Will the LA Fires Make California's Housing Crunch Worse?
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, what effects will the Los Angeles wildfires have on the state's housing shortage and homelessness crisis? As the fires decimated neighborhoods, they displaced tens of thousands of people, some who are now couch surfing or competing for a scarcity of rental units.

We'll hear from a Los Angeles County official on homelessness about the shelter needs they're facing and from housing advocates in communities that burned in previous wildfires about resources the region will need in the short and long term to contain the impacts. Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Each new devastating fire sets the state back in its fight against homelessness, says CalMatters reporter Marisa Kendall. And the size and scale of the destruction from the Los Angeles area wildfires mean that setback could be immense. More than 16,000 structures are estimated to have burned, representing an untold number of households that will be unable to rebuild, renters will be unable to find another place to live, or

or workers, including house cleaners or gardeners, whose livelihoods depend on the homes and buildings now destroyed.

This hour, we look at how the fires are expected to exacerbate California's housing shortage and homelessness crisis, and what can be done to lessen the fallout, all while President Trump created confusion and anguish before pulling back on an attempt to freeze federal aid. Joining me now is Marisa Kendall, homelessness reporter for CalMatters. Welcome, Marisa. Thanks for having me. So help us wrap our minds around what happens when a community loses thousands of homes at once,

And in L.A.'s case, one that already had a housing shortage and a massive unhoused population, who is most at risk of ending up on the streets?

Yeah, so people who are most likely to be affected are people who didn't have insurance or who didn't have enough insurance, who aren't going to be able to rebuild, renters who aren't going to get any sort of insurance payout, people who already were unstably housed. Maybe they were doubled up with a friend. Maybe they were just barely hanging on, living paycheck to paycheck. The

The people who were one crisis away from losing their housing, the fire will be that crisis. And oftentimes they end up on the street. But it also affects people whose lodgings didn't burn. You know, people can face rent increases because the demand for housing goes up. Landlords can raise prices.

And sometimes people who are renting are forced to move out if their landlord's permanent residence burns down and then the landlord wants to move into this rental property. So those are all ways I've heard that people get affected. Yeah, you've heard and you know this. We can predict this in part because we've had so many recent examples of fires that have decimated neighborhoods.

thousands of homes and communities. Like, for example, the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Marisa, I understand six years after that, there are residents who are still unhoused who lost their homes in the fire.

Yeah, you know, there were about 15,000 homes lost in Paradise in that fire. And so far, only about 2,900 single-family homes and 550 multifamily units have been rebuilt. So just a tiny fraction. After the fire, people fled Paradise and went into neighboring Chico, which had more resources. And that city is still seeing people who are homeless as a result of that fire who couldn't get back on their feet.

And in addition, the homeless shelters that burned that were operated by local churches in the area, were those ever rebuilt?

No, they weren't. Before the fire, there were some overnight shelters, and the mayor of Paradise told me they no longer have those services. So they really don't have any recourse for people who are homeless there. And people are still without permanent residence within Paradise as well. There's about 100 people living in trailers and RVs on burned-out properties. So that's going to be the city's next urgent order of business is to try to get them into permanent housing. Yeah.

Again, this is happening today, years later. The CZU lightning complex fire was in 2020, where 700 homes were destroyed. How many have been rebuilt there? Only about a third are in the process of being rebuilt. And that's not just...

you know, finished construction, that's any type of, any point in the process. You know, they have a permit or something like that. So it's a slow process. We have not nearly seen all the homes rebuilt there. And talk about the strain that the city of Santa Cruz has.

experience and is continuing to experience as a result of the people who lost more affordable homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Yeah. So, you know, the fire really tore through the more rural areas up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, including in the San Lorenzo Valley, which historically had been sort of an affordable refuge for people who had been priced out of more expensive areas.

So that was a huge loss for the affordable housing market in the area. And then on top of that, people who lost their homes in the mountains or people who just were now scared to live up there, they didn't want to deal with the fire danger, they came down into the city of Santa Cruz, which just further strained the housing market there. Yeah, the vacancy and the availability of homes went down so significantly in that area, causing housing prices to go up so drastically.

And the other thing that I was so struck by was that you report that there were people who came to Santa Cruz from paradise. Yes.

