Slow start to fire rebuilds in Sonoma County, but growing number of projects reflect expanding recovery

When Mike Baker saw the first crop of rebuilt homes rising from the earth of fire-scarred Coffey Park, he realized the structures had a familiar look.

“Almost all of these are floor plans that I recognize,” said Baker, pastor at Crosspoint Church in Santa Rosa. The projects included a half-dozen rebuilt versions of his burned three-bedroom home, which had been constructed in the northwest Santa Rosa neighborhood three decades ago by longtime homebuilder Condioitti Enterprises.

Builders and neighbors said it makes sense that the first rebuilt houses in the burned areas would feature relatively few changes to the designs. In contrast, Baker and his wife, Zoë, now are working with architects and engineers to prepare the building plans for their new Keoke Court house, which will add a second story and grow by about 25 percent to nearly 2,000 square feet.

The Bakers hope to break ground later this summer and are willing to take the extra time and effort in order to get the home they want.

Nearly eight months have transpired since the most destructive wildfires in state history ravaged the North Bay. What becomes clearer each month is the rebuild will take far longer than anyone wishes.

In Sonoma County, which suffered the biggest losses of lives and property, fire survivors have received permits to rebuild about 400 homes, less than a tenth of the nearly 5,300 houses, apartments and granny units that burned. The permitted rebuilds nearly equal the number of burned lots that have been put up for sale since the fires.

Despite the relatively slow start, contractors say a wave of rebuilds is coming. And they contend that when it hits, the county will need all the construction workers it can find to meet the demand.

“I think it will be two to three years of just everything that all of us can handle,” said Ed Waller, CEO and partner in Shook & Waller Construction of Windsor.

The October fires claimed 40 lives and burned 6,200 homes in a four-county region. Residential insurance claims have totaled about $8.4 billion.

By last week, construction had begun on 223 homes in the burned neighborhoods of the county, local planning officials said.

What can be said about the first rebuilders is they had lived mostly in Coffey Park. They generally are rebuilding a similar home to what they had lost. And they are among the first to locate contractors and settle with insurance companies in order to make sure they complete the rebuild before their rental assistance money runs out, typically within two years.

In Coffey Park, the land today resembles a hodgepodge of a construction zone. Chest-high stacks of wood wall sheathing and various hues of port-a-potties line many streets, while clusters of workers fashion foundations and frame walls. But the rebuild remains scattered across a neighborhood where nearly 1,260 homes burned. You rarely see homes rising on three adjacent lots.

Nonetheless, the neighborhood had 125 homes under construction, or 56 percent of the total for the county last week.

The neighborhood also leads the county in regard to overall rebuilding applications. The city last week reported it had received 276 requests for building permits in Coffey Park, compared to 91 combined in Fountaingrove and Hidden Valley. The county had received 239 applications, with the largest concentration - 78 homes - in the Mark West Springs area stretching from Larkfield to the outskirts of Calistoga.

Coffey Park at epicenter

Coffey Park has become the epicenter of the rebuild for several reasons, builders and others said. A neighborhood of tract subdivisions, it offers the easiest rebuild projects. As such, it also has attracted a number of longtime local builders, including Shook & Waller, Gallaher Homes, Synergy Group by Christopherson, Tuxhorn Homes and APM Homes.

Also, builders credit the fire survivors there with quickly organizing themselves into the Coffey Strong neighborhood group to assist in the rebuild. The efforts have helped neighbors more quickly work through the various issues of recovery and rebuilding.

Some builders also contend the Coffey Park residents appear to be in relatively good shape to afford replacing their homes. Contractors acknowledged the majority of the county’s fire survivors are underinsured. But they said many in Coffey Park nonetheless have found ways to move forward, often by using a portion of the insurance proceeds paid for their destroyed furniture, clothing and other home contents to help them rebuild.

Brian Flahavan, a partner in the Santa Rosa-based Synergy Group, said the hundreds of neighborhood residents he has met with often expressed worry that a rebuild would be too expensive, only to find “it’s not as bad as people think.”

Waller, a house framer and custom homebuilder for four decades, similarly said the vast majority of Coffey Park residents he meets have the means to rebuild. He said the prospects seem worse for those in Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove neighborhood, where “we’ve talked to many, many people that are hundreds of thousands (of dollars) short” in what they need to rebuild.

For the first group of rebuilders, the new homes often resemble their old ones.

Fewer than 10 percent of the rebuild permits submitted in Santa Rosa have made major changes to the design, according to Steve Jensen, manager of the city’s Resilient Permit Center. About 20 percent are the same designs and the remaining 70 percent have minor or moderate changes, which he said means they have “the same or nearly the same” exterior designs.

