{"id":153799,"date":"2021-05-07T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2021-05-07T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=195980"},"modified":"2021-05-07T11:00:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T11:00:39","slug":"a-climate-dystopia-in-northern-california-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/05\/07\/a-climate-dystopia-in-northern-california-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Climate Dystopia in Northern California"},"content":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s a ritual<\/u> that has been repeated many times over the coldest months of Northern California\u2019s winter. The Chico police arrive between 9 a.m. and noon on a Thursday, perhaps in the hopes of catching people when they are home. Home, in this case, being flimsy tents, draped in tarps, many of them strung up between pine trees, secured to fences, or hidden beneath highway overpasses. The cops read out orders<\/a> and sometimes hand out flyers: You have 72 hours to clear all of your belongings or they will be destroyed.<\/p>\n Before the deadline, volunteers usually show up<\/a> with trailers and pickup trucks to help with the move. They load up bicycles, coolers, and cats, as well as clothing stuffed in suitcases, plastic laundry baskets, and garbage bags. Then they drive around this scrappy city in the Sacramento Valley looking for a new place to set up camp \u2014 only to have police show up a few days or weeks later and repeat the whole wrenching eviction again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In April, Chico\u2019s 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 \u2014 an outdoorsy college town \u2014 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<\/a> the city for failing \u201cto address the needs of its unhoused population while simultaneously passing ordinances that criminalize everyday behavior unhoused people undertake to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n Adding a dystopian layer to this story: According to a survey by the Butte Countywide Homeless Continuum of Care, about a quarter of Chico\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Two and half years ago, when this region was hit by the deadliest wildfire in California\u2019s history, few would have predicted that Chico would be the scene of this kind of repression. The city, in fact, made national headlines for the warm welcome it offered to the thousands of evacuees who fled the ferocious firestorm that had engulfed the town of Paradise. Multiple shelters were set up, and the parking lot of the Chico Walmart was transformed into a sprawling campground and soup kitchen, with residents donating tents and sleeping bags, volunteers serving hot food, and Chico State students organizing team sports and other activities for the Paradise kids. Many opened their homes and spare bedrooms to strangers. The outpouring of neighborly love and mutual aid was such a bright spot amid the fire\u2019s destruction that it made<\/a> the New York Times. Mark Stemen, a professor of geography at California State University in Chico, memorably put it to me like this: \u201cA tsunami of fire and terror rolled down the hill from Paradise. But that tsunami was buffeted by a blanket of love and comfort\u201d when evacuees arrived, by the thousands, in his home city.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When I first wrote<\/a> about Chico for The Intercept, it was on the occasion of introducing a Chico Green New Deal, a landmark plan championed by the city\u2019s then vice mayor, Alex Brown, developed in consultation with Cal State climate experts, and supported by the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement. Like its national inspiration, Chico\u2019s framework married rapid decarbonization targets with plans for more affordable housing; a safe and sustainable food system; investments in \u201cclean, 21st century\u201d public transit; and green job creation, including projects earmarked for the poorest residents.<\/p>\n The experiment was urgent. Chico had just seen its population increase by around 20,000 immediately after the fire \u2014 in a city of roughly 100,000. Its city manager, Mark Orme, described<\/a> the impact of the fire as \u201c15-20 years of population growth overnight.\u201d Adding further complexity was the fact that Chico had long failed to provide anything like adequate affordable housing for its residents, pushing many into the city\u2019s parks and streets. Which is part of the reason why Butte County, home to both Chico and Paradise, had declared<\/a> a housing \u201cstate of emergency\u201d one month before the Camp Fire happened, a disaster that displaced an additional 50,000 people at its peak.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If affordable housing and transit solutions weren\u2019t rolled out quickly, it was already clear that Chico would have trouble sustaining that initial wave of post-fire solidarity. In an interview at the time, Brown noted that a major lesson from the Camp Fire was that, in our era of climate disruption, \u201cone of the things we can expect is displacement\u201d: people being forced to move from one community to another. Which is why investing in affordable housing was included in Chico\u2019s climate plan. For Brown, the Camp Fire\u2019s impact on both Paradise and Chico showed the pressing need to build \u201ccommunities that are more resilient to these shifts. \u2026 We can demonstrate what a Green New Deal looks like at the local level.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cresilience.\u201d 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 \u2014 precisely the gap that a new package<\/a> of Green New Deal legislation introduced to the House and Senate is seeking to fill.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cpublic safety.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Green New Deal plans (\u201cthe political will was a little bit on the lackluster side\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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 \u201cGreen New Decade.\u201d He said, \u201cWe had banners and signs and sunflowers and were ready to rock.\u201d Then lockdown happened, and the signs just sat in his yard, for months. Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, \u201cthere wasn\u2019t much room for a conversation about planning for the future, when we were dealing with these immediate crises.\u201d In late August and early September 2020, another<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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<\/a> at a local ABC affiliate summed up the market\u2019s current trajectory: \u201cUp, up, up.\u201d<\/p>\n In a part of the state steeped in gold rush lore (Paradise crowns a \u201cMiss Gold Nugget\u201d as part of its annual Gold Nugget Days<\/a>), local property developers and construction companies are welcoming high-end real estate as their modern-day bonanza. \u201cThey\u2019re coming with cash, and they\u2019re ready to go,\u201d Katy Thoma, president of the Chico Chamber of Commerce, said<\/a> of the big city migrants. Existing houses are flipping, and new ones are going up \u2014 but according to Brown, the city is \u201cprioritizing luxury condos and five-bedroom, single family homes, with the Bay Area transplants in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is not only a problem for Chico\u2019s low- and middle-income residents who are getting priced out of their community. It\u2019s a climate problem as well: Many of those Bay Area transplants will become part of the state\u2019s growing fleet of \u201csupercommuters\u201d who drive hours to get to meetings at their company headquarters, adding<\/a> to California\u2019s transportation-related emissions, which in 2019 made up 40 percent of its total. And those emissions were rising.<\/p>\n Chico\u2019s failure to provide homes that its residents can afford well predates the Camp Fire. According to a report<\/a> commissioned by the city, between 2014 and 2019, Chico added 2,724 housing units geared for those with \u201cabove moderate income\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s also because huge profit margins just aren\u2019t there in affordable multi-unit housing. For instance, a plan to build six stories of affordable housing was recently approved in Chico \u2014 only to have the land put up for sale for $5 million. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of factors pushing up the cost of housing,\u201d local housing rights advocates wrote<\/a>. \u201cOne we can see here is the exaggerated claims of speculative landowners.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s one-year anniversary, an image that went around the world<\/a>. That would be Paradise, many believed: a triumphant phoenix rising from the ashes.<\/p>\n But it hasn\u2019t worked out that way. On the contrary, the fates of fire survivors have bifurcated sharply. Paradise\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s shelters, and eventually its parks and waterways, their lives intermingling with those of Chico\u2019s other unhoused individuals and families, all of them shut out of the city\u2019s booming real estate market.<\/p>\n When Covid-19 hit, the city council instructed<\/a> police to leave those urban campers alone, because moving risked increasing the virus\u2019s spread. But the city failed to provide many camps with basic sanitation facilities, let alone create a sanctioned camping area, as many other cities<\/a> have done. In the midst of this, a needle exchange program<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nA Brutal Crackdown<\/h3>\n