Jackie Krentzman is a Bay Area-based writer and editor. Additional contributions by Brian Lee-Mounger Hendershot, Western City managing editor.    

In 2018, a devastating wildfire tore through the town of Paradise. The Camp Fire destroyed 14,000 homes and displaced approximately 35,000 people, including Vera Peete and her son.

Peete had only been living in Paradise for six months when she lost her home. For the previous six years, she was homeless.

“Then came the fire and I was back homeless again,” says Peete.

Today, Peete and her son live in an apartment in Oroville subsidized by a federal rental assistance program. Their new apartment is even bigger than their home in Paradise. She has become attached to the city, which is just 30 minutes south of Paradise.

“I feel so comfortable here,” she says. “It’s a quiet, small town with a really interesting history and background that I’m enjoying getting to know.”

The Camp Fire forever changed Oroville. Its population immediately swelled by several thousand. The city, which already lacked sufficient housing, scrambled to fast-track more.

“Five thousand to 10,000 people had to be housed overnight,” says Oroville Mayor David Pittman. “It was a mass exodus up there because the entire community burned, and most of the displaced folks went to Chico and Oroville. Some came temporarily, but at least 5,000 settled here permanently. For example, a very high percentage of our market-rate housing out by the airport was purchased by [former] Paradise residents.”

The influx of Paradise refugees spurred the city to ramp up its housing efforts. Since 2020, Oroville has built or has under construction 748 multifamily affordable units, with another 140 in the pipeline. The homes are funded from a combination of sources, including federal tax credits and disaster recovery grants. The city also has close to 500 market-rate homes in various stages of development.

“It was truly a collaborative accomplishment between multiple entities to get this much-needed housing done, in such a short period of time,” says City Administrator Brian Ring.  

Because of the immediate need, the city had to move fast. Most of Oroville’s multifamily housing and mixed-use sites are CEQA-exempt. As a result, staff shaved over a year off the usual two-to-three-year approval and construction timeline. 

“Putting projects together in nine months is just unheard of,” says Pittman. “That rewrote the book for us in terms of putting projects together.”

In a cruel twist of fate, the fire actually made it easier to build housing. Overnight, Butte County became the poster child for insufficient housing supply, having lost thousands of units on top of a virtual 0% vacancy rate. The dramatic shortfall unlocked federal funding that allowed many projects to pencil out — something many developers have struggled with since the Great Recession.

Ed Mayer, the former executive director of the Butte County Housing Authority, says Oroville in particular was uniquely situated to compress the usual timeline.

“When the Camp Fire happened, Oroville was positioned better than the other nearby cities to take advantage of the federal disaster funds,” Mayer says. “Going back in the city’s history, it has long had a more than adequate inventory of multifamily land zoned and ready for development, so after the disaster, there was a lot of multifamily land available. There were a lot of players who were ready to go play ball in Oroville.”

So, Pittman and Mayer, as representatives of the housing authority, went to Washington to lobby for more Housing Choice Vouchers, federal rental subsidies tied to the property for a specified time frame. This was crucial, as housing authorities can only use 20 to 30% of their vouchers for new housing, and most voucher holders struggle to find property owners that accept the subsidy.

“Creation of housing opportunity is everything in such an environment,” Mayer says.

The housing authority ultimately merged its tenant-based rental vouchers with other sources of funding, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery grants, to support new housing. This allowed developers to quickly assemble and finish projects.

“We have a very low-income community, and so each of these developments needed project-based vouchers to make these projects financially feasible in the long term,” says Amy Bergstrand, the city’s director of housing and community services.

As a result, Oroville has not only met but surpassed its state-mandated housing targets for affordable housing. “For a community of 20,000 to produce so many units of affordable housing over the course of five years is unprecedented in California, much less the nation,” says Mayer. “What they did was extraordinary. Lesson learned: Look at what happens when scaled and targeted investment is made in a conducive jurisdiction! ”