'The Crisis Is Here': LA Fires Could Exacerbate California's Homelessness Problem

Jennielynn Holmes stood in the middle of a makeshift evacuation center when the scope of the crisis hit her.

Surrounded by thousands of people who had just fled the Tubbs Fire, which burned through Santa Rosa in 2017, Holmes realized many of these people would soon be added to the area’s already extensive caseload of unhoused clients.

“This is the group of people (that) is one crisis away from entering homelessness,” thought Holmes, who helps lead the area’s homelessness response as CEO of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa. “And the crisis is here.”

As multiple wildfires continue to incinerate homes and displace tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles County, experts worry about the long-term effects the fires will have on the state’s already dire homelessness crisis. In other parts of California burned by past wildfires, communities are still dealing with the fallout years later.

People who had too little or no insurance on their homes, or who rented, sometimes end up on the street when their home burns and they can’t find another place to live.

But it’s not just people whose homes burn down that feel the pain. Renters in undamaged buildings get evicted because their landlord raises rents to take advantage of refugees’ desperation — or because the landlord lost another home in the fire and needs to move into their rental unit.

And when a community loses thousands of homes at once when they already have a housing shortage, prices go up across the board, displacing even more people. To make the situation worse, each fire threatens to raise already sky-high home insurance rates, making rebuilding or buying a new home even more prohibitively expensive.

As climate change leads to hotter and drier seasons in California, these wildfires have become more unpredictable and extreme. Each new, devastating fire sets the state back in its fight against homelessness.

“It’s really putting a strain on all of California at this point,” said Matt Plotkin, who helped lead recovery efforts for the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County as head of what is now the Camp Fire Collaborative, before landing in his current role as director of equity and advocacy for United Way of Northern California.

The fires in Los Angeles County have burned more than 40,000 acres, killed at least 24 people and damaged or destroyed an estimated 12,000 homes and other structures — a loss sure to further exacerbate the housing shortage in a county that already has more than 75,000 homeless residents. While much of the attention around the current fires has been on destruction in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades, experts say the rich won’t be the only ones affected.

An analysis of three past California wildfires sheds some light on what might happen once the smoke clears in Los Angeles County.

Camp Fire

After the 2018 Camp Fire destroyed much of the rural town of Paradise in Butte County, thousands of evacuees poured into Chico, about 15 miles away. Now, more than six years later, the Sacramento Valley city still feels the effects.

“We are still dealing with people being now, unfortunately, chronically houseless due to the Camp Fire,” Plotkin said. “The impact, I would not use the word ‘impacted’ because that is past tense. I would say it is still current, present. So I still say ‘impact.’”

Paradise lost about 15,000 homes in the fire. So far, only about 2,900 single-family homes and 550 multi-family units have been rebuilt, according to Mayor Steve Crowder. The loss had a large ripple effect. After the fire, vacancy rates in Butte County dropped to 1% or less, according to the county’s 2023 homeless point-in-time count report (PDF).

The fire also made life more difficult for people who were already homeless in Paradise. Before the fire, the town had a few homeless shelters operated by local churches. Those are all gone now, Crowder said.

Immediately after the fire, Paradise passed an ordinance allowing survivors to live in trailers or RVs on their burned-out properties while they rebuild. It was supposed to be a temporary measure, but, in many cases, rebuilding took years as people waited for slow-moving insurance, federal funds and money from a settlement with PG&E to reach them. About 100 trailers remain — and some have no sewage hookup, creating unsanitary conditions, Crowder said.

The town soon will have to figure out how to remove those trailers and try to find permanent housing for their occupants, he said.

CZU Lightning Complex

The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex, made up of multiple fires sparked by lightning strikes, destroyed nearly 700 homes in Santa Cruz County.

Four years later, only about a third of those residences were being rebuilt, according to a 2024 Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury report (PDF).

For several years, people displaced either directly or indirectly by the fires showed up at homeless service provider Housing Matters asking for help, said the nonprofit’s Chief Initiatives Officer Tom Stagg. While no one collected comprehensive data on how many people became homeless specifically because of the fire, the anecdotal evidence was everywhere, he said.

