This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Dual Crises: Housing in a Changing Climate
The wind was the first thing Erica Ledesma noticed on Sept. 8, 2020, when she woke up around 5 a.m. It’d been blazing hot and bone dry in Medford, Oregon—typical late-summer weather. But the howling wind was unlike anything Ledesma, who’s now 31 and was born and raised in the area, had experienced. “I was like, what is that noise? Everything was moving, the trees and everything. It all just felt off,” she recalls. “Everything felt really eerie and really dry.”
Six hours later, a human-caused fire crackled to life in a field adjacent to Almeda Drive in Ashland, about 13 miles southeast of Medford. By that afternoon, the Almeda Fire, driven like a blowtorch by 45 mph winds, had ripped an 8-mile path of destruction along the Interstate 5 corridor, incinerating large swaths of the towns of Talent and Phoenix. It was finally contained just before it reached the southern edge of Medford—the state’s eighth most populous city. In a matter of hours, the Almeda Fire destroyed 2,600 buildings and killed 3 people. Manufactured housing got the worst of it. The fire tore through 18 mobile home parks, obliterating about 1,500 homes.
A little more than a year later and 1,300 miles away in Colorado, another human-caused, wind-driven fire killed 2 people and torched more than 1,000 homes in the Front Range towns of Superior and Louisville, as well as in a swath of unincorporated Boulder County. The Marshall Fire, as it became known, was the state’s most costly, causing $2 billion in damage. The fire touched off in dry grass about 3 miles west of Superior on Dec. 30, 2021, following a drought year with alarmingly above-average temperatures. Within an hour, relentless hurricane-force winds with speeds up to 100 miles per hour blasted the flames into heavily populated areas, where they consumed commercial buildings and residences.
Much of Old Town Superior, including the mining town’s museum and its artifacts, was reduced to ashes. The Marshall Fire immolated entire subdivisions, razing legacy neighborhoods once crowded with homes, most of which had been there for several decades.
The Marshall and Almeda fires were uniquely destructive, as was the 2023 fire on Maui—also wind-driven and climate-change caused. We can expect these types of fires to increase in frequency and intensity. And as humans continue to build homes deeper into the wildland urban interface (or WUI, pronounced “woo-we”), which is the transitional zone where open space and human development connect, we can expect more neighborhood-annihilating disasters.
And more climate-change-fueled disasters means a greater need for robust, dedicated disaster recovery. But as the victims of these WUI fires (and many other disasters) learned in the months and years following the event: short- and long-term recovery resources are often poorly communicated, inconsistently delivered, and unfairly administered. In fact, advocates say, the victims who need help the most rarely get it.
In the nearly 4 years since the Almeda Fire and the 2.5 years since the Marshall Fire, victims’ advocates in both Oregon and Colorado have reported similar issues: Low-income residents lost more in the disaster and had a more difficult time accessing recovery funds and assistance. As a result, lower-income fire victims have struggled to recover. Many of the hardest-hit were unable to access financial assistance at all while their higher-income neighbors built back quickly, often ending up in higher-quality homes than before, says Jeri Curry, executive director of Marshall ROC (Restoring Our Community), a nonprofit consortium of community organizers, government agencies, and donors leading long-term recovery efforts. In Colorado, much as in Oregon, manufactured home residents were hit the hardest and are also the most likely to have been left out of recovery funding.
“Most manufactured homes just don’t have insurance, because it’s one more expense,” Curry says. “If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, what can I cut out that’s not essential? I need diapers, my meds, food.”
People scattered after the fire because you just had to find a place to live and there’s nowhere nearby.”
Daryl McCool, former Old Town Superior resident
Daryl McCool lost her home in Old Town Superior. It was a small, single-story historic miner’s shack with mature landscaping and a Little Free Library box out front that McCool and her husband had lovingly maintained in the 25 years they’d lived there. Today, the McCools are settling into their replacement home—a hulking red two-story surrounded by fire-resistant landscaping. “It’s really lovely,” McCool says. “It just takes some getting used to.”
