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Bay Area’s recovery from Tubbs Fire holds lessons for LA

Here's what one California city can learn from another

Santa Rosa Councilmember Jeff Okrepkie and photos of his home after the 2017 Tubbs fire (Brennan Spark Photography, Jeff Okrepkie)
Santa Rosa Councilmember Jeff Okrepkie and photos of his home after the 2017 Tubbs fire (Brennan Spark Photography, Jeff Okrepkie)

The overnight destruction in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades feels eerily familiar to Santa Rosa Councilmember Jeff Okrepkie. 

The Tubbs fires of October 2017, which started in Calistoga, northeast of Santa Rosa, burned through 1,800 homes in the Fountain Grove neighborhood of Santa Rosa, jumped across US-101 and destroyed about 1,300 homes in the Coffey Park neighborhood, including Okrepkie’s.

Okrepkie remembers the frantic hours before the evacuation and the moment when he found out from a friend, the morning after, that the home he had rented for five years with his wife, two-year-old son and their dogs, was gone. So were all their belongings.

“We do have an understanding of the emotions they’re going through,” he said of the victims of the Los Angeles fires. “There’s a sense of extreme empathy that other communities are being brought into this unfortunate fraternity of fire survivors.” 

Santa Rosans also understand what comes next, and the city’s experience could be instructive as L.A. rebuilds, especially because the similarities go beyond the fires’ destruction. Coffey Park, historically a blue-collar, working class neighborhood, is similar both topographically and economically to Altadena, while Fountain Grove, a more affluent hillside community with larger, custom-built homes, is more like the Pacific Palisades. 

Based on Santa Rosa’s experience, Altadena could recover more quickly because the homes are not as large and mostly in the flats, and therefore easier for a developer to take on at scale. Okrepkie used his insurance settlement to put a down payment on a new home in his old neighborhood from a builder who has now built more than 110 homes there. The builder offered a limited set of choices for floor plans and finishes, and construction went relatively fast. The first rebuilt homes in the neighborhood wrapped up in the summer of 2018. Okrepkie moved into his home in February 2020.

The pace was slower in Fountain Grove.

“It gets far more complicated up in the hills,” he explained. Sites are uneven, so debris removal is harder. Displaced residents inevitably want custom rebuilds, straining the supply of contractors and subs. “It’s a lot easier to find people to build multiple 1,700-square-foot houses versus one 5,000-square-foot house,” Okrepkie said.

Okrepkie, also a commercial insurance agent who won his city council seat in 2022 after founding an advocacy group for survivors called Coffey Strong, noted that builders may also be gun shy about the hills because fires are more likely to hit the area again, which means greater difficulty getting insurance.

“We’ve seen it a lot where a Fountain Grove lot goes into escrow and people can’t get insurance so they just bail,” he said, an issue that hasn’t hit Coffey Park, which is more urban. “Insurance companies understand how freak of a thing it was to get a fire jumping across a six-lane highway, through a commercial area and then into the neighborhood.”  

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To date, about 1,200 parcels in Coffey Park have either been rebuilt or are in the rebuilding process — 92 percent of homes lost. Slightly fewer permits show up for Fountain Grove, even though it lost about 500 more homes, according to city data, putting the figure for homes rebuilt or in the process at just two-thirds of those lost. The slow start in Fountain Grove has been hampered more recently by higher interest rates, not an issue when the vast majority of Coffey Park was rebuilt prior to mid-2022, Okrepkie said. Thus, even some rebuilds that have been permitted and entitled are indefinitely delayed.

“There’s still a lot of bare lots over there, unfortunately,” Okrepkie said. 

While there will be those residents, like Okrepkie, who stay on and even recommit to the area, many who lost their homes in the L.A. fires are likely to sell their lots and move on, spurred on by both personal and economic factors. The first wave of departures after the Tubbs fire were those who had already been thinking of making changes in their lives, Okrepkie said.

“It was nicknamed ‘the divorce fire’ at one point,” he said, with couples no longer held back from splitting by the daunting task of dividing up their belongings. 

Older longtime residents who were thinking of moving closer to their children or downsizing were also stripped of their indecision. Okrepkie said the median age in Coffey Park has dropped dramatically since the fire and the income level has risen as some newly built larger homes have topped $1 million. 

Those who could not fathom rebuilding after the trauma of Tubbs sold their lots at what Okrepkie recalled as fair prices, since their land still held considerable value — another similarity with the L.A. communities, he expected. 

“I’m sure there are people who are going to try to take advantage of the fire survivors,” he said. “But there’s going to be legitimate builders and legitimate real estate agents going in there.”

Some Santa Rosa builders ended up going to prison for taking advantage of survivors, and Okrepkie saw so many home flippers get in over their heads by taking on a full rebuild for the first time that he worked with state officials in 2020 to create the B-2 Residential Remodeling Contractor’s license, which is limited to work on existing residential structures and is distinct from a general contractor’s license. 

City legislation assisted rebuilding efforts, Okrepkie said. The city created a “resiliency zone” that covered all fire-hit neighborhoods and has its own third-party plan review and inspection company to expedite permitting processes and certificate of occupancy approvals. For homes being rebuilt to more or less the same footprint, the turnaround time in permitting was under a week. The city also rolled back some new code requirements on setbacks and electric-only homes in the zone. 

“The biggest thing that fire survivors said when we were communicating is: ‘We just want what we had back. We don’t want anything taken from us,’” Okrepkie said. He added that forming the organization that backed survivors legitimized their needs for local, state and federal government assistance and also gave those governments an easy way to communicate with them. Legislation pushing for greater density also allowed those rebuilding to add more units, turning formerly single-family homes into duplexes or underutilized backyard space into ADUs.

“I think our advocacy for the neighborhood helped a lot,” he said. “We actually have more homes in Coffey Park now than we did before.”

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