That is the daunting reality that Oregon and its neighbors now face on a grand scale. Wildfires have burned nearly 5 million acres, killed at least 27 people, and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate up and down the West Coast. Thousands of structures have been wrecked. The blazes ravaging several populated areas — a highly abnormal, “once in a generation” crisis for Oregon, according to Governor Kate Brown — have also magnified the region’s housing crisis. While California routinely makes national headlines for high housing costs and homelessness, fast-growing Oregon has an acute housing shortage too: Before the fires, the state fell short of housing need by an estimated 155,000 units.

With the Almeda fire, that collision of crises slammed into some of Oregon’s most vulnerable people. 

While it’s too early to pin an exact number on the loss, Rick Harris, a longtime real estate agent in this scenic area known as the Rogue Valley, believes that “the vast majority” of low-to-moderately priced housing was destroyed in Jackson County. Supply was already scant, with a rental vacancy rate hovering at a razor-thin 1% before the wildfires and an eviction moratorium due to Covid-19. “Now the question becomes, what do we have with what’s left?” he said.

There are no easy answers. Right now, about 2,000 displaced residents in the area are living in cars, tents, and trailers at the local fairgrounds, said Gary Leaming, an Oregon Department of Transportation official who’s acting as Jackson County’s public information officer for emergency operations. Others, including Potter, are spending nights at a megachurch that opened its doors. Some have resettled temporarily with family or friends around the state or taken up offers of spare rooms, backyards and garages. 

With the White House declaring the Oregon wildfires a “major disaster” on September 15, state, county, and local governments will soon start to work with federal officials to unlock emergency resources. But with a hurricane pounding the Southeast, wildfires burning throughout the West, and a pandemic raging in between, Sandra Spelliscy, the city manager of Talent, doesn’t expect to see any FEMA trailers anytime soon. “This is going to be a local effort, and we have to look at every option,” she said.

Most of those options are currently theoretical. Michelle Glass, the director of the Rogue Action Center, helped organize the grassroots advocacy group in 2017 to push back on the displacement she was seeing in the region’s small towns, which were historically an affordable choice for seniors and workers in the agriculture and service industries. A population boom fueled by out-of-state migrants, especially from California, has dialed up prices in these economically mixed communities. What little housing has been produced has been mostly geared towards higher earners. Here as throughout the West Coast, the consequences were already visible in a growing homeless population, to which the fires may be adding.

“We’ve been fighting the slow version of this for years,” Glass said. “Now we’re fighting a very rapid threat along the same lines.”

To keep locals sheltered in the short-term, Glass hopes to see Jackson County towns move quickly to relax rules on car camping and open land to RVs. A few industrious locals are building tiny homes and trailers, and a network for home-swapping is forming, she said. Lewis, the realtor, pointed to shipping container homes devised by a Portland builder as another way officials could get creative.

If there is reason for optimism in the smoke blanketing Cascadia’s skies, it is that Oregon has lately been a fount of progressive ideas for addressing its housing woes, and it has some helpful political infrastructure to execute them. In the 1970s, a statewide land-use planning system established urban growth boundaries around all communities of a certain size, and introduced the idea that the state should have a role in land-use planning along with localities. Those rigid constraints are part of what has kept housing supply so low. But they also set the stage for the 2019 passage of House Bill 2001, which overrode single-family zoning in much of Oregon to make way for more duplexes, triplexes, accessory dwelling units, and cottages. Cities are now starting to rewrite codes to comply.

“That might be one of the things that leads to a stronger recovery in Talent and Phoenix — that ability to build back different housing types with more density,” which tends to bring down costs, said Robert Parker, a community planning expert who teaches at the University of Oregon.