Santa Rosa sees 1,000th home rebuilt since 2017 fires

Pollie Barnes awoke at 1 a.m. the night of the Tubbs fire to the ringing of her phone. She couldn’t get to it before it stopped, and there was no message when she picked it up.

Fresh off a family camping trip on the lower Russian River, she’d ordinarily have gone back to sleep. But a scent lingered in the air of her home - hard to describe, not smoky, she said, just unfamiliar.

So she got back up and went to a window.

“All of a sudden I look, and there’s leaping fire flames in my neighbor’s yard,” Barnes said, “and I said to myself, ‘I’d better get out of here.’”

Her home was among more than ?5,300 Sonoma County homes destroyed in the 2017 firestorm, which leveled over 3,000 homes inside Santa Rosa.

Barnes escaped Fountaingrove that night in a harrowing drive. She recalled making a lucky turn toward safety where she might otherwise have driven into the teeth of the Tubbs fire.

“I was praying like I never prayed before,” she said.

She decided to rebuild her home to stay near family, and the Skyfarm home to which she returned in early February was the 1,000th in Santa Rosa completed since the fires, marking a major milestone in the recovery.

City officials presented Barnes with a keychain as a token to welcome her home and to recognize her home as No. 1,000.

But the celebration came as new rebuild activity on burned lots has leveled off across Sonoma County, marking a new phase that will see hundreds more homes completed in the coming months but far fewer homeowners embark on rebuilds.

Only a handful of new projects got underway last month, according to the city and county.

“A lot of those just moved from the planning review into construction,” said Assistant City Manager David Guhin, adding that some people are still waiting on the market to change or deciding whether to rebuild. “I’m not terribly surprised.”

Countywide, completed homes on burned lots rose to 1,377 in mid-February.

Progress continues to be strongest in west Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood, where ?768 homes are complete and ?539 are underway or in the pipeline, representing all but about 11% of the 1,473 houses lost in the neighborhood to the Tubbs fire.

In Fountaingrove, where 1,586 homes were destroyed, 16% of homes have been completed, 48% are underway or in the pipeline and 36% of lots show no activity.

So Barnes remains an outlier in her fire-scarred region of northeast Santa Rosa, where the slower pace of recovery reflects what authorities say is likely to be more incremental progress in coming years.

Rebuilding projects accounted for 3 out of every 4 homes completed last year in Santa Rosa. Outside burn zones, only ?254 homes were built in the city last year - nearly half of the tally from 2018 and the lowest mark in the city since 2015.

City officials were surprised by that dip and sought to explain it within a wider context of Santa Rosa’s struggle to add housing since the pre-recession market boom.

Its peak year of building came in 2005, when it saw 1,250 new, completed homes - more than the last three years combined outside of burn zones.

“When we first saw these (numbers), we were probably feeling the same as you,” Guhin told the City Council at a meeting last week. “Those are a lot lower than we were hoping them to be.”

But when rebuilds are included, Santa Rosa’s housing production in 2019 was at its highest level since before the recession. About 1,500 homes are actively under construction, and the city has issued building permits for more than 1,800 other homes.

“We haven’t seen those type of numbers since the ’80s,” Guhin said.

About 70% of the new units completed in Santa Rosa last year outside of burn zones were single-family homes, according to city data, while apartments make up a larger share of ongoing and upcoming work.

Guhin said one of his next steps will be drilling down into pending housing projects to determine how much of it can be considered affordable - a key barrier for many aspiring residents and homeowners in the Bay Area.

City Manager Sean McGlynn in January outlined the city’s housing efforts before the state’s Little Hoover Commission, which is examining the factors driving California’s housing costs. McGlynn spoke of trying to preserve the older neighborhoods that ring the city’s downtown core and asked the state to consider offering money to speed housing developments.

“Gone are the days when we’re going to prescribe to the developer community what their business is and how to get the job done,” McGlynn told the state panel Jan. 23. “We’re going to try to create opportunity in the city of Santa Rosa for that investment to happen within some clear guidelines so that we can protect those historic neighborhoods that are concerned about the direct impact of density but still recognize where we are and where we want to go as a community in the downtown.”

Santa Rosa continues to struggle in its bid to entice developers to build large downtown apartment buildings, though Guhin says he hopes to have good news to share in the coming months.

“Downtown development has been a challenge, continues to be a challenge that we’re not going to let up on,” Guhin told the council.

Councilman Jack Tibbetts, after hearing Guhin’s presentation, credited the city’s efforts toward addressing its housing challenges, however Sisyphean they may be.

“It seems like we’re still pushing a rock uphill,” Tibbetts said, “but we’re pushing it pretty well.”