The Ripple Effect

ROMAN MARS: Before we get started, just a quick note. Our story this week is about the aftermath of a wildfire in Northern California. As we were putting the final touches on this episode, a new wildfire started burning in the same region where our story takes place. The park fire is one of the largest wildfires in California history and has displaced thousands of people. It won’t be a major part of our story today, but we wanted to say here at the outset that our hearts are with the people of Butte County and the surrounding area, who are once again struggling with the impacts of a mega fire and all that will come after it. Okay, here’s episode two of Not Built for This: The Ripple Effect.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: At a city council meeting in Chico, California, in October of 2018, a man named Peter walked up to the podium. He was wearing a black tank top and he seemed frustrated.

PETER: I’ve been looking for housing, looking for housing, looking for housing. I have tried. I’ve gone through behavioral health. I’ve gone through 211. I’ve gone through the housing authority. They give me all these lists. All it does is waste my time because it’s a list of apartments either I don’t qualify for or they’re already rented.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: He was almost shaking by this point, trying to convey just how hard he’d been trying to find a place to live.

PETER: Every Monday, I get them. It’s nine o’clock, and I call you. And it’s already gone. Are you freaking kidding me? I live in the field between Walmart and that car lot.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But Peter was not telling the people on city council anything that they did not already know. It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that the city—really the entire county—was having a very hard time keeping roofs over people’s heads.

ED MAYER: There was very little housing opportunity, in fact, no effective housing opportunity for lower income households.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Ed Mayer is the executive director of the Butte County Housing Authority. He was actually the person in charge of giving vouchers to people like Peter. And he knew full well that there was hardly anything for them to use those vouchers on.

ED MAYER: We saw a lot of elderly coming in and we saw a lot of homeless coming in that we just were unable to help at all. So, the situation was dire.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Do you remember the vacancy rate by any chance?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Most housing experts agree that a healthy rental vacancy rate is somewhere between 6% and 8%.

ED MAYER: I think the effective vacancy rate was 0.5% or below, it was that bad. I’ve never seen a housing market in my career that bad.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: There were not enough homes to buy or rent or even shelter beds to crash for a night. You could be forgiven for thinking that things couldn’t get any worse, but that would be wrong because Butte County was about to lose a massive chunk of its most affordable housing stock. It was about to lose the entire town of Paradise. 

Starting on November 8th, 2018, an enormous wildfire began ripping through the forested foothills around Paradise. Wildfires are often named for the nearest road from which they were first reported. This fire started off of Camp Creek Road, which gave it a spectacularly understated name: the Camp Fire.

NEWSCASTER #1: The Camp Fire is the deadliest and most destructive—

NEWSCASTER #2: The deadliest and most destructive wildfire—

NEWSCASTER #3: The most destructive fire in California’s history…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: As the fire burned Paradise to the ground, Ed was at his office in Chico, about 15 miles away. He was trying to get a handle on just how many homes had been lost throughout the county. At some point, he got an email from a colleague estimating 14,000.

ED MAYER: And I went, “Oh my goodness.” And I thought, 14,000—and I roughly did the math very quickly in my head—number of people per household, three people per household, that’s 45,000. Somewhere between 35,000-45,000 people have been displaced. I burst into tears.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The fire was contained after a couple of weeks, but Ed’s problems were just beginning. He had already been struggling to find housing for the most vulnerable people in the county. How on earth was he supposed to conjure up homes for the 45,000 people who had suddenly been made homeless?

ED MAYER: To be in a business where housing was that difficult to start and then to have that kind of thing hit your community was just… It was brutal.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Someday we will probably be able to see clear trends in climate migration. Over time, it’s likely that millions of people will move northward and away from the coasts. But the reality right now is much more chaotic. Most people aren’t migrating intentionally. They’re being displaced by escalating fires and floods and extreme storms. And then they have to figure out where to go in a housing landscape that is often not ready to receive them. 

Most of the stories about the Camp Fire have understandably focused on Paradise, the beloved town with the iconic name that was nearly wiped off the map. But the nearby city of Chico was also transformed by the fire because, in disasters where a lot of people lose their homes, the impacts are not contained to a single city or town. They ripple outward, cascading into the surrounding area as the survivors are forced to go looking for new places to live. This is the story of what happened after the famous fire in Paradise. It’s about two women from very different economic backgrounds, struggling in very different ways to find a place to live in the aftermath of disaster. And it’s about a town caught in the crosshairs of both the climate crisis and the housing crisis. And how the people there reacted when thousands of displaced climate migrants showed up on their doorstep.

Because Chico, California was not built for this. I’m Emmett FitzGerald.

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Chico is a small city at the edge of California’s Central Valley, where the Northern Sierra foothills meet the flat agricultural plains. It’s a relatively wealthy college town in a relatively poor farming county. Summers in Chico are hot and getting hotter every year, but there are all these creeks that run right through the center of town where people can cool off. Chico has a yo-yo museum, a really high number of breweries per capita, and a bustling farmer’s market where you can buy a beaded bracelet from a white lady with dreadlocks or locally grown pomegranates.

