Renters falling through the cracks of disaster recovery
Renters show up with more unmet needs and uncertainty than homeowners in several different measures of recovery reviewed by this newspaper and Chico State researchers. They made up around 30 percent of the population of Paradise, but they’re over-represented among those with basic unmet needs now.
That calls into question the ability of different aid programs, many of which are tied to property ownership and have long struggled to include renters. It also highlights the shortage of rental units in the region, particularly affordable units.
What appears to be differentiating the group is not necessarily their previous socioeconomic status but really their status as non-property-owners, said Jacquelyn Chase, a professor of geography at Chico State.
“You don’t see that this was a group that was that much at a disadvantage before,” said Chase. “They weren’t living in sub-standard housing and their incomes were only slightly lower than homeowners. … It’s really the fire that is turning renters into poor people.”
Chase suggests the difference between homeowners and renters is most likely because of the lack of insurance, the lack of attention and renter-specific aid and the rebuild favoring owners.
“In the long term, this may just compound if housing isn’t rebuilt,” she said.
‘The resources have dried up’
The availability of housing was a problem from the start. When the 37,000 people made homeless overnight by the fire started looking for alternatives, they found a rental vacancy rate of around 1 percent in Chico. The difficulty of finding an affordable rental has since plunged some into a negative spiral.
Vanessa Flournoy, a former Paradisian renter, first started in Yuba City.
She had some renter’s insurance on the nice home with a big yard she lost to the fire — unlike the majority of other renters — which disqualified her from help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the insurance money quickly ran out as she started rebuilding her life. To try and cut costs, she moved to a shared apartment in Chico, where she’s now struggling just to make ends meet, she said.
“All the resources have dried up. They’re gone,” she said. “I don’t know how I can be on the road to recovery if everything is no longer available to me.”
Lora Fournier agrees. She’s part of a slightly different group: people displaced after the fire by rent hikes, despite an emergency cap on increases, and owner move-ins. The longtime Paradisian had just started renting a home when the fire hit. She lost much of her personal property to the flames, though the house itself was spared. But right before Christmas, she said, her landlord told her she’d have to leave. He wanted to rent the place to another family flush with insurance money.
FEMA told her she didn’t qualify for aid.
She ended up homeless, living in her truck. A heart surgery plunged her into debt.
She lived for a while at the Magalia Community Church’s parking lot in a donated trailer before moving to a relative’s property in Paradise.
“I don’t feel like anyone gets that what happened to us after the fire was very wrong,” she said. “I want to stay here. Paradise is home. But there doesn’t seem to be a space for me.”
Metrics show renters struggling
Renters and rental housing often falls through the cracks after a disaster, said Marion McFadden, who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for 15 years on disaster recovery and is now senior vice president for public policy at Enterprise Community Partners.
“It’s a continuous theme that rental housing takes a back-seat to homeowner assistance programs,” she said. “There are multiple reasons for that … one of them is that homeowners are eligible for much more assistance from the federal government than renters.”
For example, homeowners are eligible for low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration and the town of Paradise.
McFadden also said that homeowners tend to have more political pressure than renters.
For example, homeowners have had a bigger voice in setting the long-term vision set by Paradise, a process run by Urban Design Associates last year. In the online survey used as input for the vision, only 11 percent of respondents said they were renters.
So where did renters go?
Chase’s research with Geographic Information Systems specialist Peter Hansen focuses on change of addresses requested by people who previously lived in the Camp Fire footprint. Only around 35 percent of former residents had made the change by September of last year. Assuming that the change of address is an indication that someone is settled in a permanent alternative home, that low number suggests continued uncertainty and temporary housing.
It seems to be worse for renters: Only 17 percent of renters had made address changes.
“That shows that the vast majority are still potentially very unsettled,” said Chase.
Renters have also been applying for emergency funds from Pacific Gas & Electric, Corp. to cover basic needs at higher rates than homeowners. Around 50 percent of those who submitted claims to the Wildfire Assistance Program, which was designed to provide emergency funds to victims of fires linked to PG&E, were renters, said David Agretelis, who is working with Cathy Yanni to administer the program. The program has already distributed around $72 million and will distribute the remaining $20 million to people with “supplemental needs” in the next month or so.
More rental housing on the way
The funds were designed to fill a gap, covering needs not previously met by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or insurance companies.
“We see a lot of people applying for emotional distress, housing, transportation, gasoline, medical and dental,” said Yanni.
Rental housing is on the way, though. Landlords appear to be rebuilding their rentals at the same rate as homeowners. According to data analyzed by Hansen and Chase, around 37 percent of the homes for which a permit application has been filled out are rentals. That includes a few multi-family units. Nonprofit developers have been fighting to develop affordable housing throughout the county, though they’ve hit some snags.
In Chico, too, more rental housing is coming online. Wait-lists have diminished, said Tanya Morgan, the executive director at Hill Properties, though rentals still get snapped up more quickly than before the fire. Around 600 new units are currently under construction, estimates Morgan.That would boost the supply by around 3 percent.
The rub is that the units will probably not be as affordable as Paradise once was. The demand for construction has pushed costs up.
Source: chicoer.com
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