By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, April 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – It was the middle of the night when Yvonne Rawhouser’s neighbour woke her up to warn her that a nearby hillside was aflame.
The wildfire that had been raging through northern California’s wine country in October 2017 was closing in on the mobile home park where Rawhouser had lived for decades.
“I grabbed my cat in the cat box,” recalled Rawhouser, 60, a cancer survivor who suffers from renal failure. “We thought we’d be evacuated for a few hours and then come home.”
Instead, the fire destroyed most of the 160 houses in the Journey’s End seniors’ park in Santa Rosa – with the dozens of remaining homes rendered unliveable, Rawhouser told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In part because her home is still standing, Rawhouser has not been able to access insurance payouts or federal assistance, a year and a half after the fires.
Stories like Rawhouser’s underscore nationwide gaps in the post-disaster social safety net for people in non-traditional housing situations, such as those living in mobile or rental homes and the homeless, say housing rights advocates.
What happened to the Journey’s End residents is typical of whenever communities are hit by disaster, said Larry Florin, chief executive of Burbank Housing, an affordable housing provider working with victims of California’s recent wildfires.
Even if residents of a mobile home community own their homes, they typically do not own the ground it sits on and they rely on the park’s privately-run utilities, said Florin.
He noted that the Journey’s End sewage, electricity and water systems were all destroyed, making it economically unfeasible to rebuild the park.
And almost no residents have received insurance or federal assistance to allow them to move somewhere else.
“They fell through the cracks,” he said.
