Source: NBC News
The tent city in the Walmart parking lot is gone. Most of the emergency shelters around town have closed. Target finally has been able to refill shelves fast enough to keep up with spiraling demand. A kind of normalcy has fallen on Chico.
But the Sacramento Valley city that became the No.
1 refuge for survivors of November’s Camp Fire is still adapting to a new normal of traffic jams, overflowing hotels, crowded restaurants and a housing crunch so extreme Chico recently was named the hottest real estate market in America.This college town is in the midst of boom times, but nobody is gloating about it, at least not very loudly. What you hear most from residents is talk about excess traffic, skyrocketing home prices and worries about if, and when, a new equilibrium will be found.
“To be unsettled and to not have that solid foundation is hard for people,” said Chico City Manager Mark Orme. “Generally speaking, there is worry about, ‘When are things going to get back to normal?’ And the answer is, it’s not going to be days or weeks or months. It’s going to be years.”
Before California’s deadliest wildfire swept through Paradise and surrounding towns on Nov. 8, killing 86 people and destroying 14,000 homes, Chico was a low-key urban island of 93,000 in a long agricultural valley. The community swells during the school year with another 17,000 students at the campus of California State University.
Now, the population has spiked by 10,000 to 20,000 because of people who fled the fire, not to mention hundreds of repair and restoration workers from state and federal agencies and from the Pacific Gas and Electric utility.
That has pushed the population of the city — an hour and 45 minutes north of Sacramento on California Route 99 — to about what had been expected two decades from now.“The growth happened overnight. It’s kind of amazing,” Orme said. “It feels like a city within a city.”
The result has been a boon to many businesses, and a windfall for homeowners ready to move on, but a costly and vexing challenge for an overburdened city government and people who yearn for the old, pre-fire Chico.
Housing already had been tight, before the Camp Fire drove thousands of residents out of the Sierra Nevada foothills and into Chico and other communities. Now, home sales have doubled and prices jumped 21 percent in December, compared to the same month in 2017.
Earlier this month, Realtor.com designated Chico the hottest market in the country, based on the number of listing views online and the short length of time homes stay on the market, an average of 37 days in December.
“This is more like what you would see in the dense urban areas on the coast,” said Dan Jacuzzi, CEO of a chain of more than 60 real estate offices in Northern California and Northern Nevada. “We have never seen a market in the Central Valley with 17 and 20 offers on a single listing and homes selling for $50,000 over the initial asking price and above.”
After almost 40 years in real estate in the region, Jacuzzi said, “This has truly been an unprecedented market.”
Cindy Cosby, a realtor who has mostly represented buyers in Chico, said the spike in prices has been less due to owners pushing up asking prices than to buyers bidding the price up.
There hasn’t been a sign yet that price…
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