Yeah, it's true. I spoke with people there who said, who work in homeless services in Santa Cruz, and they said even before their fire, they saw people ending up on their streets who had been displaced by the Paradise Fire. And that's a trend that I've seen again and again, is you talk to people who lost their housing from one fire, they move somewhere else, they get displaced again. I mean, I've seen it happen to people as many as three times. And this is why...

Migration is an example, right, of how any large wildfire like this becomes a statewide event.

Absolutely. And I think you'll probably see that in Los Angeles. You know, the fires happened there, but you're going to see people moving all over. As a result, many will never return to the areas they got burned out of. So you're right. It's a regional and even a statewide event. And we may see some effects up here. What are some other impacts that make it a statewide event? I imagine insurance is one. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the fire damage will cause insurance rates to go up, not just for Los Angeles, but throughout the state. Now we have the California Fair Plan, where if you can't get insurance because your insurer pulled out because of the high risk of fire, you can opt into the Fair Plan, which is a collection of insurers. But if they can't pay, if they can't pay out for these fires, then they rely on other insurers in California to make up

that difference, which could raise prices for everybody. So it's all connected.

We're talking with Marisa Kendall about how the Los Angeles area wildfires could exacerbate the state's housing and homelessness crisis. Marisa is a homelessness reporter for CalMatters, and you, our listeners, are invited to join the conversation. If you or someone you know was displaced by a fire, what was it like finding a temporary or long-term place to live? What broader housing impacts from these fires are you thinking about?

about? And do you work on homelessness or housing affordability? What impacts have you seen post-wildfire? You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, calling us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. You can find us on our social channels on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and others. We're at kqedforum.org.

So, Marisa, I mentioned earlier that L.A. had a housing shortage before the fires. Help me understand the scale of that housing shortage that they were trying to address. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even before the fires, there were about 75,000 people who did not have homes in L.A. County.

It's estimated LA County needs about 500,000 new low-income homes. They have a shortage of about 500,000 low-income homes. A lot of people are severely rent-burdened. About 77% of extremely low-income households in LA County are paying more than half their income

So that's, you know, extremely untenable. They could be out on the street with just one financial blow. So it was already a situation where there was not nearly enough housing, not nearly enough shelter. Also, a huge proportion of unsheltered residents who are homeless and outside on the street.

L.A. County had more than 52,000 unsheltered residents and fewer than 27,000 shelter beds. So a huge gap and a huge number of people just with nowhere to get a roof over their head. So you're saying that their total homelessness population has been estimated at 75,000, but 52,000 of those are outcasts.

We're actually like out in the open, essentially, as these fires burn. Correct. Yeah, which means they have nowhere to go to get out of the smoke and the ash. They're breathing all that in on a constant basis. And people who are out on the street are much more likely to already have chronic health problems and to be older. And all those conditions are exacerbated by breathing in all these pollutants. You know, in other communities where we saw these fires, they saw a spike of unhoused people going to the E.R.,

for these health complaints. You know, so outreach workers are out there. They're handing out thousands of N95 masks and trying to get people into motels down in L.A. County. But it's still a really tough situation if you're living outside there. We have a clip from L.A.'s reporter Erin Shank, who spoke with Giselle Harris, who lives in a tent behind a pharmacy in Van Nuys.

The air quality has been bad. So it's been like hard breathing and I've been having like sinus issues and eye irritation. And Marisa, Noelle on Discord, this listener Noelle writes, I know Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued rent gouging landlords already. One said he didn't know it was illegal. Can you talk about how big a problem that has been? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

You know, state law and L.A. County Code prohibit landlords from raising rent more than 10 percent during a state of emergency. So that would include this this fire and a violation of misdemeanor. You can have jail time. You can have a fine. But.

But what we're hearing is this is still happening. Like you mentioned, you know, we have that one criminal case now. And I've also there's a report that there's a group of volunteers who are combing Zillow right now looking for spikes in rent prices. And they found just in the course of about a week that.

almost 1,500 listings on Zillow that they say violated the state's rent gouging ban. So we're definitely seeing it despite the protections that are supposed to be in place. With regard to the housing shortage of 500,000 units, Los Angeles County greenlit a permitting process, a goal of permitting 500,000 homes by 2029 with certain targets along the way between now and then. How are they doing on that?