Like many victims of both the Almeda and Marshall fires, the McCools are getting used to more than just a new house. Their entire neighborhood is “radically different,” she says, pointing to a brand-new home down the street. It’s painted mostly black, with metal accents, gleaming windows, and landscaping rock all the way to the foundation. It sold in October 2023 for $1.89 million, according to the Boulder County assessor’s website.
This was a close-knit neighborhood before the fire, and the McCools were friends with many of their neighbors, including an elderly woman who lived two houses away. She’d been living in an apartment since the fire, waiting for her home to be rebuilt.
“They just finished it and she passed away. She never got to move in. Another of my neighbors said, ‘You know, I missed two years of being her neighbor because the fire took us all away from each other,’” McCool says. “But that’s just what people had to do. People scattered after the fire because you just had to find a place to live and there’s nowhere nearby.”
Same, But Different
Although Southern Oregon’s Almeda Fire and Northern Colorado’s Marshall Fire occurred a thousand miles apart in two very different climates (temperate rainforest vs. high desert), they share a significant number of similarities.
First, both fires got a “wildfire and straight-line winds” disaster declaration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), meaning the conditions and fire activity were similar. Both the Marshall and Almeda fires were largely spread by gale-force winds driving flames across drought-parched vegetative fuels. They both also ripped through WUI zones, where residential and commercial structures have invaded previously undeveloped areas. Other destructive WUI area wildfire disasters include the 2018 Camp and Woolsey incidents in California that, respectively, destroyed the town of Paradise in Butte County and burned 1,600-plus buildings in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Scientists anticipate that WUI fires will continue to increase as climate change worsens.
In Colorado, more than 1 million homes exist in the WUI zone—twice as many as in 1990. And in Boulder County, where a family of four needs to bring in more than $107,000 per year to be “economically self-sufficient” and the median home price tops $870,000, many of the homeowners who lost everything in the Marshall Fire can’t afford to rebuild, even if they had insurance. “I met with a client yesterday—she bought her home in 1998 for $156,000. The cost to build the same square footage today—really modest, not luxury finishes—is $780,000,” Curry says. “That’s what it costs because it’s got to be energy-efficient and electric and all the things that are required today that weren’t required in 1998.”
Homeowner victims of the Almeda Fire in Oregon face similar reconstruction barriers, says Elib Crist-Dwyer, who works with Rogue Action Center, a community organization that’s been instrumental in long-term recovery efforts.
“It’s unfortunate, but for many people in the area, as they drive through Talent and Phoenix now, they see a lot of new construction. They see a lot of homes have been rebuilt, so there’s this impression that we’ve recovered,” he says. “In the downtown areas that’s true, and some people are ending up with better homes than they had before the fire. But other neighborhoods, especially in these mobile home parks, they were already kind of invisible to the community. And in some of these municipalities, there’s active efforts to keep affordable housing from being rebuilt.”
Low Income, Low Priority
Unsurprisingly, lower-income victims in both Oregon and Colorado suffered the most losses and have struggled harder to recover than folks with access to cash. More than 100 families who lost their homes in the Almeda Fire are still living in hotels, Crist-Dwyer says, because they’re unable to find affordable permanent housing in the area.
“We had a 1 percent vacancy rate before the fire. So the housing crisis was already impacting us heavily, and now it’s even worse. I know people who are making six figures and paying more than 50 percent of their take-home [pay] on rent in order to stay in the area. So for folks not at that income level, housing is now just that much more inaccessible,” Crist-Dwyer says. “The housing stock that we lost is impacting every person in the Rogue Valley. The housing crisis isn’t just about [fire] survivors anymore. It’s about everybody, and it will be about everybody for decades.”
