Sunshine manor paradise ca6/20/2023 “Natural disasters are a new ticket to homelessness, particularly in California,” said Laura Cootsona, the executive director of the Jesus Center, a non-profit homelessness services provider. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian Displaced by fire “It always disproportionately hits those who are already on the edge, who are paying too much for housing.”ĭowntown Chico, California, in September. Vest had lived in Paradise, a mellow and affordable Gold Rush-era town of 27,000, for most of his life, and after his father died, when he was 12, he was mostly raised by his grandparents. With its single main high school, large numbers of retirees and sun-dappled forests, Paradise was a slow, albeit beautiful place to grow up, where Vest went hiking and camping with friends. He was a caretaker for his grandfather – sometimes using the social security money he received after his father’s death to pay his grandparents’ bills. Around the time of his grandfather’s death in 2016, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Vest’s housing situation became precarious and he struggled with homelessness, and he moved in with a devoted friend, Jeannette Kelsay.Īccording to Kelsay, Vest was abused as a child, and as an adult struggled with “episodes”, in which he became paranoid and convinced other people were talking about him, and laughing at him. “There are lots of things in Stephen’s life that happened that would totally push anyone over the edge,” she said. Yet at her home he thrived, Kelsay said, helping her clear the house of her late father’s belongings, planting tomatoes in the garden, sketching, and restoring an old Mustang. ![]() Kelsay, whom Vest sometimes called Aunty G, knew him to be sweet and kind, but also self-conscious and shy. ![]() She had finally convinced him to see a psychiatrist when the Camp fire hit on 8 November 2018 and upended their lives. The blaze ignited in the early morning and blotted out the rising sun. It killed people caught unaware in their homes or trapped in their cars. Vest stayed behind to try to save the house, and the neighbor’s, with a hosepipe, Kelsay said. But the water ran out, and he was no match for flames that at one point were consuming almost 400 American football fields’ worth of land every minute. Vest was one of thousands who had nowhere to live following the Camp fire. ![]() Sparked by faulty equipment on an electricity transmission line, the blaze led to the deaths of 85 people and destroyed much of the town.Īt its peak the disaster displaced over 50,000 people from their perch in the Sierra Nevada foothills, but once the flames were extinguished, another crisis began to unfold. The fire had wiped out almost 14,000 homes in a county with an already limited housing stock.Ĭhico, the mid-sized valley town 10 miles down the road, was reshaped by the fire, and grew by more than 10,000 people as fire evacuees settled there. Though some survivors scattered across the US, many of those affected stayed in the county. The county’s homeless population grew by 16%, including those sheltered with support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), according to a 2019 count. Some of those on the streets were the very same people who had just been burned out.Ī new fire in 2020 killed 16 and wiped out an additional 1,200 single-residence homes in the county.
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