Yes. So they have a ways to go. The last data I saw, they built 30, they built a total of 36,000 units in 2023. So not too

You know, they would need to ramp that up to to make that goal at this point. So you mean they're basically falling short, but their year to year goal since 2021? Correct. And I imagine what's happening now will be a big setback to that goal potentially. Yeah, absolutely. When you already have this shortage and you wipe out 16,000 residences, buildings, buildings.

in one swoop, that's really going to set you back. We're talking about how the LA area wildfires are affecting the state's housing and homelessness crisis. What could come as well? And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786.

by posting on our social channels at KQED Forum and by emailing us, forum at kqed.org. Tell us if you or someone you know was displaced by a wildfire and what it was like trying to find housing after. Tell us about the broader housing impacts you are thinking about as you experience or watch and listen and read coverage of the impacts of these Los Angeles area wildfires. We'll have more after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

The L.A. area fires have decimated neighborhoods and displaced tens of thousands of people, which could exacerbate the state's housing and homelessness crisis. And we're talking this hour with Marisa Kendall about how that could happen, homelessness reporter at CalMatters. And we're talking with you, our listeners, asking you to share your experiences as well at 866-733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786.

at the email address forum at kqed.org or on our social channels. We're on Blue Sky X, Facebook, Instagram threads at KQED Forum. I want to bring into the conversation now just to get a sense of the current situation in Los Angeles County. Carter Hugley, Senior Director of L.A. County Homeless Initiative. Carter, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me. So, Carter, tell me about the newly technically homeless, the people who've been displaced. What are you seeing? How is your organization working with those who have been displaced?

Well, thank you for focusing on this population. We had roughly 500 people who were in interim housing sites in the evacuation zones that we, through our emergency centralized response center, which the county already had for leading up to this to respond to the crisis and the disaster of homelessness that already existed in the county,

We used that response center to coordinate the evacuation of those 500 folks from about 17 interim housing sites that are in those danger zones. Then we have safely repopulated 14 of those sites. We had a lot of folks living in interim housing in those areas, as well as the unsheltered individuals that you've mentioned.

Right now, the system is supporting roughly 500 individuals at mass care and shelter sites that are run by the American Red Cross. And the Los Angeles Homeless Services System is supporting those individuals as we figure out who has an alternative resource to be able to rely on to get into permanent housing and which individuals and households are going to need continued support from the homeless response system. So you mentioned that you had...

To evacuate 17 interim housing sites and have repopulated 14 of those. Are the other three still standing? A couple sites. Some of our substance abuse residential treatment center sites were damaged. And so not all of the sites are able to be safely repopulated yet. And, you know, that meant that you had to evacuate hundreds of people, as you say. Are they all accounted for, the ones who were in those sites before? Yes. Yes. Everyone is safe. Thank goodness. And thanks to, honestly, the heroic work of

of our homeless service system providers who moved swiftly into action to mobilize the transportation and get people out of these zones before there was an evacuation order even sort of set. You have to go because once you say you have to go, people can't get in to get people out. So our homeless system moved swiftly and got people into safety, and thankfully everyone is okay. How are your workers faring? I saw reports in the Washington Post and others that they are overstretched because some even had their own homes burned.

Absolutely. Someone I know very well.

who's worked on Skid Row for years, has lost his home. There's just, you know, the homeless service system, we're out here today getting people into housing through our Pathway Home Program, and one of our outreach workers here lost his home in the fire, but he's here today helping people get inside because people who work in homeless services are dedicated to this. They believe that everyone deserves housing, and they work tirelessly to do that, and the county had declared an emergency on our homeless crisis two years ago.

So people are tired, but people are committed is how I would describe how people are faring. I understand that your organization has been working, of course, to help those who are immediately displaced by the fire, working with state and government agencies, setting up mass care shelters and so on. But where are a lot of the hundreds of people who had to immediately evacuate that you're dealing with? Where are a lot of them?

So people are in a mixture of sites. So we have some of our most vulnerable are in those mass care and shelter sites run by the Red Cross. We have lots of households that are currently sheltered through the Airbnb assistance program that was stood up. And then FEMA has turned on its transitional sheltering assistance program. So there's thousands of families living in hotels there.

funded by FEMA. And then several hotel chains have offered temporary stays in hotels for households that have been displaced by the fire. So there are tens of thousands of people who are temporarily displaced, some of them being supported by in hotels that are privately financed and philanthropically financed, and some supported directly by FEMA and the sort of mass care disaster relief system that's being stood up.

Given that you are reliant on support for federal funds, right now there is reporting that the attempted freeze of federal aid has been rescinded, though there's also reporting that another tactic could be tried related to this. What happened in your organization when you heard about that?