SUSAN DOBRA: When I first came to Chico, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It had everything. I mean, I loved the community. The music was insane. I mean, I just loved it.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Susan Dobra came to Chico in the ’90s to teach in the English Department at Chico State. The job didn’t end up working out, but she stuck around because she loved the city so much. She met a skinny guitar player named John Michael. And she moved in with him and his son, Skylar.

SUSAN DOBRA: John Michael and I, at that point, we were raising Skylar. We had fallen in love. We decided to try to buy a house together. So, we went looking and couldn’t find anything in Chico that we could afford.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Housing in Chico was pricey even back then. And so, historically, a lot of people who worked in Chico would live about 20 minutes outside of town, up on the ridge, in smaller, more affordable communities like Concow, Magalia, and Paradise.

SUSAN DOBRA: When we went up to Paradise and found out that literally the houses were, like, a hundred thousand dollars cheaper than in Chico, we started looking up there.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is a common story throughout California. As the cost of living has soared, people have gotten pushed out of expensive cities and into the forested hills outside of town. And in the mid 2000s, Susan and John Michael found an affordable fixer upper in Paradise.

SUSAN DOBRA: You know, we loved that house, and we put so much into it, so much love into it, and to see it go from the crap that it was to the beautiful house that we made it into… John Michael’s a genius contractor.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Susan and John Michael lived in that house for over a decade, and they made a life for themselves up on the ridge. They found friends through the Paradise Grange, an old venue in town that hosted concerts and open mic nights. They liked living in Paradise. Even though there wasn’t a lot of racial diversity, there were people from very different classes and cultures living side by side. Ranchers and hippies. Artists and weed farmers. People who had just bought their first home and people who had nowhere else to go…like Crystal Johnson.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: I think people live up there for the serenity of life, the serenity of the hills, and the nature. That’s where my serenity was.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal Johnson moved up to the ridge in 2017, and her situation was very different from Susan’s. Before that, she had been homeless for a bit after losing an apartment that she shared with her ailing mom. She was not in a great place and needed a reset.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: Honestly, I went up there to go and find myself, to find out what my purpose is and what I should be doing next and maybe get my shit together and go back to school or get my teeth done.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal got a job at a trailer park not far from Paradise. She says she worked as an onsite manager—kind of like a super. And in exchange, she got a free place to live. She spent her day cutting firewood for the residents and handling a seemingly endless stream of maintenance requests.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: It was busy, busy, busy. There was no rest for me.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But it made her happy. She found a sense of purpose working at the park. It felt good to have her own needs taken care of and be able to focus on helping other people.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: It just made my heart feel whole, like the Grinch when he had that little tiny heart and it grew so big.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: For Crystal, the free housing and the job at the trailer park provided a crucial platform of stability that she’d been struggling to find. And by 2018, it felt like her life was finally moving in the right direction. Meanwhile, Susan Dobra was still living in Paradise with John Michael. She was commuting back down the hill into Chico to teach a class on global issues at the university. And one of the first units that she organized that year was on climate change.

SUSAN DOBRA: And I really…I have to admit that the strange thing was that I was thinking of it as a future problem at that time, you know, because it was like, “In 50 years, this is what’s going to happen. And if we don’t do this by 2050…” It was kind of very oriented towards what was going to happen down the line.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But then climate change got a lot more present tense.

SUSAN DOBRA: You know, it just kind of came roaring up to my back door.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Fire is a natural part of the landscape of northern California. And for centuries, indigenous people used fire intentionally to manage the forests of the Sierra Foothills and reduce the build-up of dead material. But in the 20th century, these cultural burning practices were replaced with the aggressive fire suppression tactics of the US Forest Service. This resulted in forests that were essentially filled with kindling that was ready to burn. And then you add climate change to the equation. All across the Western US, we’re seeing a growing number of days in a given year that have the right conditions for extreme fire. And a lot of these new fire weather days are happening in the late fall. Typically, Northern California can expect a good soaking rain by November, which effectively brings an end to that year’s fire danger. But in 2018, the first winter storms were stubbornly behind schedule. And following one of the hottest summers on record, the landscape was kiln dry.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: How aware of wildfire as an issue were you in Paradise?

SUSAN DOBRA: Yeah, we were very aware, we thought.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Fire risk was not some great secret in Paradise. The town wasn’t on the edge of the forest. It was built right among the Doug firs and the ponderosa pines. But Susan and John Michael were never particularly stressed about fire. Their house wasn’t at the end of some backcountry dirt road. They had neighbors all around them, and they felt a false sense of suburban safety.

SUSAN DOBRA: A couple of weeks before the fire, we said, “It’s never gonna get to us. We’re in a neighborhood.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: They’d actually just gone to a fire safety workshop at the Paradise Grange, where they learned all about the town’s evacuation protocol. They learned that in order to control traffic, every neighborhood had been given a zone.

SUSAN DOBRA: And on the day, you know, if the fire happened, you’re supposed to turn on your emergency radio station and wait for your zone to be called. You know, there was a plan.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Camp Fire erupted on the morning of November 8th. It was a classic fire weather day with a hot, dry, ominous wind whipping down off the western slope of the Sierras. Susan had gone to a doctor’s appointment early that morning. And when she got out of her car, she saw a bunch of people in the parking lot pointing at the sky.

