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Driven From Paradise: Will Gentrification Keep Wildfire Evacuees From Coming Home?

Much remains in flux, including the possibility of land being taken through eminent domain to widen evacuation routes.

By Frances Stead Sellers

As heavy equipment hauls out mangled bedsprings, tree trunks and charred fireplace bricks, evidence of rebirth is emerging in this town scorched seven months ago by the most destructive fire in state history.

Signs offering “Cash for your lot” are tacked up on telephone poles; real estate agents and developers in shiny SUVs are riding across the torched earth; and the frames of houses are taking shape, more modern and fire resistant than the ones that preceded them.

“It’s surreal,” said Brian Voigt, a longtime real estate agent and Paradise resident, as he drove past a patch of freshly bulldozed red soil prepped for redevelopment. “It will be an amazing town in 10 years.”

But concerns that the ambitious vision for Paradise excludes the town’s lower-income residents has ignited debate in this economically diverse community. With California’s housing crisis already fueling demand, many worried that plans to upgrade housing and utilities here will alter the town’s character, ensuring that the Paradise that rises from the ashes will be unaffordable for some locals.

“If you check what happened after New Orleans, they got rid of all the poor people like me,” said Paradise resident John Gillander, 62, referring to the redevelopment of flooded communities after Hurricane Katrina. He successfully opposed several proposed changes to the building code in Paradise, including setting a minimum size for manufactured homes. “We were probably the last affordable community in California.”

Town council members say they plan to include low-income housing in the redevelopment. But some note that, in the aftermath of such a disaster, some gentrification is unavoidable. The old wooden shacks dating back to the town’s agricultural past cannot be replaced, they say, and wealthy people will be attracted to double or triple lots that command expansive views in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada now that so many trees have been cut down.

Melissa Schuster, who has served on the town council since 2016, said she recognizes that Paradise’s poorest residents may be among the least likely to return.

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