So obviously the housing and the homeless system rely heavily on federal funding. I think our county housing authority, 70% of the funding for the county housing authority is federal funding. So it's extremely concerning to have our funding, which is largely federal,

Not exclusively relying on the federal government, but heavily subsidized by the federal government to be in question at all. But we're monitoring the situation to see what exactly is the impact. We're confident that direct assistance to folks is probably the most protected thing right now, but we're keeping our eye on it. Los Angeles County had finally begun to see a slight decrease in its homeless population, according to HUD.

I imagine you're assuming these fires will be a setback in those efforts. And I'm wondering if you could help us understand to what degree you think that might be the case.

Yeah, the pandemic was similar in the sense of you're watching an event, as the reporter described, happen to people that is destabilizing. Sometimes homelessness, you know, despite how it's all too common, it is a rare thing that happens to households in the United States. And it takes a while for it to happen for a lot of people. People usually exhaust all alternative resources before they end up outside.

And so during the pandemic, for example, we knew that it would take two to three years before you really saw the downstream effects on homelessness from the pandemic. I imagine this would be a shorter timeline than that because this is an immediate timeline.

assault on the housing stability of this community. But you will see the same pattern where a lot of households will rely and exhaust every alternative option before ever relying on sleeping in a car or sleeping outside. But yes, we expect this to be a further destabilization of our housing supply, a further destabilization of

housing affordability. And so we're doing what we always do, which is shore up the systems of support for as much as we can with our local resources to make sure we can meet the needs of those who are really going to need system support to be stably housed. Well, Carter, I really appreciate you talking with us. Thanks so much. Thank you. Carter Hughley, Senior Director of L.A. County Homeless Services.

initiative. Marisa Kendall is with us, homelessness reporter for CalMatters, and we're talking about how the LA area wildfires, the size and scale of it, could exacerbate the state's housing and homelessness crisis, and taking your questions about what that impact could be, and hearing from you about your experiences if you or someone you know was displaced by a wildfire, what it was like

trying to find temporary or long-term housing after that? Or if you work in homelessness or housing affordability, what have you seen? What are your thoughts about what we are seeing unfold as a result of the destruction in Southern California? 866-733-6786, the number. Email address, forum at kqed.org. Our social channels are at KQED Forum. And let me go to Johnny in Los Angeles. Hi, Johnny, you're on.

Yes. There's solutions sitting in downtown L.A. It's called the Chinese invested one point two billion dollars in a four building complex that sits there unfinished. All it needs is glazed in and there's twelve hundred units sitting right there. And everyone on the earth, everyone should get together, get the federal government, get Trump as a developer, finish the damn thing. It's a beautiful building. There's your solution to a lot of housing rights.

there. I worked on the project. Six, it all needs is glazing, plumbing, just finish work. And there she sits, $1.2 billion in. Look it up. It's a beautiful project, and it's like a lot of these projects. They just...

There's solutions in front of you, and you can take a tragedy, and I'm looking for solutions like you always do. You always try to. That's what I love about your show. Thanks, Johnny. Really appreciate that. What do you think about what Johnny is saying, and is that an issue in our government bureaucracy as well, right, with regard to being able to focus on the areas where potential solutions could be quick or more available? Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you do hear that a lot where construction projects will have they'll be almost there. They'll have almost all the funding or be almost finished and they'll run out of money because construction costs go up. Insurance is a big part of it. Like we talked about, the rising insurance rates have made it hard for new housing to get built.

even in some places. So I think he's right. I mean, there are some efforts out there where they are offering loans and financing specifically for these projects that are almost there. They just need that extra little boost. And, you know, that could be like a big bang for your buck to get these projects finished.

This listener writes, if the president withholds disaster aid from California, thereby slowing the recovery from these horrible fires, could this trigger a recession in California or in the entire nation since California is the fifth largest economy? So just to step back for a second, Marisa, I should remind listeners that reportedly the administration has rescinded the memo calling for a federal aid freeze, though there is still a lot of scrambling right now to figure out what exactly that means with regard to any other attempts on this.

In California's case, of course, with regards to Trump, we've had a couple of things happen. One has been for a while now threats to withhold or delay, I should say, delay or condition aid. Can you just give us a sense of how realistic that is and the things that he has said since he's made those types of statements?

Trump has said, President Trump.