SUSAN DOBRA: And there’s a big glow in the sky, like, bigger than any sun- like a sunrise. It’s a big glow. And I said, “Is that a fire?” They said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, wow. That’s big.” And they said, “Yeah.” “And it’s windy.” “Yeah.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Earlier that morning, a piece of equipment belonging to the power company PG&E had malfunctioned near the town of Pulga. It sparked a small blaze, but it didn’t take long for the 30 mile an hour winds to whip up an inferno. When she got home, Susan turned on the radio.

SUSAN DOBRA: “This is an emergency notification for the Town of Paradise…”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The voice on the radio said that they were evacuating certain neighborhoods in Paradise, but not her zone.

SUSAN DOBRA: “Zones 1, 5, 12, 15 are to be evacuated. Please stand by for other zones.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But then, she noticed that her nextdoor neighbors were leaving in their RV.

SUSAN DOBRA: And they couldn’t get out onto the road. And that’s the first time I noticed, “Wow, there’s traffic. There’s a line of traffic on the road.” And just then, the electricity went off.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Susan turned on her car radio so she could keep listening as they got ready to leave.

SUSAN DOBRA: And that’s the first time I realized and noticed that I turned it on at eight o’clock. It’s now 11:15. This is the same message that’s been playing: “Zones 1, 5, 12, 15 are to be evacuated. Please stand by for other zones.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The emergency message was playing on a loop.

SUSAN DOBRA: They’ve abandoned the emergency station. That cannot be good. That can’t be good. So, then I said, “Okay, honey. We gotta get out of here.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: They pulled the car out of the driveway and went absolutely nowhere. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic.

SUSAN DOBRA: Like, we got maybe 500 yards in 45 minutes. And now it’s noon, it’s black as night. You can see the glow of the fire off in the distance.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: There was no way to know if the traffic was going to improve, and so Susan and John Michael ducked into a church parking lot to figure out a plan. Susan actually had a brochure from the fire training that she had gone to a couple of weeks before, and she pulled it out.

SUSAN DOBRA: It was like I had a checklist. Do this, do this, do that, do that…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I’m just struck by the fact that you’re in the midst of the biggest crisis of your life and you’re, like, reading a brochure.

SUSAN DOBRA: We had just gone to the workshop, right? So, I was going to be a good citizen.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Except that brochure said that if they couldn’t get out, they should lie on the ground, put a blanket over their head, and shelter in place. Susan was not particularly excited about this idea. It seemed like such a last resort kind of move.

SUSAN DOBRA: I looked at John Michael and said, “Are we going to do this?” He said, “No.” I said, “Okay, what are we going to do?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: There was no way to get anywhere in a car. But John Michael thought he knew a back trail through the woods that would take them to a larger parking lot that would feel a lot safer.

SUSAN DOBRA: And so, we just took what we could on our backs, took the dog. I forgot my phone. He took his ukulele so we’d have something to do. And we walked down the road to cut through the woods to get over to a holiday market parking lot. And the only time, I think, really that we were afraid was as we were going through that woods we didn’t know if there was going to be fire on the other side or what, or if we could get trapped in the woods by fire. We didn’t know. So, we stopped, and I said, “Honey, this is what all of our spiritual practice has been about. If this is our last day, I’ll see you on the other side.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: While Susan and John Michael were hiking through the woods, Crystal was battling traffic on the one road off the ridge. The news of the fire had come earlier at her trailer park. A police officer showed up around 11 in the morning and just told everyone to get the hell out of there.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: And the sheriffs came through there saying, “Get outta here.”

SHERIFF (RADIO): Mandatory evacuations to all of Paradise. Get people moving now!

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: “Get down to Chico or you get down to wherever you can get to. It doesn’t matter which road you take, just go!”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal and a group of neighbors piled into an old RV and headed down the Skyway, the main road out of town.

SHERIFF (RADIO): We got the fire coming southbound Skyway. We’ve got the roads completely blocked. Somebody has to be able to open up and keep people out of here.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: The whole ride out of there, it just seemed like we were in The Towering Inferno. The sky was nothing but flames all the way around us. It was like these big old fireballs just shooting everywhere.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: There just weren’t enough roads for everyone up there to evacuate all at once. But after several hours stuck in the most terrifying traffic jam of her life, Crystal finally made it down off the ridge safely.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: Oh my God, I can’t believe we’re alive.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Back up the hill, Susan and John Michael somehow managed to find a safe path through the woods, carrying John Michael’s ukulele. And they ended up in a different parking lot outside of a holiday market where they were met by a bunch of CAL FIRE officials.

SUSAN DOBRA: We went up to one of them and said, “What do we do?” And he said, “Stay here. You’ll be safe here.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This parking lot was safer than the last one. And visually, it was kind of shielded from the worst of the fire. And so, as the afternoon dragged on, Susan and John Michael didn’t really have a sense for how bad things had gotten. At the end of the day, the county sheriffs came and picked them up.