Of course, the “everybody” who feels the vacancy crunch most acutely is usually the poor folks, who can’t afford the area median home sale price of $449,000 (according to Redfin’s June 2024 calculations). “The market is still determining what’s worthwhile for developers and contractors to build, and because the market is so inflated, there aren’t enough incentives to make building affordable housing worthwhile,” Crist-Dwyer says. “I know builders who tell me they’re building rich people’s homes because of all the energy incentives, the green building incentives. The state will pay for your radiant floor or your solar panels because it’s reducing the carbon footprint, but those incentives aren’t available for affordable housing.”
The housing crisis isn’t just about [fire] survivors anymore. It’s about everybody, and it will be about everybody for decades.”
Elib Crist-Dwyer, Rogue Action Center
It’s been nearly four years since the fire, and many of the low-income Almeda Fire victims continue to face barricades and setbacks. Rose Ojeda—a director at CASA of Oregon, a statewide nonprofit economic justice organization and affordable housing developer that’s been heavily involved in long-term recovery efforts—continues to see unanticipated suffering among victims who need help the most. For example, many victims who received emergency financial assistance from FEMA or who collected insurance proceeds in the weeks or months after the fire had no choice but to spend that money on necessities. Those folks are now being penalized when seeking housing. “They may have used it for a medical expense or a car, and it wasn’t necessarily housing related. So if they didn’t use it in accordance with FEMA guidelines, then they have to contribute that amount toward the purchase of a home,” Ojeda says.
This “duplication of benefits” FEMA payback requirement “has been really problematic” for many Almeda victims who were forced to make decisions after the fire about what to spend insurance and FEMA funding on, often without knowing they’d be penalized later (e.g., denied financial assistance they thought they were eligible for) for any “housing recovery” money they didn’t spend directly on housing. But with inadequate support on the ground, many fire victims, specifically lower-income victims, had no choice but to spend that money to survive.
“We just were not adequately prepared to deal with this level of devastation,” Ojeda says. “We are all anticipating that there will be another climate change-related disaster that we need to really be better prepared for.”
Missing Middle
Homeowners in Colorado are also finding it difficult to rebuild after the Marshall Fire. Access to some state and federal emergency funding was income-restricted, Curry explains, meaning residents making more than 150 percent of area median income (AMI) were ineligible for many of the benefits. In Boulder County, AMI for a family of four is $146,000.
“They left a lot of people out because they’re making 150, 200 percent of AMI, and they look really good on paper, but they have nothing because they’ve lost everything and now, they can’t even access funds,” she says. “So there are people who just got completely missed in the middle, because most everyone was underinsured. The majority of people who lost their homes have maybe gotten about 70 percent [of their value] back, at most.”
Only 79 families who lost their homes in the Marshall Fire were fully insured (received full replacement value), Curry says. A large fraction of fire victims lost everything, were underinsured, and earn more than 150 percent of AMI—meaning they fell into a resource gap that left them unable to access many of the recovery resources, including grants and loans that could have helped them rebuild.
Additionally, some Marshall Fire homeowners are facing the same “duplication of benefits” setback Ojeda described Oregon fire victims as being up against. For those folks, “the most you can get if you have good credit is a loan,” she says. And after nearly three years of bouncing around, people are tired. They’re losing hope. “There are people who, when this first happened, they moved 10 times. They had to start up utilities each time,” she says. “The other costs, the eating out, the Airbnbs, hauling things, replacing things. It’s been horrible.”
Rebuilding Different
As the third anniversary of the Marshall Fire approaches, the landscape is largely healed. The burn scar is no longer visible in most places, but the transitional status of the neighborhoods that burned is obvious. Colorful and tidy brand-new houses with fresh (fire-resistant) landscaping are clustered among empty lots with for-sale signs. A rusted-out horse trailer is parked in one empty lot whose owner hasn’t rebuilt. Next to it: a recently finished luxury home’s glass-and-steel façade glimmers in the high-altitude sun. Nothing like it existed in this neighborhood before the fire. The homes were all older, modest, Curry says. “Builders come in and scoop up burned properties then put a $2 million-plus house with an [accessory dwelling unit]. That’s a dramatic change for everyone in the neighborhood, which adds layers of trauma.”