“I remember definitely seeing an increase in RVs that people were staying in in town for up to two years after the fire,” he said.

The CZU fires tore through rural communities in the Santa Cruz Mountains, including the San Lorenzo Valley, which used to be an affordable refuge for people priced out of other areas, Stagg said. Losing homes there has made the region’s affordable housing crisis even worse, he said.

In addition, people burned out of the Santa Cruz Mountains — or trying to escape the threat of fire there — moved into the city of Santa Cruz, stressing the city’s housing market and bringing down the vacancy rate, said Robert Ratner, director of Santa Cruz County’s Housing for Health.

It’s common for people to migrate after a fire, traveling to places where they have friends and family or where they believe they can find affordable housing. That fact makes every California wildfire a regional — even statewide — event. Even before the CZU fires, Stagg’s team saw people end up homeless in Santa Cruz after being displaced from Paradise by the Camp Fire.

It’s difficult to track exactly how many people are made homeless by a fire, but as fires increasingly ravage California, some communities are interested in trying.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Santa Cruz County did not conduct a homeless census in the year after the CZU fires. Later counts asked participants about the primary reason they became homeless, listing natural disaster as an option. Few people ever chose that answer, but Ratner thinks that may be because there are so many combined factors that lead to homelessness. For example, someone might be displaced by a fire, but it’s ultimately their economic insecurity that prevents them from finding a new place to live.

Wording the question differently might produce better data, Ratner said.

“It feels like something we need to start asking about so we can get better information,” he said.

Some rural counties in the far north of the state, where wildfires are frequent, already ask. In 2023, nearly a quarter of Siskiyou County’s 507 homeless residents said they were homeless as a result of fire, according to the county’s most recent point-in-time count (PDF).

Tubbs Fire

After the 2017 Tubbs Fire burned through Napa and Sonoma counties in the Bay Area’s wine country, local service providers saw a spike in homelessness about a year and a half later, Holmes said.

Immediately after the fire, money and other aid from FEMA, the local and state government, and philanthropic organizations poured in. Many people were able to live doubled or tripled-up with friends or family for a period of time. But when the money ran out, and those cramped living situations became unsustainable, people found themselves out on the street.

It’s a situation that could repeat in Los Angeles County, Holmes said.

“It’s incredibly challenging because you’re dealing with a huge new homeless population,” she said. “People who lost their homes are now technically homeless. So with already a crazy amount of people experiencing homelessness, particularly in Southern California, and now you add on potentially tens of thousands more.”

After the Tubbs Fires, the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa (the organization Holmes runs) created a disaster case management team with up to 20 case managers and wrote a disaster case management playbook. The organization thought it would be a temporary program. But the fires continued, and it’s now become a permanent fixture.

For several years following the fire, Sonoma County included fire-related questions in its annual homeless point-in-time count (PDF). The year after the disaster, more than a third of homeless survey respondents said their previous housing or sleeping location had been affected by the fire in some way — including 12% who said it had been burned or otherwise destroyed.

The county also surveyed people who were housed to determine how many people might be at risk of becoming homeless. The survey found about 7% of Sonoma County households had someone living with them temporarily in the year after the fire. Using that data, the researchers estimated that 21,482 people were living temporarily doubled-up. Of those, nearly 40% said they were living that way because they lost their housing as a direct result of the fire. An additional 11% said they lost their housing because their landlord moved in or the rent increased because of the fire.

The city of Santa Rosa has permitted 3,220 new residential units since the 2017 fire, according to city data. That includes more than 370 affordable units, said Megan Basinger, the city’s director of housing and community services.

“We’ve seen more restricted units come online since the fire than I think we’ve ever seen,” she said.

As Los Angeles County starts to think about rebuilding, no one is watching with more empathy than those who have been through it before, Holmes said.

“We just feel so much for what’s going on down there because we know what it feels like,” she said, “to watch a community you love just be taken away so quickly.”