SUSAN DOBRA: They said, “Can we take you down to Chico, ma’am?” And I was like, “No, we’d like to just go back to our house if it’s all the same to you.” And they looked at me like I was out of my mind. They said, “No, there’s fire everywhere, ma’am.” I said, “Really? Okay.” So, I thought, all right, they maybe have to do this. So, we get in the car with them and not two blocks away, every direction that you look is flames…just everything. You look all the way down this way, nothing, it’s like a disaster set from a movie.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: So many people evoke movies when they’re trying to describe what it feels like to be in the middle of a disaster like the Camp Fire. I think it’s because there’s really nothing from day-to-day life that could possibly serve as a point of comparison. The fire was just too intense for normal language—too otherworldly. And the level of destruction really was the stuff of alien invasions. Nearly the entire town was incinerated that day—turned to white ash. 

Susan and John Michael lost their home and everything in it. Somehow, Susan’s car, which they abandoned at that first church parking lot, survived, although one side of it got all melty. She never got it fixed, still drives it around like a badge of honor. Crystal also lost most of her possessions that day. The trailer park where she lived and worked partially burned during the fire. And she was so traumatized by her experiences that she never wanted to go up on the ridge again. 

All three of them, though, were lucky to make it out alive. 85 people died in the Camp Fire. But even before the extent of that tragedy was fully understood, it was clear that another disaster was starting to unfold, one that would impact Susan and Crystal in very different ways. That’s coming up after the break. 

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EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Camp Fire displaced roughly 50,000 people from the ridge above Chico. And over time, the diaspora of fire survivors fanned out across the country. People moved to be closer to family or further away from their own trauma. Researchers at Chico State have found fire survivors in all 50 states, but the majority of people did not go very far. At least 15,000 of them ended up down the hill in Chico. A town that was struggling to keep its existing population fully housed grew by more than 15% in one day.

SUSAN DOBRA: We would’ve never imagined ourselves to be walking down the street in Chico without a place to go.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Hotels booked up immediately. It was hard to get a room in Sacramento, a city of half a million people that’s 90 miles away. And so, Susan and John Michael found themselves in a McDonald’s, scrolling through their contact lists.

SUSAN DOBRA: It was like, “Okay, what friends are going to take us in? Who can we ask this of?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Sometimes when I think about the fire, I think about the metaphor of a staircase. Everyone who was up on the ridge that day fell down the stairs, but where you ended up depended a lot on what stair you started on. For people at the top, they landed somewhere in the middle. But for a lot of people who were already struggling with housing before the fire, they bottomed out. Susan and Crystal had very different trajectories in the aftermath of the fire. And their paths diverged right away, as they both had to figure out where they were gonna sleep that night. 

One of the biggest factors working in Susan and John Michael’s favor was that they just had a lot of friends in Chico, including one crucial friend named Athena.

SUSAN DOBRA: And when we called her, she said, “Oh my God, I’ve been calling you for hours! Thank God you got in touch with me! How are you guys doing? Come to the house right away. Come. You’re going to stay here. This is where you’re going to stay.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Taking on a temporary housemate from Paradise was a totally normal thing in Chico in the aftermath of the fire. At first, it was as if the town swelled through sheer generosity to cram in as many new people as it could. Fire survivors slept on friends’ couches and camped in cousins’ front yards. Some people even stayed with strangers.

ED MAYER: So, what happened was everyone’s here initially, great outpouring of compassion, everyone understands.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Here’s Ed Mayer again from the Butte County Housing Authority.

ED MAYER: If you were inclined, you could walk into any store in town, fill up your grocery basket, and walk out, and no one would ask a question.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The people of Chico did not ask for thousands of new neighbors. And yet, early on, you could find kindness wherever you looked in the city, even at the Walmart. In the early days right after the fire, a lot of displaced people ended up in the Walmart parking lot, which just so happens to be right across the street from Ed’s office at the Housing Authority.

ED MAYER: Yeah, right across the street here we have the Walmart. And right next to our Walmart, I think it’s about a 10-acre parcel that’s vacant. And the day of the disaster, that next morning, I woke up and that whole parcel and all of the Walmart parking lot was jam-packed full of tents and trailers and RVs and campers.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Walmart tent city became a clearing house for donations.

VOLUNTEER (VIDEO): Well, we got you all covered…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In this video taken during that first week, you can see piles of toilet paper, blankets, clothing, and food, mostly donated by people in and around Chico.

VOLUNTEER (VIDEO): We have our own Walmart outside of Walmart. This is all what people in the community brought and dropped off.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And those donations were important because a lot of people had nothing, including Crystal. After finally making it to Chico, her first stop was at a church, where she was given a free meal. She was with her teenage son.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: We’d sit there and we’d look at each other and think, “How are we going to do this? How are we going to make money to get clothes?” Because we had nothing anymore.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Unlike Susan and John Michael, Crystal didn’t really have anyone in Chico she could stay with. And so, she and her son got on a bus that took them to the fairgrounds in the nearby town of Gridley, where the Red Cross was setting up a temporary sanction campground. Luckily, donations were already piling up there, too, and she was able to snag a free tent.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: I had my tent. And I was out there in a tent in what they called “tent city.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Gridley Fairgrounds became a tent city run by the Red Cross and the kindness of strangers.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: People would come by and give us gift certificates and this and that and whatever. And everything was brand new. Nothing was used, nothing. And to have all that new stuff, it just warmed up my heart.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Call me a sap, but I think that people are mostly good. And in the aftermath of disasters, you often see all that goodness turned up to 11. But there are limits to how far individual acts of generosity will go towards solving a giant systemic problem like the one facing Chico. People can’t couch-surf forever, and unofficial tent cities don’t tend to last.

