Many opened their homes and spare bedrooms to strangers. Multiple shelters were set up, and the parking lot of the Chico Walmart was transformed into a sprawling campground and soup kitchen, with residents donating tents and sleeping bags, volunteers serving hot food, and Chico State students organizing team sports and other activities for the Paradise kids. The city, in fact, made national headlines for the warm welcome it offered to the thousands of evacuees who fled the ferocious firestorm that had engulfed the town of Paradise. Two and half years ago, when this region was hit by the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, few would have predicted that Chico would be the scene of this kind of repression. Photo: Salgu Wissmath for The Intercept A Brutal Crackdown
For this reason, Chico’s war on the unhoused may be providing a grim glimpse into an eco-authoritarian future, in which the poor victims of climate change-fueled disasters are treated like human refuse by those whose wealth has protected them, at least in the short term, from the worst impacts of planetary warming.Ī view of the ridge above Butte Creek Canyon, which burned in the Camp Fire, outside Chico, Calif., on May 4, 2021. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California recently condemned the city for failing “to address the needs of its unhoused population while simultaneously passing ordinances that criminalize everyday behavior unhoused people undertake to survive.”Īdding a dystopian layer to this story: According to a survey by the Butte Countywide Homeless Continuum of Care, about a quarter of Chico’s unsheltered residents lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire which burned the neighboring town of Paradise to the ground, taking the lives of 85 people. Even in California, where the lack of affordable housing has reached epidemic levels in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chico - an outdoorsy college town - stands out for the ruthlessness with which its city government and police have turned on unhoused residents.
In April, Chico’s anti-homelessness sweeps drew a harsh rebuke from a federal judge, who accused the city of willfully violating the law by flouting its legal obligation to provide viable shelter alternatives to its unhoused residents.
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