A Climate Dystopia in Northern California

San Francisco CA

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In April, Chico’s anti-homelessness sweeps drew a harsh rebuke from a federal judge, who accused the city of willfully violating the law by flouting its legal obligation to provide viable shelter alternatives to its unhoused residents. Even in California, where the lack of affordable housing has reached epidemic levels in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chico — an outdoorsy college town — stands out for the ruthlessness with which its city government and police have turned on unhoused residents. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California recently condemned the city for failing “to address the needs of its unhoused population while simultaneously passing ordinances that criminalize everyday behavior unhoused people undertake to survive.” Adding a dystopian layer to this story: According to a survey by the Butte Countywide Homeless Continuum of Care, about a quarter of Chico’s unsheltered residents lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire which burned the neighboring town of Paradise to the ground, taking the lives of 85 people. For this reason, Chico’s war on the unhoused may be providing a grim glimpse into an eco-authoritarian future, in which the poor victims of climate change-fueled disasters are treated like human refuse by those whose wealth has protected them, at least in the short term, from the worst impacts of planetary warming. That was November 2019. Today, Chico, with its brutal crackdown on unhoused people in the grips of a deadly pandemic and in the midst of serial wildfire disasters, does not demonstrate community “resilience.” It demonstrates something else entirely: what it looks like when the climate crisis slams headlong into a high-end real estate bubble and social infrastructure starved by decades of austerity. It also shows what happens when locally developed climate justice plans are denied the federal and state financing that they need to rapidly turn into a lived reality — precisely the gap that a new package of Green New Deal legislation introduced to the House and Senate is seeking to fill. Chico demonstrates what it looks like when the climate crisis slams headlong into a high-end real estate bubble and social infrastructure starved by decades of austerity. The combination of factors that has created this crisis in Chico is far from unique to Northern California. After decades of defunding social programs, coupled with wild overfunding of police, a great many communities across the country find themselves stretched too thin to absorb a major shock, particularly when it comes to housing and mental health supports. And without these other tools, every challenge quickly turns into a matter of “public safety.” Since I reported from Chico a year and a half ago, this story has taken a series of grim turns. The city council, then dominated by cautious Democrats, was slow to act on Brown’s Green New Deal plans (“the political will was a little bit on the lackluster side” are her diplomatic words). Meanwhile, with Donald Trump still in the White House and Republicans blocking climate spending in the Senate, there was no way to get federal green financing quickly, particularly for affordable housing. Scenes at Comanche Creek Greenway on Tuesday May 4, 2021 in Chico, Calif. Comanche Creek Greenway is the site of an unhoused community in Chico, Calif. It’s the last public park where unhoused Chico residents are currently safe from sweeps from local police. Due to an ongoing lawsuit there is a temporary restraining order preventing police from evicting the unhoused people currently living at the park. Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept The Comanche Creek Greenway seen on May 4, 2021, in Chico, Calif. Photo: Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing many more people in Butte County (as elsewhere) into various states of economic and social distress. Stemen told me local activists were all geared up to hold a big rally calling for a “Green New Decade.” He said, “We had banners and signs and sunflowers and were ready to rock.” Then lockdown happened, and the signs just sat in his yard, for months. Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, “there wasn’t much room for a conversation about planning for the future, when we were dealing with these immediate crises.” In late August and early September 2020, another wildfire struck the region, incinerating two towns and displacing yet more people in the county. The city opened up some hotel rooms to older people who were particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, but there were not nearly enough rooms for everyone who needed shelter. Throughout this two-and-a-half-year period of shock after shock, housing costs in Chico have continued to soar. First it was in response to the uptick in demand from Paradise evacuees and people working on post-disaster reconstruction, which saw a spike in rents and made Chico among the hottest housing markets in the country. Today the boom continues, but now it is in response to a pandemic-fueled influx of Bay Area professionals and retirees looking to telecommute or chill out in a more affordable, low-key community. According to the California Association of Realtors, the price of a single-family house in Butte County increased by a staggering 16.1 percent last year, with Chico at the center of the frenzy. A headline at a local ABC affiliate summed up the market’s current trajectory: “Up, up, up.” In a part of the state steeped in gold rush lore (Paradise crowns a “Miss Gold Nugget” as part of its annual Gold Nugget Days), local property developers and construction companies are welcoming high-end real estate as their modern-day bonanza. “They’re coming with cash, and they’re ready to go,” Katy Thoma, president of the Chico Chamber of Commerce, said of the big city migrants. Existing houses are flipping, and new ones are going up — but according to Brown, the city is “prioritizing luxury condos and five-bedroom, single family homes, with the Bay Area transplants in mind.” Montecito is a new suburban development of single family homes on the outskirts of Chico, Calif. on Tuesday May 4, 2021. These homes are being pushed as a solution to the housing crunch in Chico, however they are contributing to urban sprawl and often marketed to out of towners and Bay Area migrants rather than local residents. There is no affordable housing at all in the development. Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept A sign advertises a new suburban development of single-family homes on the outskirts of Chico, Calif., on May 4, 2021. Photo: Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept This is not only a problem for Chico’s low- and middle-income residents who are getting priced out of their community. It’s a climate problem as well: Many of those Bay Area transplants will become part of the state’s growing fleet of “supercommuters” who drive hours to get to meetings at their company headquarters, adding to California’s transportation-related emissions, which in 2019 made up 40 percent of its total. And those emissions were rising. Chico’s failure to provide homes that its residents can afford well predates the Camp Fire. According to a report commissioned by the city, between 2014 and 2019, Chico added 2,724 housing units geared for those with “above moderate income” — almost double its planned allocation. Meanwhile, it added just 15 units of housing for very low-income earners in that same period, just 1.5 percent of its planned allocation. In large part, this is because of zoning rules that favor single-family homes over apartment buildings. And it’s also because huge profit margins just aren’t there in affordable multi-unit housing. For instance, a plan to build six stories of affordable housing was recently approved in Chico — only to have the land put up for sale for $5 million. “There’s a lot of factors pushing up the cost of housing,” local housing rights advocates wrote. “One we can see here is the exaggerated claims of speculative landowners.” After the Paradise fire, there was a profound sense of solidarity among the 27,000 people who lived in that wooded town. According to the public narrative, the community had suffered together and would rebuild together. Jessie Mercer, a local artist, put form to that hope when she collected 18,000 keys from homes, churches, businesses, and cars that had burned in Paradise and welded them into a giant phoenix that she unveiled on the fire’s one-year anniversary, an image that went around the world. That would be Paradise, many believed: a triumphant phoenix rising from the ashes. But it hasn’t worked out that way. On the contrary, the fates of fire survivors have bifurcated sharply. Paradise’s middle-class fire victims have, for the most part, been able to move out of emergency mode and rebuild their lives. Despite warnings about ongoing wildfire vulnerability, hundreds of families have returned to Paradise — many to freshly built homes more spacious than the ones taken by fire, thanks to insurance payouts. Others have sold their land to eager developers and settled in less fire-prone areas nearby, including in Chico. But Paradise previously had a large population of low-income residents as well, who lived for the most part in rented apartments and mobile home parks, overwhelmingly without home insurance. After being evicted from the Walmart parking lot to make way for Thanksgiving shoppers, many never did find stable homes. Instead, they moved through Chico’s shelters, and eventually its parks and waterways, their lives intermingling with those of Chico’s other unhoused individuals and families, all of them shut out of the city’s booming real estate market. When Covid-19 hit, the city council instructed police to leave those urban campers alone, because moving risked increasing the virus’s spread. But the city failed to provide many camps with basic sanitation facilities, let alone create a sanctioned camping area, as many other cities have done. In the midst of this, a needle exchange program was introduced to help address high rates of hepatitis C. At the same time, local housing rights activists report that the police, prevented from evicting urban campers and many ideologically opposed to harm-reduction strategies for drug users, seemed to be on strike, refusing to enforce basic laws like keeping dogs on leashes. Montecito is a new suburban development of single family homes on the outskirts of Chico, Calif. on Tuesday May 4, 2021. These homes are being pushed as a solution to the housing crunch in Chico, however they are contributing to urban sprawl and often marketed to out of towners and Bay Area migrants rather than local residents. There is no affordable housing at all in the development. Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept The Urban luxury apartments in the student area of Chico, Calif. on Tuesday May 4, 2021. Because the apartments are for Chico State students they are considered low income housing even though rent is much higher than average. Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept Left/Top: A new suburban development of single-family homes is seen on the outskirts of Chico, Calif., on May 4, 2021. Right/Bottom: Luxury apartments for California State University, Chico, students are seen in Chico, Calif., on May 4, 2021. This led to a head-on collision with many of Chico’s middle-class residents, for whom a walk, run, or a bike ride in the park provided the only sanctioned forms of recreation during long stretches of the pandemic. As frustrations over pets, garbage, and needles mixed with more generalized lockdown rage, the mood in Chico’s parks rapidly deteriorated. It was in this context, ahead of the 2020 elections, that a local deep-pocketed political action committee called Citizens for a Safe Chico declared war on the encampments, painting the entire unhoused population of Chico as violent, drug-addled “vagrants” and “transients” (despite evidence that the overwhelming majority had been living in the county for years). With a budget of a quarter of a million dollars, Citizens for a Safe Chico spent the pandemic churning out sensational videos interviewing irate business owners and purporting to show the city going to hell. Some attracted tens of thousands of views. According to filings obtained by The Intercept, most of the PAC’s top individual and business donors have ties to the real estate, construction, or development industries. The campaign was an unqualified success. On the same day that the country voted to unseat Trump, Chico’s city council, previously dominated by Democrats, flipped Trumpian right, with only two progressives left. Brown kept her seat but lost her job as vice mayor. The position is now held by Kasey Reynolds, owner of Shubert’s, a local ice cream and candy shop, who handed out samples during her campaign calling for a “Sweet & Safe Chico.” Her three-pronged “recipe” was: balance the budget, “support the police department,” and “suppress criminal vagrancy,” a plan that earned her the nickname “ice cream fascist.” (She strongly objects to the label.) In January 2021, the new council’s first act was to order local police to sweep the parks of campers. And then to do it again. And again.