SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Even before fire wiped out the home she rented for 17 years, Suzanne Finzell had thought about leaving this city on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area because of rising prices. A spike in housing and other living costs had driven her friends to Nevada and Oregon.
Now, Finzell wonders if that will be her fate too, as the wildfires that charred California wine country send thousands of people who lost their homes scrambling for new places to live in one of the nation’s tightest and most expensive housing markets.
Before the fires, the rental vacancy rate was a mere 1 percent in Santa Rosa and 3 percent in surrounding Sonoma County. Then the city lost an estimated 5 percent of its housing stock to the flames.
“We had a housing crisis before the fires,” Mayor Chris Coursey said Wednesday. “It’s magnitudes worse now.”
Meanwhile, authorities reported more progress against the flames. The deputy chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said crews had stopped the movement of all fires.
Firefighters were helped by cooler weather and the lack of wind. Forecasters expect a tenth of an inch of rain in the affected areas on Thursday — not enough to quench any fires outright but still welcome.
The fires that swept through parts of seven counties were the deadliest and most destructive series of blazes in California history. At least 42 people died and 6,000 homes were lost.
Elsewhere in the aftermath, a spokesman for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said he did not expect the county’s death toll to go much higher. It stood at 23 on Wednesday. “The number of dead people we’re finding has really slowed down,” Sgt. Spencer Crum said, and many people listed as missing have been found safe.
About 100,000 people were evacuated at the height of the fires, and about 22,000 remain under evacuation.