Holiday Farm Fire survivors endure a long slog to rebuild homes

Editor’s note: Five years ago this month, the Holiday Farm Fire ripped through the McKenzie Valley, destroying hundreds of homes and leaving enduring scars — physical, psychological and on the land itself. This is the first in a series of Lookout Eugene-Springfield stories examining the fire and its aftermath.

Melanie Stanley lost her home and her Blue River general store in the Holiday Farm Fire.

Stanley, 47, is among those who have rebuilt their houses after the 2020 fire swept through the McKenzie Valley, burning more than 173,000 acres and destroying 517 homes on a 20-mile stretch that includes Blue River and other unincorporated rural communities like Finn Rock, Nimrod and Vida.

She counts herself among the lucky ones. 

Five years after the fire, the region is still clawing its way out of a housing crisis, and rebuilding. Residents hole up in recreational vehicles year-round, waiting for housing opportunities and recovery dollars to rebuild. Even for those with the financial means to rebuild, including money from insurance settlements, the waits for finances and building permits can stretch out for months, adding to other delays.

Yet it’s a battle that people in the McKenzie Valley are willing to shoulder if they want to stay and preserve their way of life. Residents like Stanley returned, trading emergency shelter and hotel rooms in Eugene for trailers in burned-out patches of land.

“I can’t live in Eugene,” Stanley said. “We’re not Eugene people, and we live in McKenzie for a reason.”

The rebuilding in McKenzie Valley has not gone swiftly, even after federal officials announced in 2021 that Oregon would get $422 million for recovery efforts after the Labor Day fires in Lane County and across Oregon.

Oregon Housing and Community Services, the agency that disburses federal and state housing dollars, has contributed funding to rebuild 143 owner-occupied homes and five rentals in Lane County, state data show. That’s about 29% of the properties lost in the fire.

‘I hands-down share their frustration’

Signs of hardship and frustration linger, five years after residents moved to hotels and other emergency shelters in Eugene and elsewhere.

In August, the Lane County Board of Commissioners agreed to ask the state for an extension of a rule that allows property owners to live in recreational vehicles on their land while rebuilding.

Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch represents McKenzie Valley residents.

“I hands-down share their frustration,” Buch said in an interview with Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “I’ve been advocating over the years to get that funding directed down to the county as fast as humanly possible.”

It’s been a long path.

In November 2021, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that Oregon would get the $422 million, from a congressional appropriation, for recovery efforts. Then-Gov. Kate Brown tapped Oregon Housing and Community Services, a state agency, to administer the grant.

Four months later, in March 2022, the federal agency posted a register notice with program requirements for Oregon. Outreach and planning followed. In February 2023, the U.S. Housing and Urban Development agency approved the $422 million grant agreement with the state.

More than two years later, patience is running thin. Oregon Housing and Community Services has plodded along at a pace that frustrates local officials and residents alike. 

“Oregon Housing and Community Services has been excruciatingly delinquent in allocating those funds to the communities in need,” Buch said. 

The grant doesn’t mean Oregon got a check for $422 million. Instead, it pays out reimbursements for projects.

And money has trickled out slowly in the last two years. A federal report from July shows the state of Oregon has drawn 13% of $422 million. That award has a balance of $367 million, the document shows — unspent money that has not yet flowed into Oregon to aid recovery.

“They took a massive amount of time to go through the rules and regulations, to learn how to deal and allocate with those dollars,” Buch said of the state agency.

‘Long and steep’ recovery

In a statement, Oregon Housing and Community Services acknowledged the challenge of the recovery efforts.

“OHCS’s role in long-term housing recovery is organized around having accessible, understandable, and timely solutions driven by local communities,” Delia Hernández, an agency spokesperson, said in an email. “The path to recovering from a wildfire is long and steep for most people, and we acknowledge there are survivors who have not yet recovered.”

The agency’s statement said the funding has all been spent or is already committed for projects. The funding is available until 2029.

At this point, the agency has helped fund the 143 owner-occupied homes and five rentals in Lane County rebuilt after the Holiday Farm Fire. Most of those were through state-funded programs that came before the federal grant.

An example is Lazy Days in Blue River, a collaboration the state completed with Homes for Good, Lane County’s housing agency.

The affordable housing project is on land that formerly had manufactured homes that were destroyed in the fire. The project has about 20 modular homes and another 10 Park Model recreational vehicles, which are similar to tiny homes. People started moving into modular homes at Lazy Days in late February.

It’s a bright spot among a wider backdrop of frustrations.

Nevertheless, officials also say the level of the catastrophe meant that the state was unprepared to administer a recovery of this level. 

“Many people were doing the best that they could, but a lot of mistakes were made because we did not as a state have a history of these kinds of catastrophic events,” Buch said. “But the stumbling blocks for getting that money out the door were preceded by the fact that we had no idea how to face the challenge that we were facing.”

Searching for solutions 

As government officials labored to cut through red tape, McKenzie Valley residents saw a need for housing solutions. And they did something besides complain about the slow pace of bureaucracy.

They formed the McKenzie Community Land Trust. The nonprofit has the goal of increasing the stock of affordable housing in the valley, with an eye toward helping working-class families purchase homes.

Here’s how it works: The nonprofit purchases land in the valley and builds houses on it. When families purchase the houses, the land trust continues to own the land and provides the homeowner a 99-year lease.

The community got the idea from the Methow Housing Trust, a similar organization that sprung up in Washington state after a wildfire left a shortage of affordable housing in that state’s northern region. Other community land trusts exist in Oregon — usually within cities like Bend and Portland. But this is the first of its kind designed to assist efforts to recover from wildfire in a rural area of Oregon.

