Chico Residents Face Evictions to Make Room for Camp Fire Victims

April Whitley has lived in her Chico home with her husband and two kids for the last three years, but they won’t for much longer.

Whitley said her landlord called at the end of November to tell her she needed to move out because she wanted her daughter — who lost her home in the Camp Fire — to live there.

“My initial reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, I have nowhere to go.’ There’s nowhere in Chico,” Whitley said.

The influx of people displaced by the Camp Fire have taken up whatever spaces were left in an already tight rental market in Butte County. According to Butte County’s Housing Authority, every single unit is occupied, and renters are now essentially playing a game of housing “musical chairs,” with fierce competition whenever a space opens up.

Now, landlords like Whitley’s are evicting tenants to make room for their own family members affected by the Camp Fire. Whitley’s landlord did not respond to a request for comment.

Whitley said she tried buying a house, but because she doesn’t have much extra cash, she said the post-fire market has been even harder for her to navigate.

“We don’t have the cash that folks from Paradise have with their insurance money, so we can’t compete in bidding wars that are happening right now,” she said.

Unable to find a home they can afford in Chico or the surrounding areas, Whitley and her family are moving to her brother’s place in Capay, a small community outside Sacramento nearly two hours away.

The plan is for her two kids to stay in her brother’s extra bedrooms, while Whitley and her husband live in an RV on her brother’s property.

The city passed an emergency ordinance after the fire preventing landlords from evicting existing tenants in order to jack up rents for fire victims, but owner move-in evictions are legal. Chico Mayor Randall Stone said they are just another hurdle the city has to deal with after the fire.

“What we can do, we’ve done, from a legal standpoint,” Stone said. “We can just provide resources to make it easier and better, trying to preserve the tax base and the employment base as much as humanly possible.”

Stone said he’s working to encourage development through permit fee reduction and legislation that would require the construction of affordable housing.