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The homes that line the wide and flat streets are clean and crisply painted, but they don’t appear to be cookie-cutter or brand-new. The asphalt roads have spots of discoloration, but only someone who lived through the fire would know the marks were caused by melting trash cans and burning cars.

And only a local would know that the porches jutting out from neighborhood homes are both new and significant: A sign of not only how the community was able to negotiate zoning changes with the city, but also how the fire transformed people’s lives and relationships.

“We have porches now. That’s huge,” Annie Barbour said on a recent fall morning as she drove through the neighborhood, stopping her car frequently to chat with friends walking dogs or working in their yards. “We changed from a community that came home and pulled into the garage and closed the door.”

The close relationships forged after residents lost nearly 1,500 homes in their community — and more than 5,000 in Sonoma County as a whole — helped them pull off something of a miracle: today, more than 98% of homes in the neighborhood have been rebuilt.

It’s a feat that is unlikely to be repeated, even as the frequency of destructive megafires in the West continues to increase. It took not only grit, but also luck and good geography for Coffey Park to rebuild so fully.

Less than a third of structures in Paradise, California, have been rebuilt in the five years since the Camp Fire claimed 85 lives and incinerated more than 85% of the town’s structures.

Two years after firefighters helplessly watched a wall of flames descend the forested hills surrounding Greenville, California, only a dozen or so new buildings have been erected in what was once a picturesque — if somewhat rundown — historic mountain town.

In all three places, fire survivors say their sense of community has been immeasurably strengthened since the fires. Deepened relationships between neighbors have helped many people work through trauma and anxiety, bolstered their ability to advocate for their communities, and put them on a better path to recovery.

But the fires have also dramatically reshaped communities in less pleasant ways, displacing large groups of people who didn’t have the financial or emotional resources to rebuild. They’ve also had far-reaching impacts on mental health and family dynamics, worsened existing housing shortages in surrounding areas, and shaken people’s sense of security.

“Not to be dramatic, but you don’t feel safe pretty much anywhere,” said Coffey Park homeowner Susan Tavonatti. “That’s what the fire took away.”

Civil Beat spent 10 days in November visiting three Northern California communities that have been reshaped by wildfires. The stories of these communities offer a glimpse of what may lie ahead for Lahaina in the years to come — and lessons for how to move forward, even though life will never be the same.

‘This Community Is Stronger’

In many ways, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California’s wine country marked a new era of deadly megafires in the U.S.

In the intervening years, wildfires have significantly damaged or destroyed towns in California, Oregon, Colorado and Hawaii. But in 2017, relatively few people understood what it was like to lose an entire community to such a cataclysmic blaze. To return to your neighborhood and find not a single recognizable landmark left standing.

For survivors of the Tubbs Fire, that meant there wasn’t much of a recovery roadmap to follow.

“How do we navigate this?” Barbour said of the learning curve residents experienced. “We had to figure out what we didn’t know. And we didn’t know what to ask.”

Residents started figuring out the right questions after their county supervisor suggested subdividing the community into smaller areas and deputizing volunteers to track rebuilding issues on a block-by-block level.

“The information was, ‘You guys can become block captains. Take what you hear from your portion of the community and get the answers,” said Barbour, an outgoing woman with a disarmingly wide smile, who had taken an early retirement shortly before the fire and volunteered quickly for the role.

Wildfires consumed more than 66,000 structures in the West between 2010 and 2020 — . Innumerable factors determined which of those homes and businesses got rebuilt, including how well the property was insured, what government support was available, and whether a property owner felt physically and mentally capable of taking on such a grueling task. Another enormous factor is how well a community can band together and advocate for what it needs.

Coffey Park residents embraced what was dubbed the “block captain” system, dividing the neighborhood into smaller sections and assigning someone to communicate regularly with every person on their block.

Every two weeks, block captains met with city officials to get clear answers to the questions they had gathered, and then redistributed that information to everyone in the group. They created subgroups for people with the same insurance company to swap notes. Solicited volunteers to tackle larger systemic issues like permitting or insurance when they arose.

“I think that the real reason we were successful is because we over-communicated and hammered the city, the county,” said Steve Rahmn, who served as a block captain and helped form Coffey Strong. “We had a mission to help our neighbors get into their homes.”

