Younger, richer and smaller: Wildfire era changed communities forever

When Jen Goodlin visited Paradise six months after the 2018 Camp fire, she thought she was saying goodbye.

- LIAM DILLON, BEN POSTON, DOUG SMITH AND JESSICA GARRISON

A town native, Goodlin was living in Colorado with her husband and four children. She wanted to witness the devastation that wiped out 10,700 homes, including the small white cottage where she grew up, and turned the dense forest of her youth into a bleak landscape. But once she arrived, she was surprised at her reaction. She could envision so much more than the burned trees and abandoned businesses around her.

Here, she saw, her family could live on a big piece of land as they'd always wanted. Her husband thought she was crazy, but they ran the numbers, bought a 1.2-acre vacant lot and put a trailer on the property. A few years later, they moved into a new, four-bedroom house.

"It took the fire to bring me home," said Goodlin, 43, who now runs a local wildfire recovery nonprofit.

Young families like Goodlin's are coming to Paradise, shifting the town's demographics away from the retirees who once lived there. Attracted by cheap land - lots cost less than a mid-range car - newcomers can build a larger home on larger parcels for less than buying a house in Chico, a city of 100,000 people 15 miles away.

Though Paradise's current population is less than half of what it was, the local Little League already has more kids than before the fire.

Nearly a decade of megafires in California has brought profound changes to recovering communities. Paradise has become younger. Some rebuilt areas have become wealthier. Renters and people on fixed incomes have found themselves pushed to more urban locales. Both devastated neighborhoods and fire survivors face an unpredictable future that, given the recent intensity of wildfires in California, many more areas will have to face.