In the end, the Walmart encampment only lasted a couple of weeks before it was closed down. And then in January, two months after the fire, the Red Cross closed up shop in Gridley. Crystal and everyone else there were told that they would also need to move on.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: We were out there almost until the end when Red Cross picked up and left and just weren’t going to care for us out there anymore. So, we all started packing up and leaving.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: After a disaster, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when people go from being temporarily displaced to just being homeless. But this might’ve been that moment for Crystal.

I talked to a lot of social workers for this piece. There was an army of homeless service providers and disaster case managers in Chico who were trying as hard as they could to find everyone a safe place to live. And they did help a lot of people, but a lot of people ended up on the streets, too. 

Every year, homelessness advocates do what’s called a Point-in-Time Count, where they fan out across the city and survey all of the unhoused residents. They did the Count that year in March, about four months after the fire, and the results were chilling. Homelessness had increased all throughout the city, and over a third of unhoused people in Chico identified as Camp Fire survivors. But the impacts of the disaster on the housing market were really just beginning. 

On the day of the fire, Jon Baird was glued to the TV. He’s a real estate agent in Chico. And at a certain point, he started doing the mental math on what the disaster might mean for the real estate market.

JON BAIRD: And then, over the course of the next three days, the real estate market here in Chico was just bonkers.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The influence of the fire would ripple throughout the entire Chico housing market and affect people at all income levels, even those at the very top. Paradise was not a wealthy community, but there were some people with means living up there—people who had enough cash on hand to just purchase a new house without waiting around for an insurance settlement on their old one. And this class of people started buying up homes in Chico immediately—like that day.

JON BAIRD: It was just a mad dash to try to get homes. And yeah, it was surreal. It was kind of a major daze during the entire day, kinda like you could not believe this is happening.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Do you remember receiving calls that day?

JON BAIRD: Yeah. So, I had just happened to list a home in Chico, a really nice home that had been on the market with another agent for, like, 60 days and didn’t sell. And then that next day, like, we had, I think, 10 showings. We ended up getting six offers.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Of those, how many of them were Camp Fire survivors?

JON BAIRD: Oh, every single one. Yeah, every single one of them were. I think we had around 165 homes on the market in Chico before that weekend. And after the weekend, they were virtually all sold.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Housing prices in Chico spiked in the weeks following the fire, and rents went up right along with them. By the end of the year, realtor.com declared Chico “the hottest real estate market in the country,” a twisted designation given the circumstances. This was the housing landscape that beleaguered Camp Fire survivors were operating in as they tried to get back on their feet. Here’s Susan Dobra again.

SUSAN DOBRA: Housing was just insane. Everybody was having a hard time finding a place. People had friends and stuff like that, but it was like, okay well, now where am I going to live?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: After weeks crashing with friends and then more time living in a different friend’s rental, Susan and John Michael started looking for a home to buy. They had gotten their insurance settlement and were ready for their next move. They didn’t want to rebuild in Paradise though. They wanted to stay in Chico. John Michael in particular, he was working through a lot of PTSD from the fire, and being in Chico made him feel at ease. He could ride his bike everywhere he needed to go, which was great because every time he got stuck in traffic, he felt like he was reliving the worst day of his life.

JOHN MICHAEL: It doesn’t matter where I’m at, if I get in gridlock anywhere on the planet, I’m not the same person. It’s like, “Turn around. We’re out of here.” That’s the kind of feeling. So, it felt good to be in Chico. It felt safe, fire-wise.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Did you actually, like, look at houses in Chico?

JOHN MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we looked. We scoured for a year and a half.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: At one point, John Michael had his eye on this sweet little spot with fruit trees and a fireplace. But when he and Susan went to the open house, it became clear that it was going to sell for way above asking price.

SUSAN DOBRA: By the time we walked up to the front porch, we heard that the bidding had already gone up above what we could handle.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Outbid there on the spot that morning?

SUSAN DOBRA: Yeah. That happened a lot. That happened a lot.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But it wasn’t just fire survivors who had to struggle in the post-fire housing market. It was also really hard for renters in Chico because a lot of landlords took advantage of the situation and jacked up the rent or just sold their house to the highest desperate bidder.

HILLARY CROSBY: You have people, homeowners, that were like, “Oh, well,” they’re in a prime situation to sell their home now because people have insurance money to buy a new home. “Great. I’m selling my home.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is Hillary Crosby, executive director of the organization Safe Space Chico. She says that a lot of renters ended up getting kicked out when their landlord sold. And that only added to the number of people who were struggling on the streets of Chico.