Coffey Strong hosted bingo nights, barbecues and weekly “Whine Wednesdays” where neighbors gathered in an empty lot with bottles of wine and camping chairs to commiserate. When someone finished construction on their home, neighbors “flocked” their yard with colorful plastic flamingos.

The social events were critical for mental health, which is still an issue for many residents in the area. Even people who did not live in the fire zone say they experience a sense of PTSD when there’s a dry day with strong winds in the fall, or find themselves anxiously checking emergency alert apps if they smell smoke in the air.

“Being alone is what’s scary,” Ramhn said.

The importance of being with other people who understand what you’re going through is why so many fire survivors are quick to reach out when a catastrophic blaze erupts elsewhere. Survivors from Coffey Park reached out to people in Paradise, who in turn reached out to Greenville and now Lahaina.

But banding together as a community is harder when it’s not just a neighborhood that burns down, but an entire town.

‘There Needs To Be Some Kind Of Transformation’

It’s hard to go anywhere in Paradise on a weekday and not hear the tapping of hammers or the beeping of an excavator readying an empty lot for construction.

Stores and commercial strips have sprung back up along the main road that runs through town and more than 2,600 homes have been rebuilt in the last five years, but most of Paradise is still a sea of vacant lots.

Less than a third of the town has been rebuilt to date, though the passage of time has softened the visual impact of so much emptiness. The ash and debris from the fire are long gone, and short stumps are all that remain of the more than 1 million trees that needed to be removed from the town. Grass and weeds have sprouted in their place, but a strict ordinance on mowing prevents them taking on a truly abandoned appearance.

Amidst all these signs of loss, a new town is slowly emerging.

Sitting behind her computer in a small office that serves as the headquarters for the Rebuild Paradise Foundation, Jen Goodlin points toward a large brown paper poster on the wall covered in handwritten notes highlighting how far the place has come in the last five years.

The town has climbed back up to a little more than 9,000 residents — far less than the 26,000 who called Paradise home before the fire, but more than double the number of people who had moved back by 2019. School enrollment is growing rapidly. New businesses have opened, along with new roads, bike lanes and sidewalks. The town has high-speed internet now and plans to build a walkable downtown, both things that didn’t exist before the fires.

Goodlin, who grew up in Paradise, was living in Colorado when the Camp Fire destroyed most of the community. She came back six months after the blaze to say goodbye to her hometown, but found herself drawn to move back instead.

“There was so much recovery happening. It was kind of a beautiful picture,” she said.

Goodlin — and the growing number of newcomers who are helping drive an unprecedented demographic shift in town — see the potential in what members of the community group Regenerating Paradise call the town’s imaginal state.

When a caterpillar begins its transformation into a butterfly, first it morphs into essentially a ball of mush. The cells within that mush are called imaginal cells, a term that carries with it a great sense of possibility, said David Leon Zink, a musician and leader of Regenerating Paradise.

“We have this moment where perhaps we can direct the formation together,” Zink said. “What sort of future do we want to lean into?”

While government agencies and contractors got to work on the monumental task of clearing the land of fire debris and preparing for a flurry of construction permits, groups like Regenerating Paradise planned community events where people could contribute their visions for a new town.

They held a hackathon to help identify new solutions for Paradise, reached out to communities from Australia to Japan that had rebuilt from significant natural disasters to learn what had worked best for them, organized focus groups and strategic planning sessions, held open mic community forums and mixers, and for several years organized an annual revival festival with performances, panel discussions and opportunities for people to engage in conversations about the future.

“When we bring our community together, we can have conversations and be in a place where we can imagine a new future,” said Allen Myers, a filmmaker and founding member of Regenerating Paradise. “The one that we knew is gone. And so it’s a matter for us to start envisioning a new future and that creates a healing.”

The vision that emerged from all these gatherings was one of a community that was safer, stronger, welcoming and greener. A place that was more resilient to climate change and natural disasters. One that had a walkable downtown and safer evacuation routes. Perhaps even a performing art center.

“We want to be economically vibrant and we want to have a strong social group,” Zink said. “We don’t want to be weakened by the catastrophe in the long term.”