And then, you know, there was a lot of animosity sort of between Governor Newsom and the president. You know, Trump was arrived to tour the L.A. fire scenes and didn't really tell the governor where or when he was going to be there, which was awkward. But the governor did greet him on the tarmac. They hugged. They were cordial. So that seemed to maybe be an optimistic sign. Yeah.

And then the funding freeze as well. You know, there were reports that FEMA was considering briefly whether it had to stop doling out aid to L.A. County fire victims. And, you know, even now that the memo apparently has been rescinded and the funding is OK again, it just breathes so much extra uncertainty into the homelessness response system.

which already is facing precarious funding already at a time where the state budget that's been proposed for the upcoming year offers no new homelessness funding. And California does rely on federal funds for things like housing vouchers that subsidize hundreds of thousands of households in California. So I think people are really worried about the impact of that.

Right. Also, the homeless population is entitled to disaster aid specifically, right, if they're in these zones? They are, yeah. I think, you know, what you bring up is something that's so important to remind our listeners, which is...

So many legal experts have said this funding freeze, even his attempts to delay or condition aid, is either just straight up illegal, unconstitutional, or very, very much unlikely to ever hold up if it goes through a legal process. But then what is real is the fact that it does create so much anguish, especially for people

in the case that we're talking about specifically, people who are already in pain. Yeah. And, you know, it's all well and good to say, OK, well, it'll get shot down in court. But still, you still see practical implications immediately on the ground. You know, the Long Beach mayor reportedly said in Long Beach, the city was trying to draw down federal homeless services funds after, you know, everything was talked about yesterday and they couldn't. Those those funds were were blocked for a minute. And

And just, you know, in a time where there are no ongoing, there's no ongoing source of funding for homelessness in the state, these sort of disruptions can be really tough. This is Neuron Discord writes, I've heard the refrain from many people that you live in a wildfire prone area. You should just not be able to get insurance because you choose to build in a disaster prone region. I'd like to point out that nearly all of the U.S. is vulnerable to some form of disaster.

There are precious few areas in the U.S. that don't face some sort of widespread disaster with the potential for death and destruction, all of which will be exacerbated as the impacts of climate change continue to increase. Marisa, your thoughts on this listener's perspective and also just why so many people sought out places that are vulnerable to fire in our state?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. You know, wildfire experts will tell you we probably should not rebuild in these areas that get hit by fires because especially with the warming climate, with, you know, summers getting hotter and drier, fire season is getting longer, we're going to see more of these fires.

But, you know, people continue to flock to some of these areas. Some of them are beautiful and remote. Others, in addition to being beautiful, are some of the few remaining affordable enclaves in the state. And there has been talk about, you know, should we let people rebuild their homes?

But there doesn't seem to be any political appetite right now to stop the rebuilding in those fire prone areas because we have such a housing shortage. You know, Governor Newsom signed an executive order suspending some environmental protections in the fire areas to try to really push rebuilding and speed up the rebuilding. He asked the state housing agency to take a look at some of its

building rules and see if we could cut anything to even further speed up the process. Mayor Bass and the city of LA did something similar. So, you know, for now, people are going to keep rebuilding there.

This listener, Ron, writes, California's approach to homelessness caused by wildfires is making things much worse for California residents in homelessness. First, the state should stop scapegoating and punishing landlords and insurance companies. That's useless. The state and feds must put resources into prescribed fire and fuel reduction. They should mandate and support home hardening methods so homes are not so vulnerable to fire. Third, they should stop building in areas that have and will always

always burn and increase safe ingress and egress to all residential areas. Are there parts of that that you agree with, parts you would push back on? I mean, I think a lot of experts would agree we really shouldn't be building there. But I think the tough thing is we don't have a good plan in place to stop that. You know, if you've lost your home in a fire-prone area, you

You know, I mean, is the state going to buy you out? Is the state going to buy out everyone who lived there? I mean, we just don't have a plan in place to compensate people and then move them somewhere else in our already short housing market. So, yeah, I mean, I think.

There are a lot of problems with the way that we're doing things now and a lot of things that should be different, but I'm not sure anyone's laid out a real feasible plan for how to make a meaningful change there. This is Nur Weitz. Can you discuss how the increasing cost of or impossibility of getting insurance pinches homeowners and landlords who can't raise rent because of rent control and gouging laws? How can the state support landlords who cannot keep up with the insurance rates?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really big issue. And I have heard from experts in other places of California that faced prior fires who said, you know, they had building projects proposed to them, you know, proposed much needed new housing, and they couldn't get done because of the cost of insurance. So it is actively worsening the housing shortage. Yeah.