Even so, eventually the vast majority of rebuilders will take the opportunity to revise and update what they lost, predicted Keith Woods, CEO at the North Coast Builders Exchange, a Santa Rosa trade group. He likened it to car repairs: some will do tuneups, and some will undertake “complete overhauls.”

Among the fire survivors, Waller has encountered two distinct approaches in how quickly people wish to rebuild.

Roughly three out of four fire survivors ask him, “How soon can I get back in?” But the others often say, “I don’t want to be part of this first wave.”

The latter group, Waller said, don’t want to live any longer than necessary in a construction zone, with the inconvenience of “dirt and dust ... and nail guns.”

Preparing for building surge

As the varied players in the rebuild process move forward, they often are keeping an eye on each other for signs of increased activity.

Among building supply companies, officials such as Friedman’s Home Improvement CEO Barry Friedman are reviewing city building permit numbers and looking for other indications that would help anticipate demand from those rebuilding.

“Everybody is trying to figure out where is that wave,” he said.

Asked about the outlook, he replied, “Friedman’s and other local suppliers are working hard to make sure the community has the materials it needs to rebuild.”

Already the price of lumber this year has jumped 30 percent, according to Random Lengths, a company in Eugene, Oregon, that reports on the North American wood products industry. But publisher Jon Anderson said the jump is due less to rising demand than to unusual supply constraints, including those brought on by the “most severe fire season” for loggers and mill operators in decades in British Columbia and the western United States.

“These are historically high prices,” said Anderson.

The increasing cost of supplies and labor will affect not only the cost of replacement homes in the fire area but also those in new subdivisions, said Randy Waller, Ed Waller’s son and the broker/owner of W Real Estate in Santa Rosa.

Community leaders have said thousands of new homes need to be built in the county in the coming years. Over the past decade, builders have averaged less than 640 homes per year.

Randy Waller, who markets new homes for a number of builders, said the industry is on track to build more new homes this year. But rising expenses mean some “borderline” developments will be sidelined because they no longer make financial sense.

“The cost of building is going to knock out projects that would have rolled through over the next 12 to 24 months,” he said.

Among fire survivors, a large number have not yet settled on the final compensation from their insurance companies, said Jeff Okrepkie, chairman of Coffey Strong. Many want to rebuild but “they are still waiting for those final numbers so they can be sure they actually have the money.”

Rebuild could take decade

Many observers suggested more building activity will take place in the burned areas next year, at which time the need for construction workers will similarly increase.

Woods of the Builders Exchange has regularly predicted the rebuild could take a decade to complete. He said the worker shortage eventually will become a serious problem for local builders. That is why industry leaders are partnering with local educators over the next three years to offer several hundred high school students the chance to learn enough skills to get hired in construction.

The first companies offering to rebuild homes were local contractors like Waller, who with partner Steve Shook had framed thousands of homes for various county homebuilders over the past four decades. But the sheer number of destroyed homes has drawn other builders.

Among them is Ron Ferraro, who has moved his Sunset Developers to Santa Rosa from New York. He has begun rebuilds for two clients in the county and this summer plans to start about five homes on lots he purchased in Fountaingrove.

He also is bidding on jobs for other contractors who need help in completing rebuilds.

A year from now, Ferraro said, “there’s just going to be an abundance of work and there aren’t going to be enough (workers) to do it.”

The work also has prompted the creation of a new company, Homebound, formed to offer a “concierge service” that links fire survivors with builders and other experts who can help homeowners with the recovery and rebuilding process. The Santa Rosa-based company was founded by Cardinal Newman High grad Tom O’Brien, who is a principal at Atomic, a San Francisco-based company that builds startups.

O’Brien said he is a partner in Homebound with Atomic founder and managing partner Jack Abraham, an investor in startups who lost his own Kenwood home in the October fires.

O’Brien said Homebound will offer homeowners a way to rebuild a quality home while saving money and providing end-to-end oversight by staff. He predicted the service will appeal to doctors and others who don’t have time to devote hundreds of hours to rebuilding.

While the company will work throughout the county, it can offer its service in rural areas that may not have attracted as much interest from builders as neighborhoods like Coffey Park, said Julia Donoho, an architect, attorney and Homebound’s vice president and general counsel. Such efforts, she said, can make a significant difference as the county works toward recovery from the fires.

“We need as many people to rebuild as possible,” Donoho said.

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 707-521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.