Lots of people are signing up for that vision. Before the fires, about 80% of Paradise residents had lived there for at least five years. Today the town is split evenly, Goodwin says. About half of people in town lived there before the fire, the others are newcomers. In 10 years, 80% of people living in town are expected to have moved there after the fire.

“We’re getting a lot of young families. We didn’t have that before, which is exciting,” said Greg Bolin, a longtime Paradise Council member who is currently serving as the town’s mayor. “I don’t know half the people walking through the door at our church … it’s a new town.”

‘The Whole Nature Of This Town Is Changing’

For all the fire survivors who have found a silver lining in their renewed sense of community, there are countless others were unable to find that solace.

Roughly 40% of people living in Coffey Park at the time of the Tubbs Fire were renters. There’s been little definitive tracking of what happened to them, but anecdotally the sense is that few were able to return.

Rental prices for newly rebuilt homes in Coffey Park are far higher than they were before. The tight-knit nature of the community that emerged from the fires has also made it a more attractive place to live. Competition for open rentals is fierce.

The situation is even worse in Paradise, which had long been a rough-around-the-edges bastion of affordability in one of the priciest states in the country. The town used to have 32 trailer parks; only a handful are being rebuilt. Building prices have increased dramatically in the last five years and many seniors and low-income residents have been priced out of coming home. Others are being driven out by zoning changes.

Before the fires, “The Ridge” as Paradise and the surrounding unincorporated communities in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains are referred to locally, was dotted with unpermitted or roughly constructed homes.

“A lot of people were living in what I call non-traditional situations. And they’re the ones that fall through the cracks,” said Bryan Boyer, a program manager at a transitional homeless shelter for families in Chico. “I’m not talking about a few people, I’m talking about hundreds or thousands of people out there, that we’re living in some little add-on that somebody built in 1976.”

Paradise is taking a much firmer approach to permitting and living situations after the fire.

Michael Walden, a soft-spoken man with a silver beard better known by the nickname “Pyramid Michael,” helped run an organic community gardening space before the fires and had built his own energy-efficient home on property owned by his longtime partner.

Like many Paradise residents, he bought a trailer after the fire and moved it onto the empty lot where his home once stood. His partner of 20 years moved to Chico and the couple split up. She doesn’t plan to return or rebuild, though she’s let him stay on the land. Without an active construction permit though he will soon have to leave to comply with a city order aimed at preventing trailers from becoming a permanent fixture in town.

In the immediate aftermath of the fires, most people pulling building permits were trying to reconstruct homes they had lost. Now, an estimated 75% of people building homes and moving into town are from other parts of the state or the country.

Sitting in a plastic chair beside the rock circle where he meditates each day, Walden listened to birds chirping and the faint clang of hammers in the distance. The 73-year-old sees little future for himself in Paradise, but his voice has no tone of anger when he speaks about the painful changes that are pushing him out.

“This town is being bought out by people coming in from San Francisco, from Sacramento from other big cities where they want to get out of the bullshit,” Walden said matter-of-factly. “The whole nature of this town is changing.”

Without the ability to afford a rental in town, Walden has run out of options. He’s selling most of his possessions and heading to Arizona in hopes of finding an RV he can afford. Whatever future he has will be outside of Paradise.

“I’m a spiritual person,” he said. “I trust in the way of things and synergy and I rely on life. Nothing else has worked for me. And I don’t have to like parts of it, but things do what they do so I just keep walking.”

The displacement of people in Paradise has had a ripple effect on other communities as well.

After their town was reduced to mostly rubble, most residents from The Ridge headed to Chico, a college town about 20 minutes away that was already dealing with a severe housing shortage. Hundreds of fire evacuees set up tents or slept in cars in the Walmart parking lot. When they were forced to move a few weeks later, many scattered.

Head to one of the several homeless encampments on the edges of Chico today and — even five years later — it doesn’t take long to find someone who lost their home in the fire.

There was a secondary wave of displacement in Chico too. With 20,000 people entering a town of 97,000 overnight, home prices shot up rapidly. Many landlords decided to sell their properties, giving renters a brief window to find a new home, Boyer said.

“Significant numbers of people who weren’t even burned out lost their homes because of the ripple effects,” Boyer said.