I think we're going to see people with more canceled plans, people without insurance, people put into more dangerous situations, or maybe people aren't going to go back to these. You know, they're not going to go back to their property because insurance is too high. But yeah, I think it's going to come down to changing something about the insurance market and what's happening there.

This is with regard to rebuilding on discord rights. It should be pointed out that the further farther you are from concentrated areas, the more it costs to build infrastructure to obtain goods and to have access to things locally.

like doctors and hospitals. We're talking about California's housing shortage, its homelessness crisis, and how the Los Angeles area wildfires could exacerbate that. Marisa Kendall is with us, homelessness reporter at CalMatters. We were joined earlier by Carter Hughley, senior director of LA County Homeless Initiative. We'll have more with Marisa, and we'll also talk with housing advocates who have been in communities with previous wildfires and how things are playing out there. And of course, with you, our listeners,

More after the break. I'm Mina Kim. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. The Los Angeles area wildfires decimated neighborhoods, displaced tens of thousands of people in a state that already deals with a housing shortage and a large homeless population, a homelessness crisis.

in many ways. And we're talking about how all of that could be exacerbated by these wildfires. Marisa Kendall is homelessness reporter for CalMatters. And you, our listeners, are sharing the kinds of questions and concerns that you have in terms of the broader housing impacts from these fires.

If you or someone you know was displaced and what it was like to find temporary housing, we'd love to hear from you. If you work on homelessness or housing affordability, we'd also love to hear your thoughts or what impacts you witnessed after a wildfire. The email address is forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram at KQED Forum, as well as other social channels. Call us at 866-733-6786.

866-733-6786. I want to look now at the longer-term housing consequences. And for that, I want to bring Jenny Lynn Holmes into the conversation, CEO of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa. Hi, Jenny Lynn. Hi, thanks for having me. Glad to have you. You were working with...

Sonoma is unhoused before the 2017 Tubbs fire and then worked with those displaced by the fire as well. First, when you were watching the fires unfold in the Los Angeles area, what came to mind for you? Yeah, I mean, being very honest, it was very hard to see what was happening in L.A. County, mostly because our community is,

has just a deep empathy and understanding for what they were experiencing. You know, we were one of the first fires of that scale with the amount of individuals who were displaced and structures that were lost and just the sheer, you know, widespread panic and devastation and watching your community completely fall apart and burn and not knowing where and what is to happen next.

It's a feeling that unless you've been through it, it's hard to really describe and it is even harder to understand. So watching what L.A. County went through was incredibly reminiscent of the devastation we experienced here in Sonoma and Napa County.

So Jenny Lynn, talk about the timeline of what happened with your community's post-fire housing needs, like the impacts that you saw emerging and when with regard to housing shortages and an increased homeless population.

Yeah, you know, it happened very quickly. You know, there's the immediate kind of recovery needs and then there's the longer term needs. And what we saw here was we lost about 5,000 units of housing and we saw that amount of households be displaced immediately.

You put that on top of an existing vulnerable homeless population, we are dealing with a tripling of the individuals who are now living without a home in our community literally overnight. And to that magnitude, it's hard to really wrap your arms around it in the initial days. You know, there's...

In the beginning days, there was a lot of attention, philanthropy, assistance from communities, kind of your initial first nonprofit responders that were kind of coming in. But where we really started to see concern grow and new needs emerge was after the six month mark.

And then another kind of checkpoint around 12 and 18 months. So around six months is when you start to see the attention go away from the community. Some of the philanthropic dollars go away and move to, you know, are moving to another part of the crisis in whatever part of our nation or state. And then you see people really needing things for the first time. The initial days is about getting kind of clothes, food.

food, supplies, and then you're starting to look at, well, I need to get reintegrated, my kids reintegrated back into school, I need to get housing, I need to figure out how I'm going to rebuild or if I can rebuild. And by that point, a lot of the initial assistance is gone. And so you are now dealing with a lot less resources and a huge amount of new need.

The other major kind of timeline moment we saw was around 12 months after the crisis. As Carter mentioned earlier, homelessness doesn't just happen overnight. It's a series of crisis that occur and you begin to double up, triple up, live in hotels until all those situations become unsustainable. And then you enter into homelessness. So about a year after our

We saw people entering the homeless system of care. We could chart back their crisis of why they were homeless back to the fires. And who were the people who you were seeing affected most? Which communities?