HILLARY CROSBY: That is people we see on the street that had their housing sold out from underneath them because people saw an opportunity. And I mean, it is what it is, but they took it. And we are still in a housing crisis.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And all of those people who got displaced because of price gouging and eviction, they didn’t have many resources available to them. Ironically, those who lost their homes directly in the fire, they got more help. It wasn’t always easy to access, but there were FEMA payouts and insurance and fire relief fundraisers and eventually settlement money from PG&E, whose faulty equipment started the fire. But people who lost their homes indirectly…they didn’t get any of that.

HILLARY CROSBY: And so, when you say, “Were you impacted by the Camp Fire?” Well, that’s a hard question to answer because if you lost your housing and you weren’t in the fire but your landlord sold your house out from underneath you and now you can’t find any place for you and your family, I feel that’s disaster-impacted. But are there any resources for you? Not necessarily.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: A year and a half after the Camp Fire, there were still lots of survivors who didn’t have a place to live and many others who were struggling with the high rents and evictions that followed in the fire’s wake. All of that only added to the large population of people who were unhoused in Chico before the fire. But patience with all of the people on Chico’s streets was starting to wear thin. And compassion towards those who were still struggling began to run out. Here’s Ed Mayer again, former director of the Butte County Housing Authority.

ED MAYER: Similarly to news cycles, attention spans, you know, people just get burned out after a while. It’s like, “Enough already, okay? I’ve dealt with the disaster. I’ve got my life. I mean, get on with it.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But not everyone was able to just get on with it. Susan Dobra says that it was hard enough for her and John Michael to piece their lives back together after the fire. And they had lots of things working in their favor: a good insurance policy, lots of friends, each other. Many fire survivors didn’t have all that support.

SUSAN DOBRA: I know many people in Paradise that are just hanging on by their fingernails already. Something like this hits? It wipes them out. It sets them back years and years in their recovery from whatever it is they’re recovering from.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Frustration with the large numbers of unhoused people in Chico began to simmer, and then, during the early days of the pandemic, it bubbled over. The city stopped breaking up encampments during the COVID lockdown, and everyone I talked to agreed that the encampments grew larger and more chaotic during this period. Without garbage collection, the trash began to pile up, and a lot of people in Chico started getting very upset about the conditions inside their parks. Over time, you started to hear a new story getting told around town. That the people living in the parks were not fire survivors, or even local to the area, but that they were coming to Chico from all over to take advantage of services. Here is City Councilman, Sean Morgan, in an interview with a local radio station.

SEAN MORGAN: The narrative that these are people from Chico and they’re people from Paradise and they’re down on their luck is absolutely, totally false…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I’m just going to jump in here to say that this is one of the most common and pernicious myths about homelessness that local politicians love to repeat: that all of the unhoused people in their city are coming from somewhere else.

SEAN MORGAN: And the stragglers that just came to Chico, which is the great majority of them, because it was convenient and it was easy and they heard somewhere, “I can get needles and drugs and healthcare and free camping.” They need to go back where they came from.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Unhoused people move around, just like everyone else. But researchers at UC San Francisco recently put out one of the most robust surveys on homelessness in California, and found that 75% of unhoused people were living in the same county as when they last had a house. And Ed Mayer says that the homeless Point in Time Counts in Butte County have had similar findings.

ED MAYER: We’ve learned through our homeless Point-in-Time Counts that these are our citizens. These are not people who’ve come from other places. These are ours.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I wanna be really clear. The majority of people in these parks were not fire survivors. But all of them were trying to find a place to live in the middle of a county-wide housing crisis that had been deeply exacerbated by the fire. And also, some of them were fire survivors, including Crystal Johnson.

Crystal was bouncing around a lot during this period. She found a free trailer on Facebook, which she parked behind a motel and lived in for a bit. Then she got a room in the motel for a while through a pandemic program, but that didn’t last either. And eventually, she found herself back on the streets, attracting unwanted attention.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: We didn’t have a place to shower or get bathed up. And to not smell or have clean clothes or fresh water—they started turning an eye on us.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal says it felt like some people in Chico started seeing her in a very different light. No longer was she the victim of this horrible fire. Now, she was the problem. Some people didn’t even believe that she had lived up on the ridge at all.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: But I have plenty of proof and it doesn’t matter what they think because after a while people say, “Oh, you’re just another one of the local homeless people or transient people, or…” No. We’re Camp Fire survivors.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: For Crystal, it seemed like this crucial chapter in the complicated story of how she ended up in this situation was being erased.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: And how can anybody judge another person when they haven’t put their feet in their shoes and lived their life and what they’ve been through? Some people are quick to judge them, and it’s not right. We’ve been out here because of Camp Fire. Period.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But anger about the situation in the parks was powerful in Chico, and it coalesced into a political force. Conservative city council candidates started running on a promise to get tough on the encampments. The campaign resonated with a lot of people, and in November of 2020, the conservatives flipped the city council. And as soon as they got into power, they made good on their electoral promises, by evicting a large encampment that had developed in one of the city’s biggest parks.

