Sonoma County Gazette 11-17

NOVEMBER 2017
I I m m m m i i g g r r a a n n t t s s f f e e e e l l Impact of Fire and ICE ~ 14
R E A D T H I S i f your Home Burned ~ 17
H H O O L L I I D D A AY Y C C A A L L E E N N D D A A R R : : S S U U P P P P O O R R T T B B u u s s i i n n e e s s s s O O w w n n e e r r s s
Craft Fairs, Tree Lightings, FREE Dinners ~ 70-71
who Lost their Homes to the Fire - SHOP LOCAL ~ 62
HOUSING Challenges!
By Vesta Copestakes
We’re about the enter a new
phase in Sonoma County, one that we were trying to achieve through environmental awareness and social and political activism.
Housing and homelessness have been our challenges and nothing we were doing was fixing the problem. Compassionate, intelligent people got together to find solutions, but ideas have been making a slow transition to implementation. People looked to tiny houses in tiny villages, or ADUs (Auxiliary Dwelling Units), but they just aren’t sprouting up fast enough to solve the problem.
As housing prices rise, homes have become vacation rentals taking them out of the housing circuit. Rents have increased so high, people are forced to move out of the county and commute long distances to jobs.
Fire raged through the center of our county taking out thousands of homes, wiping out businesses, scorching the earth and devastating lives. Now we have newly homeless people who were happily housed and secure until flames destroyed what they had worked so hard to achieve. Now there are less homes and more homeless.
HOUSING cont’d on page 6
Sonoma PROUD
How are we going to fix this one?
Strangers accepted strangers into their homes. Local businesses closed up shop and churned out thousands
PHOENIX ~ A bird in
Egyptian mythology that lived in the desert for 500 years and then consumed itself by re, later to rise renewed from its ashes.
And yet what I’ll remember most thirty years from now won’t be the fire. It won’t be the charred remains of cars or the oddly vacant space where the Round Barn used to sit. It won’t be the commercial buildings laid low or the haunting skeletons of entire neighborhoods: The jarring normalcy of sidewalks, roads, and ceramic garden gnomes amid the rubble.
By Lynda Hopkins
5th District Supervisor
I have never been so proud to live in Sonoma County.
Over the past 11 days, we’ve been to Hell and back. The worst wildfire in the history of the State of California slammed into the heart of our community, consuming everything in its path. Overnight, lives, homes, businesses, and entire neighborhoods incinerated. The fire moved in at breakneck pace and then lingered, raining down ash as it relentlessly marched, forcing further evacuations, consuming more acres, more buildings.
Thirty years from now, I’ll remember the kindness. I’ll remember the fact that in a moment of crisis, we came together as a community and we became stronger.
PROUD cont’d on page 4
The EVERYTHING to DO Calendar: pgs 52 - 71
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