It was definitely our vulnerable population, individuals who are disabled, individuals who are elderly. Our renting population was a significantly vulnerable population. They don't have the same access to FEMA assistance and they don't have the right to rebuild because they didn't own the home or the land. And so they were literally having to find brand new housing without a long-term goal or option of being able to rebuild. And I'll say...

was a big issue then and I would, given the national kind of policy directions we're seeing around immigration, the undocumented community was another very vulnerable population that we saw. Because again, without certain legal status, you don't have the same rights to rebuild, you don't have the same access to funds and given the kind of political rhetoric happening in our nation,

We are, I can reasonably predict there will be a lot of people who will be too scared to come forward, even if they are eligible and do have a right to assistance. And so the undocumented community, our immigrant community, people who are living in the shadows and in fear right now, it's only going to get more challenging for them as they attempt to recover. One of the things I was struck by was that you also said that

A significant mental health impact also made it difficult for communities to be able to do the intense work of rebuilding or finding stable or permanent housing. Yeah, I think that that's probably one of the most lasting effects in our community. I think you can drive around our community, you can still see the burn scar. And, you know, here we are many, many years later, you can still see homes being rebuilt, you can still see businesses that never rebuilt.

But one of the problem most lasting and challenging issues has been the mental health impact that these fires had on our community. You know, you talk about some of our first responders and what they saw when they watched their own homes burn. They watched their community burn on the front lines of fighting the fire. And then you talk about the secondary responders, which I term as the nonprofits responders.

and community aid agencies and the amount of work that kind of put on individuals. And to this day, when the wind picks up or it's a warm day, our community, you can feel it in the air. You can feel the concern, the worry, and the just PTSD from what we experienced in our fires. And

The recovery process is not going to be solved in a year. It's not going to be solved in two years. It's still taking us time. We're still working on recovery. And it's going to take years. And so taking care of one's mental health

And dealing with that impact earlier, I think is critical because no one knew what was happening and we couldn't really name it until after we saw the lasting effects of it. And again, the Tubbs fire was in 2017. The Camp Fire was in 2018. The CZU Complex Fire was in 2017.

And we're talking about the very long-lasting impacts of that that also exacerbate issues related to being able to be in stable housing in these places. So, Jenny Lynn, I imagine you have a lot of insights for those in the L.A. area leading homelessness and displacement efforts right now on ways to contain the fallout. And I'm assuming one of those things is investing in mental health resources, not forgetting to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, some of the lessons learned that was one of the critical ones is to really start that work now, start the kind of mental health services now. I think the other one is.

Where you can, you know, where you have philanthropic dollars, hold those. Hold those for when the initial federal assistance and the initial kind of aid is there. Hold the more flexible philanthropic dollars for the long-term recovery because that's where people are really going to need it, especially our vulnerable populations. And really looking at who is being left out of the recovery process from an equity perspective is

and investing those philanthropic dollars there because homelessness will be impacted, but those who are living on the margins will be impacted even more. In our subsequent years, we saw 21,000 people in our community living on the verge of homelessness, and over half of those could chart their housing instability back to the losing their homes in the fire or being indirectly impacted by the economic impacts.

So the crisis is here, but it's going to change, but still be a crisis in the next couple of years. And so being thoughtful about where you're investing and being thoughtful about how you build the capacity for the individuals who will be left out of the initial recovery will be critical to look at in L.A. County around recovery.

solving homelessness, minimizing the impact of homelessness and keeping people out of homelessness. Vidal on Discord writes, can a disaster such as these fires be an opportunity for Los Angeles and the surrounding areas to seriously work on their city planning? The traffic and lack of places one can live without the need of a car are severely lacking. I feel like there are a lot of things we can do

to prevent this disaster from happening again while improving some of our housing issues. Did you see that, Jenny Lynn, in the Sonoma area with regard to using this as an opportunity to really rethink how you rebuild, how, you know, city planning, I guess, as Vidal says here? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think

And it's, you know, the way that we were able to really look at streamlining, and I want to give a lot of credit, particularly to the County of Sonoma and the City of Santa Rosa, really looking at how they can remove very crowded barriers to rebuild. But I also want to give credit to our nonprofit and housing partners, too. You know, we did think about how things could look differently. You know, I'll give an example. One of our hardest hit areas was

a rent-controlled mobile home park called Journey's End. And the individuals who were displaced from losing their homes in that mobile home park, there was no way they were going to be able to move from a rent-controlled unit into the current housing market and be able to survive. And so one of the things that was done was there was federal aid

and funding that was brought in that was able to build high dense housing on the same footprint, giving priority to the individuals who lost their homes, but also increasing the total number of units on that same footprint. So not only did we make sure the individuals who lost their homes

In that area, which was heavily individuals who were older or disabled, were able to be rehoused in an affordable way. We built more affordable housing to impact, to increase the footprint that was lost but rebuilt.