The model keeps home prices down without the cost of land — one tool to combat rising costs. As delays in funding and permits stretch out, inflation and construction prices go up, putting home ownership out of reach for many. And with the land held in trust by the nonprofit, it’s preserved long-term; it can’t be sold to a developer who wants to replace it with more expensive housing or commercial projects.

“Many of us were very frustrated with the slow recovery following the fire,” Tabitha Crystal Eck, executive director of the land trust, said in an interview. “One year, two years, and we were seeing almost nothing rebuilt. What was getting rebuilt?”

For a nonprofit founded in 2022, the McKenzie Community Land Trust is generating visible results already. A group of six three-bedroom houses in Blue River is nearly finished. The two-story houses are just about ready for families.

They’re available to purchase for residents who earn below 80% of the area median income, or $4,892 a month for a family of two. To qualify, residents also will need to be working in the McKenzie River Valley, have lost their primary residence — either rented or owned — in the Holiday Farm Fire, or both.

The project will aid those recovering from the fire and new residents. In the lottery for applicants, 13 people applied for the six openings. Of those, all of them worked in the area and five of them lost their homes in the fire. 

For the planners, it’s an indication that people are rebuilding their lives even amid the lack of housing. 

“None of the people that applied for our homes are just waiting around for a home,” Eck said. “They’re here, still engaged in the community, with kids in the school and working and need homes.”

As the work for getting the $422 million of federal recovery money flowing into Oregon continued, the nonprofit looked at other sources to fund the project. 

Those included $890,000 from Lane County in wildfire recovery funding, $1.2 million from the state housing fund, a $1.2 million construction loan with Summit Bank and $30,000 from PacificSource, a Medicaid insurer.

It’s an effort that unfolded on a parallel track to the federal recovery grant.

“Ahead of recovery dollars coming to the communities, we accessed state funding, we went after affordable housing dollars not specific to fire relief,” Eck said.

Another nonprofit is involved in local recovery efforts: McKenzie Valley Long Term Recovery.

The nonprofit, which formed after the fire, helps people navigate the system and access resources for housing and other needs as they rebuild their lives. 

One of the biggest challenges has been the rollout of the federal funding for housing recovery, said Devin Thompson, executive director of McKenzie Valley Long Term Recovery.

In an interview, Thompson offered a candid assessment of where the problem lies.

“The slowness is at the state level,” he said.

As the five-year mark passes, it’s another grim reminder of the slow pace of recovery. 

“We’re getting ready to go into a sixth winter of individuals living in RVs or trailers,” Thompson said. “RVs and trailers were not meant to be lived in full-time. How do we get these dollars on the ground and get people back into permanent, safe living conditions as quickly as possible?”

But while local officials express frustration at the sluggishness of recovery efforts, they understand the scale of the fire put the state into uncharted territory.

Cliff Richardson, a Blue River resident and founding member of McKenzie Community Land Trust, said the state agency had “no idea how to operate handing this money.” 

“They’d never been in a disaster, and they were woefully unprepared as a state to handle any kind of disaster,” he said.

Local concerns hit home 

Yet the state is not the only bottleneck. Local residents also said the process of obtaining county building permits could have run more smoothly and efficiently. 

Stanley, the business owner in Blue River, said the process of navigating the permit process was “disastrous,” even amid county efforts to expedite that work. In Stanley’s view, it was inequitable, with some people waiting several weeks and others for several months.

At times, it was difficult to know where permits were in the process, said Stanley, who navigated the process for her house and to rebuild her business. 

“It can get lost,” Stanley said. “It can get shoved at the bottom of a pile. It can get put who in the heck knows where.”

Dale Turnley is a general contractor who rebuilds homes and businesses in the valley — including Stanley’s store. 

At this point, he said, the homes that are yet to be built are for people still living in recreational vehicles whose homes were underinsured and whose resulting settlements were insufficient to allow them to immediately build.

And he said that when the timing of building permits is uncertain, it adds complexity to construction projects, as the seasons change.

“You end up playing the weather game, waiting for patches of blue sky, no rain, to be able to do your concrete work and a lot of the infrastructure so you aren’t working in a mud pit,” he said. 

Devon Ashbridge, a spokesperson for Lane County, said the county hired six more staff, including a permit navigator, to help process permit applications more efficiently for residents after the fire. 

In some cases, there are instances when the county needs more information for the permits, Ashbridge said.

“They never planned to need to rebuild their home, and it’s complicated under the best of circumstances,” Ashbridge said.

Ashbridge said the county can do better. 

“For some of them, it may have been that what they submitted wasn’t complete, and it took time for them to finish off those missing or incomplete pieces,” Ashbridge said. “And in some cases, maybe it did just take longer for reasons that are entirely on the county.”

Buch said state land use requirements in unincorporated areas are extremely challenging, though that doesn’t let the county entirely off the hook.

“Although that’s true, that doesn’t mean the county is perfect,” Buch said. “And I would say, yes, the county has made mistakes along the way as well.”

Regardless of the challenges, Stanley is not leaving. She has family here and friends she grew up with in a tight-knit setting. She worked in the business – Meyer’s General Store – as a teenager when her parents owned it. She’s in the midst of rebuilding it and selling groceries, liquor and supplies for residents again.

In part, she said, that’s because even in the worst of times, leaving was not an option.

“This community is part of my identity,” Stanley said. “When bad stuff happens, we all come together.”