Mobile homes, the last affordable housing option for many California residents, are going up in smoke

(Inside Climate News, 2 Oct 2022) Exploding wildfires, home prices and rents show how the climate crisis is increasingly a housing crisis.

CLEARLAKE, Calif.— Susan Gilbert heard police rolling by with their bullhorn.

Get out! Get out! Get out!”

But she was more exasperated than scared. She had lived at Creekside Mobile Home Park on Dam Road for 17 years and had lost track of all its close calls with wildfires. Creekside, a park situated on a bend of Cache Creek in northern California, had always survived. About 30 minutes earlier, when Gilbert came home from a visit to the vet with her cat, Pumpkin, and noticed black smoke swirling in nearby woods, she called her son.

“Guess what? Dam Road’s on fire again,” she said. 

Over the last six years, this had become part of life in the corner of California where she could afford to live. Smoke and sirens in Clearlake signaled just another bad news day in yet another bad fire season.

Gilbert, a no-nonsense 72-year-old with a long, gray ponytail, opened the door of the cat carrier and let Pumpkin scurry inside. The smoke column was growing thicker above the gruff no-man’s land tangled with brush that always seemed to be catching fire. Twenty-mile-per-hour winds pushed flames toward a hill across from Creekside dotted with homeless encampments, abandoned cars, brown, brittle grass and a canopy of live oak trees.  

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Inside Climate News, 2 Oct 2022: Mobile homes, the last affordable housing option for many California residents, are going up in smoke