Prior to the fire, this property on William St. in Superior had multiple older mobile homes on it. After the fire, a developer bought the land and put up two luxury homes. They both sold in 2024 for nearly $1.7 million each, according to Zillow. Shown above is the same site, in 2012 and 2023.
Many of the families in the area were multigenerational, and the housing was a mixture of stick-built and manufactured homes (i.e., mobile homes). Many of the single-family residences have been replaced, but mobile home owners haven’t received the same assistance.
That’s in part FEMA’s fault. The hurricane-force winds that drove the Marshall Fire through entire neighborhoods also shredded hundreds of manufactured and mobile homes that weren’t in the fire’s path. The winds blew off skirting, damaged outbuildings, broke windows, and tore off roofs. Unfortunately, many of those residents didn’t get help from FEMA. Even though the emergency disaster declaration included “straight-line winds,” homes that sustained wind-only damage weren’t eligible for federal disaster relief funds. Those residents received some state and local support, but many homes haven’t been repaired.
“I’m sad because we’re losing people. People aren’t going to be able to stay in Boulder County through no fault of their own. And they’re really essential people. It’s just taken so long, and the cost of being out of your home and not being able to rebuild drives up other costs,” Curry says. “The loss of citizens really changes the fabric of the community. It changes the schools. It changes multigenerational households and multigenerational neighborhoods.”
In Oregon, the mobile home parks that burned were home to much of the area’s Latino community, which is close-knit. Ledesma’s parents’ home was spared, “but my grandpa, my aunts, my uncles, and other relatives lost their homes,” she says. “It was one of the worst nightmares that our community has experienced.”
And, as in Colorado, the fire severed community network bonds, scattering long-term residents, and, in some cases, it’s drawn a bead on unforeseen vulnerabilities. Missing paper trails documenting homeownership proved to be a significant problem, for example. “Many of these homes had been passed down through family. Maybe someone purchased it for $10,000 in 1995, but without any documentation. So many folks were unable to establish themselves as legitimate fire survivors,” Crist-Dwyer says. “Through the first round of federal support, FEMA applications, 65 percent of people who applied were denied, and it was due to lack of proper paperwork to prove they owned their home.” Reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting put that amount at 70 percent.
Rogue Action Center helped multiple families translate documents, which Crist-Dwyer says weren’t available in Spanish. Even if a person could prove homeownership, some residents were afraid to apply for aid—afraid of bringing unwanted Immigration and Customs Enforcement attention to their largely immigrant community, he says. The aid application forms were also mostly online, leaving many Almeda Fire victims unable to access them at all. This had detrimental long-term effects on the community.
“Now what we’re seeing is that, four years later, many families are still not back to permanent, stable housing,” Crist-Dwyer says. “And those who have found their way back to stable housing are really separated from their communities. So not only did they lose their home, they lost their whole network of support that was so vital—looking after kids, neighbors sharing a garden—all these pieces that were just so vital to their community are parts that are missing now.”
Reclaiming Talent Mobile Estates
In the early days after the fire, Ledesma watched her community struggle. “It took FEMA two months to arrive in our community, and it took a month for Red Cross [to arrive]. And even when Red Cross did show up, they didn’t know how to serve the Spanish-speaking community,” she says. “The fire completely made visible all the inequities that have existed in our community for so long and have been ignored.”
Most folks who lost their homes were on low or fixed incomes, including many older adults. And while a lot of the stick-built homes have been or are being rebuilt, Crist-Dwyer says there’s been real resistance in some areas to rebuilding low-income housing. “We’re dealing with racism in our systems. We’re dealing with white supremacy,” he says. (The area was once a Ku Klux Klan hotbed.) “And because we’re such a small community to begin with, you can’t ignore any one of these things in trying to address this.”