KRCR (NEWS CAST): Chico PD, park rangers, and even city staff came in with bulldozers and cleared up the mess left by campers and homeless who’ve made this park their home.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Evictions like this went on for months. Every time the police closed an encampment, a new one would pop up somewhere else, and the city just kept whacking the mole. Crystal remembers the feeling of getting moved again and again.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: We were always on the go. We just couldn’t stay in one spot for too long, otherwise cops would show up and we’d be told that we got so many days or so many hours to move.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal was caught on a hamster wheel of displacement. And every time she got moved, she had the same question for the cops.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: “Where are we supposed to go?” And they said, “Well, figure it out.” “Okay. I’ve been trying to figure it out. And it’s not that easy.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Eventually, the situation in Chico got so bad for unhoused folks that a group of attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against the city, arguing that Chico could not legally evict people from public space if they had nowhere else to go. And a federal judge sided with the unhoused. He put a permanent injunction on the city, ruling that Chico could no longer clear encampments unless it could provide people with a spot in a shelter. As part of a settlement agreement, the city agreed to build what they call “the Pallet shelter.” If that sounds like the bare minimum of what counts as housing, that’s because it kind of is. It’s a collection of 177 extremely tiny modular homes made by a company called Pallet. And Crystal was one of the very first people offered a spot. 

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: [STEPS] …Stuff just to make it feel like home… 

SOFIE KODNER: People have little messages too…

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: Yeah…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Last year, producer Sofie Kodner and I visited the Pallet Shelter, which is also known as Genesis. And Crystal showed Sofie her tiny, tiny house.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: It’s a little messy out in front of my place right now, though.

SOFIE KODNER: This your spot?

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: Yeah. Right here.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The shelter is a series of white boxes arranged in neat rows across a dusty lot like little storage units. Each one is 64 square feet.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: Yeah, it’s really, really small. It’s basically the size of a jail cell.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal and her son moved into the shelter the third day it was open.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: After being checked in and everything, we go to our Pallets and they gave us a sleeping bag and a pillow. And we walk in there, and I just had all the weight that was on my shoulders just gone. It was gone. It was just a relief.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The space was small, barely enough room for her, let alone her son. But she finally had a door she could close. By this point it had been more than three years since Crystal had lost everything in the fire. More than three years of not knowing whether she’d be able to sleep at night, not just because of the disaster but because of how the system failed in its wake. She was exhausted.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: I crawled up there and just laid down just to see what it felt like and see if it was comfortable or not. And I actually went right out. I just went right to sleep. I was so comfortable.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Pallet shelter is run by the Jesus Center, a soup kitchen in town. There’s a little office in the back with a team of friendly caseworkers who seem to know every resident by name. The shelter has been widely celebrated as a creative solution to Chico’s problems. But Ed Mayer says that it’s not getting to the root of the matter, which is the lack of housing.

ED MAYER: I simply say it this way: if I wanted to put every homeless person in a house, they don’t exist. And that’s the bottom line.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Chico faces many of the same obstacles to building affordable housing as other cities in the country. Many of the residential neighborhoods are zoned exclusively for single-family homes. And every time someone tries to build a new apartment building, there’s fierce opposition from local NIMBYs. But Ed is also feeling more hopeful than he has in years. After the Camp Fire, a lot of federal funding poured into Butte County for affordable housing. When I spoke to Ed, he said that there were 3,000 new units in the pipeline. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. But to Ed, who has watched the county struggle to build housing for decades, it doesn’t feel that way.

ED MAYER: It’s like a tsunami of affordable housing units. So, with one development, we took 41 households off the street.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Are you getting some Camp Fire survivors in that?

ED MAYER: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah, we see Camp Fire survivors in everything we do. We see them all the time.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: When Crystal Johnson first got to the Pallet shelter, she met with a case manager and got put on a waitlist for some of the new apartments being developed by the Housing Authority.

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: I want stability. I need stability. I have things I’ve got to get taken care of, and I can’t do that without permanent housing. So, it’s really urgent that it happens.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Crystal has now been at the Pallet shelter for over two years, but it’s unclear how much longer she’ll be able to stay. A recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court gave city governments throughout the country a lot more power to break up encampments without providing alternative shelter. How that will impact the Pallet shelter or the city of Chico’s homelessness policies more broadly is an active ongoing story. But whatever happens, Crystal is just hoping to find a permanent place to live where she can start to put this whole chapter behind her. A chapter that she memorialized with the most northern California tattoo of all time. It’s a message to the company that sparked the fire.

SOFIE KODNER: Wait, will you describe that?

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: I’d say it’s Mickey Mouse’s hand in tie-dye with the middle finger up, showing the birdie. And it says PG&E in the middle finger.

SOFIE KODNER: So, you got a tattoo to say, “F*** PG&E”?

CRYSTAL JOHNSON: Yeah. Pretty much.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Climate change is obviously not the singular cause of Crystal’s situation. It’s not even the singular cause of the Camp Fire. But as the atmosphere heats up and the weather gets more volatile, it’s exposing and exacerbating the vulnerabilities that already exist in our society, particularly when it comes to housing. In fact, I would argue that the climate crisis and the housing crisis are so deeply intertwined at this point that you almost can’t distinguish one from the other. And one of the best ways to adapt to climate change is just to do a better job keeping a roof over everyone’s head.