The fires have destabilized Paradise and Chico in other ways, too. Mental health providers have seen an increase in substance abuse and domestic violence, Boyer said. Significant payouts from lawsuits against the electrical company responsible for the fire have been a lifeline for some people, but a huge disruptor for others.

“A lot of money went out. That had all sorts of weird sociological effects,” Boyer said, adding that he’s heard a lot of stories in his work at the family shelter of single moms whose partners took the settlement money and split. “The fires just kind of splintered a lot of families.”

Holding Onto What Matters

Standing at the entrance to the Paradise High School Gym on the third Friday in November, Jen Goodlin grinned as she looked at the bustling crowd that had turned out for the school’s career day. Hundreds of teens chatted loudly while milling around booths for local businesses in construction, government, and the arts.

Goodlin has long been bothered by the fact that one of the top internet search results for her town is the question, “Does Paradise still exist.” This, she said, pointing to the crowd, is the answer to that question.

There’s a palpable enthusiasm in Paradise for what is being rebuilt. But five years out, the rebuilding process could still be easily derailed. Settlements from the electrical company found liable for the fire have helped keep the town keep its services going despite the loss of much of its tax base. But thousands more residents will have to return in the coming decade for the town to be fiscally stable, Paradise Mayor Greg Bolin said.

More troubling is the dramatic increase in home insurance costs, with some residents reporting rate increases of nearly 800%.

“If we don’t get that thing figured out, that’s the one hurdle we’re not going to get over. And that can shut us down,” Bolin said, adding that he knows people whose insurance bill jumped from $2,500 a year to $22,000. “There’s momentum right now and you feel that momentum. I don’t want to see insurance stop that.“

There are other discouraging signs, too. The only hospital in Paradise closed after the fire and is not reopening. One of the two pharmacies in town recently announced it was shutting its doors.

Getting over these hurdles and holding onto what matters to a community takes determination and creativity, said Barbour of Coffey Park.

It will also take a lot of patience, particularly for towns with fewer resources.

Jane Braxton Little moved to Greenville with her husband in 1975, attracted to the eclectic community and independent spirit of the remote mountain town.

The 80-year-old science writer quickly took on a volunteer role with the fire collaborative that formed two years ago, after yet another catastrophic California fire destroyed much of the historic community.

In the last two years, the grocery store has reopened, as has the Dollar Store and the gas station. But most of Greenville’s small downtown area is surrounded by blackened, dead trees and full of vacant lots pockmarked with deep holes. Only about half the town’s 1,200 residents have been able to return, many of them living doubled up with family and friends. At night, the area is eerily dark, with only a few streetlights running along the main road. Generators rumble from RVs sprinkled across the town.

Keeping basic services going has required extreme collaboration and flexibility. The health clinic, run by the — a federally recognized tribe that is one of the town’s largest employers — operates out of a trailer. After the owner of the town’s only pharmacy announced that they did not plan to rebuild, the Rancheria began looking for grants to help it open one.

This summer, when the county newspaper declared it was ceasing publication at the end of the month, a group of residents got together and in a matter of weeks.

The news site is being run mostly through volunteer efforts, but they believe it can become sustainable with just a little support, said Braxton Little, who is serving as the site’s editor. And it needs to, she said. The town needs a reliable source of information to rebuild.

“We’ve already lost so much,” Braxton Little told about a dozen members of the town’s Rotary Club, more than half of whom had driven from neighboring communities to hear her speak at their November meeting. “We can’t lose one more thing. We have to hold onto everything we can keep going.”

Braxton Little is optimistic, but pragmatic too. If the town can get 10 more families to move back, maybe it can get a burger joint — even one that is only open a few days a week. More businesses could attract younger residents, people who might connect with the community the same way she did.

“I look for young families that are excited by roughing it a little bit and the adventure of living in and helping to create a new town,” she said.

Greenville, she believes, can build back better and more vibrant than it ever was before. But that is going to take time. More time than she has left.

It will take a generation or more for oaks and pines around Greenville to regrow. Decades, perhaps, for the town to attract enough businesses to be able to close down streets for a festival.

She will live to see the beginnings, she said. To help keep institutions alive and to support the younger members of the community in their efforts to create something new.

“I’m counting on them,” she said. “I tell them that all the time. I’m not going to live to see it, you guys have to do it. We’ll do what we can to prop you up, but you have to do it.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.