The 18 manufactured home parks destroyed in the fire “were already kind of invisible to the community . . . separate from the fabric of the mainstream community in many ways,” Crist-Dwyer says. While this separation made fire recovery efforts disjointed and sometimes ineffective, it also fostered a sense of independence and resilience in the community. Just a few months after the fire, Ledesma attended a community meeting hosted by the Northwest Seasonal Workers Association.
“We were all in a circle, like 70 community members—imagine, in the middle of a fucking pandemic with our face masks; it almost felt illegal for us to gather—we were just giving FEMA updates and figuring out solutions,” she says. “And one of our elders just stood up and was like, ‘What if we buy one of the mobile home parks?’ And everyone got kind of excited in the room.”
That excitement continued. Ledesma and Niria Alicia Garcia—a local organizer whose father lost his home in the fire—began researching purchasing options and ownership strategies, eventually connecting with CASA Oregon and co-founding Coalición Fortaleza, a housing justice nonprofit.
[RELATED ARTICLE: Taking Ownership Into Their Own Hands]
Two years later, in June 2022, Coalición Fortaleza closed on the purchase of Talent Mobile Estates, which was once a tightly knit community of about 100 homes, all but 10 of which were destroyed in the fire. It’s now a resident-owned community (ROC). Development has been slow; the project finally broke ground in April 2024. Once complete, it will have about 77 new manufactured homes. Residents who were displaced from the park in the fire were given first opportunity to buy in to the ROC. Sadly, only 26 of the original families will move into the newly rebuilt park, which is scheduled to open around September. Most of the families who lived in the park before the fire found other living arrangements. Many had to move out of the area. Lot rent at Talent Mobile Estates will sit at around $700 per month and decisions will be made by a resident-elected board of directors.
In the wake of Coalición Fortaleza’s victory with Talent Mobile Estates, the group is branching out, working with other community members and groups that want to turn their parks into ROCs. Ledesma says they’re trying to get the Jackson County Housing Authority—which came under fire last year when 60-plus state-purchased manufactured homes the entity had in storage were deemed uninhabitable—to allow the parks it owns to become ROCs. Coalición Fortaleza’s work also inspired residents at Redwood Mobile Estates, which is 60 percent Latino, to buy their park in nearby Grants Pass.
“If these parks can be converted [to ROCs], then why not? Right now, manufactured home parks are being targeted. People are always getting rent hikes and it’s really unstable,” Ledesma says. “So we’re trying to prepare ourselves, like what’s our next fight? What’s the next park that we need to work on and make sure that all the communities and manufactured home [owners] know that there is an option, and they can purchase their park.”
[Correction: This article should have indicated that manufactured homes built prior to 1976 that sustained wind-only damage in the Marshall Fire were ineligible for FEMA funds.]
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Thank you Shelby for your informative article. I was actually in The Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon the day that the Alemeda Fire occurred and we were evacuated North on I-5 through Grants Pass and down to Crescent City, CA. It took us 30 hours to drive back to the Bay Area, normally a 5 hour drive. We had to dodge 3 fires and the sky was either crimson colored or dark gray.. We returned several months later to Ashland and Talent and it was tragic to see the extent of the damage. Erica and I teamed up to do a NCRC Just Economy Conference. Erica and her colleagues are doing some important work in the rebuilding.
I have teamed up with California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) to research and write a natural disaster guidebook that was published in 2021 co-authored by Veronica Beaty and myself. We received a contract several months ago from Routledge Press to write a major book on the impact of climate change and natural disasters on affordable housing and community development.
We are looking for a diverse array of case examples on disaster planning, preparedness, recovery, and rebuilding. We would love to hear from Shelterforce readers. Please contact me at [email protected]. Our goal is to have the book published by 2026