ED MAYER: The point is, as people are getting displaced or hurt out there, we need to figure out a way to take care of them, because these events are not going to stop happening. And they seem to be increasing in frequency.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In the past few years, there have been many more massive wildfires in Butte County, like the Bear Fire and the Dixie Fire. And while I record this, the hills above Chico are on fire yet again as the Park Fire burns through hundreds of thousands of acres northwest of Paradise. And every time one of these big fires displaces a lot of people, some of them end up in Chico, where there still isn’t enough housing.

ED MAYER: So we just have these disenfranchised, displaced people that are still here, getting beat up more and more. And they’re not going anywhere.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Nowhere is truly safe from climate change. But some places are safer than others, and when those places don’t build enough affordable housing, it can create a vicious cycle. Where people get priced out of relative safety and into the path of climate disasters like wildfires. And then when a disaster predictably happens, there’s nowhere for people to go. And so they end up on the streets, or back in harm’s way.

JOHN MICHAEL: Yeah, I’m a slow walker up this hill.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah, let’s take our time.

SUSAN DOBRA: Let’s definitely take our time.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But yeah, look at just how green everything is, and I imagine it gets even greener.

SUSAN DOBRA: Oh! Emerald green everywhere! In the spring…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: After years of searching for a house and getting outbid at every turn, Susan and John Michael finally found a place in Butte Valley, about 15 miles southeast of Chico. It’s a cozy, little ranch house at the bottom of a grassy hill dotted with oak trees. I visited them in the middle of a drizzly week in early December. And as we hiked up the hill, I kept thinking, “This place is amazing. I would love to live here.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It’s so beautiful. It’s really so incredibly beautiful.

JOHN MICHAEL: It’s just awesome. I just love it. I love the cool weather, the wetness…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah, right. It’s so moist and verdant.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But if you’ve spent any time in California, you know that emerald green doesn’t last.

JOHN MICHAEL: At the end of May, this is all going to be brown, yellow grass all the way till October—end of October—and it’s a major fire hazard.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Susan and John Michael got burnt out of Paradise only to end up back in fire country. John Michael wasn’t that excited about this house at first. Remember, he wanted to live in Chico, where he felt safe. But they just couldn’t find a house that they could afford there. And they also didn’t want to move too far away from all of their friends who had helped them get through these difficult years. And so this is where they ended up.

JOHN MICHAEL: So, in the beginning, I was thinking, “Man, I don’t want to be here.” Then we’d see the stars at night and how beautiful this place is. I went back and forth and back and forth.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In the end, it was one conversation with Susan that convinced him to give this place a shot.

JOHN MICHAEL: Susan told me, “Honey, if we can’t do this, then we can’t do this.” So, she assured me that if we reach a point where we can’t live here because it is really too dangerous, then we’ll just leave. So, she told me that, and that made me feel more at ease, more safe.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Little by little, the two of them have been transforming the property. They planted gardens and orchards and then set about trying to make the house as fire-resistant as they could. John Michael installed a fire suppression system and put on a new state-of-the-art roof. And against his own aesthetic judgment, he covered up the beautiful, old redwood siding with cement paneling. It took time and money, but he’s feeling more at ease.

JOHN MICHAEL: So, it took me over a year—a couple years—to feel that feeling like we can be here and we’ll be okay. Because the fire’s coming. Just a matter of time.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Next time on Not Built for This: All across the country, there is an economic force that is threatening to drive people away from areas of extreme climate risk…insurance.

SUSAN DOBRA: The first policy we got was $2,400. The second year it went up to $3,000. The third year, they wanted $7,600 almost.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In recent years, insurance rates have skyrocketed as companies try to cover increased losses due to climate change. And almost nowhere is that more true than in southwest Florida.

GLORIA RASO TATE: Everyone’s having insurance issues. And insurance has become a nightmare in Florida all the way around.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It once seemed like nothing could stop the Florida real estate machine. But rising insurance rates are threatening to put a lot of Floridians financially underwater, long before their houses are swallowed by the sea.

MARION MORRIS: One more storm like that, I’m out. You sell this daggone house. We’re leaving.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by me, Emmett Fitzgerald with additional reporting by producer Sofie Kodner. The rest of the Not Built for this Team is producer Jayson De Leon and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and the one and only Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic with additional music by Swan Real. Fact checking by Sona Avakian. Series art by Aaron Nestor.  

A huge thank you to everyone who spoke to us for this story, especially Crystal Johnson, Susan Dobra, John Michael Sun. If you want to see a video of John Michael playing a song he wrote about the fire, there’s a link on our website. In addition to everyone you heard from, I also want to thank Kate Scowsmith, Jacqualyn Chase, Mark Stemen, Addison Winslow, Bryce Goldstein, Laura Cootsona, Bob Traush, Dan Joseph, Jessica Gianola, Jay Rose, Tony Dunn, Amber Abney-Bass, and Sophia at the Pallet Shelter. 

Not Built For This is a 6-part series from 99% Invisible. New episodes will be coming to you in the 99PI feed on Tuesdays and Fridays, wherever you get your podcasts. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Berube, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, and Neena Pathak. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family.

You can find 99% Invisible on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, and every episode of 99PI and Not Built For This, at 99pi.org.