We're talking with Jenny Lynn Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities in Santa Rosa. And you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. A couple more thoughts on this. A listener on Discord writes, I'm fully in support of denser housing regions, especially here in the Bay Area, but I'm not sure how well they would have fared in a wildfire situation like this. The roads can be jammed with people trying to get out.

Excuse me. A listener on Discord writes, the housing crunch is not the only problem to deal with going forward. We need to focus on infrastructure and resources. Getting around is a problem, too. This was demonstrated by the Palisades residents' attempt to evacuate. Marisa, you report that for several years following the fire, Sonoma County included fire-related questions in its annual homeless point-in-time count. Why did you want to highlight that?

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting because the data that we have on homelessness is pretty sparse across the board. And it's really hard to track why someone became homeless and if they became homeless specifically as a result of wildfire. You know, we don't do a good job tracking that.

So it was really interesting that Sonoma County started doing that after its fire. They found the year after the disaster, more than a third of homeless survey respondents said their previous housing or sleeping location was affected by the fire, including 12% that said it had been burned or otherwise destroyed. So it really paints a good picture of the effect.

And I did ask in L.A. County if they were going to add similar questions because they were supposed to do their point-in-time count of their unhoused residents this month. That got postponed until mid-February because of the fires. And they told me they are actually considering adding some fire-specific questions this

Right now, the only thing they ask is, you know, did a natural disaster cause your homelessness, which is very broad. And in the counties, you know, like Santa Cruz County, for example, asks that and they never get very many people who say yes. And experts there have said they think the question could be better organized.

Right.

This is Nur Reitz. Our climate reality is something that we're going to have to continue to face in the future, and the housing difficulty will only be a larger consideration going forward. Marisa, I know you've thought about this. What do you think? Yeah, that's 100% true. You know, as with climate change, with the climate getting warmer, you know, not only are we having –

People have said fire season is now all year round. In California, our fire seasons are getting longer. Our fires are getting more extreme and more unpredictable. So we are going to continue to see homes destroyed. And then on top of that, with our housing crisis, you have people building more and more into these fire-prone areas. So it's sort of this confluence of these two factors. And I think we are going to continue to see this. Yes. But are you seeing...

With the agencies that you cover with regard to homelessness and housing needs and housing shortages, a real consideration of this in planning and policy around how they want to approach what could be a big increase. People are definitely talking about it.

It's definitely top of mind for people. Whether there is a solution on the table right now, I think that remains to be seen. I think there's still a lot of work to be done there. Jenny Lin, I'm wondering what you would like our listeners to know about how these wildfires can exacerbate the state's housing and homelessness crisis that we haven't gotten to.

Yeah, I mean, the reality is it will. We already are living in an incredibly tight housing market in the state of California, and we have a growing homelessness crisis. And one of the things we have to grapple with is making sure that individuals who were homeless prior to the disaster and individuals who are homeless now are both taken into consideration in the recovery.

You know, there were there was a lot of discussions in our recovery process around resources and how they should or shouldn't be used with different individuals experiencing homelessness. But the fact of the matter is, everybody is vulnerable and everybody deserves a pathway to recovery in this process, no matter when the homelessness kind of.

And when we have a tight housing market and resources are scarce, you end up having to make decisions. And I would encourage people to challenge themselves to think differently.

think more innovatively and use this crisis as an opportunity to take all individuals into consideration in the recovery process. Think creatively around how to maximize housing footprints and how to make sure that everybody is able to be safe in California. Jenny Lynn Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you. And Marisa Kendall, homelessness reporter for CalMatters, thanks for your reporting on this and your insights. Very big picture as well as very focused on what's happening with this very vulnerable population. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. And my thanks to listeners for sharing your questions and your insights as well on this issue. And thank you, Caroline Smith, for producing today's segment. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.