Three years after the 2020 Alameda fire destroyed 19 mobile home parks and burned 1,500 to 1,700 manufactured homes and RVs in southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley, many of the region’s most economically vulnerable fire survivors remain displaced.

Down a gravel road, past what was once a vibrant mobile home park, five manufactured homes are tucked within a grove of trees unscathed by the fire. Pointing to a 300-gallon portable water tank in the back of his pickup truck, one resident said, “Our gas and water lines busted during the fire, but we still had electricity. So, we bought an electric stove, and we truck in our own water.”

When asked if the city knows, Mark shook his head.

“We keep to ourselves. We don’t make waves. We’ve seen what’s happened to friends who lost their homes when their (mobile home) park burned.”

Just weeks before, fire survivors expecting to move into Royal Oaks Manor mobile home park in Phoenix were notified that the 118 manufactured homes purchased by the state for more than $20 million were deemed uninhabitable and replacement homes won’t be ready until the spring of 2024.

While fingers are pointed to assess blame — the state for failing to properly store the modular homes, and the builder for faulty construction — fire survivors express rage and hopelessness as yet another promise is broken. City leaders and nonprofit coalitions’ advocates shared their own anger and dismay at the inequity of recovery and the state’s inability to provide timely solutions to the housing crisis.

“Survivors are done putting their faith and trust into state programs,” Elib Crist-Dwyer, disaster relief team lead for Rogue Action Center, said. “Families are doing the very best they can in the face of these broken systems within the state that have failed them and continue to put up roadblocks for recovery. The frustration and despair that people are feeling here, almost three years later, is really palpable.”

According to Crist-Dwyer, in every county across the nation that has been federally declared a disaster area, income disparity has grown exponentially.

Talent’s mayor, Darby Ayers-Flood, echoed Crist-Dwyer’s frustration.

As the mayor of a small town struggling to maintain its diverse cultural and economic community, Ayers-Flood witnessed the exploitation of crisis and trauma within weeks of the fire.

“Disaster capitalism is real. We’ve seen it happen right here in Talent. Most of the fire survivors still without housing were the uninsured. When they lost their home, they lost the $16–25,000 investment they’d paid in cash because that’s not how that culture works. The way they are positioned in our society to survive took the feet out from underneath them.”

Some find opportunities in catastrophes.

“The first phase of disaster capitalism is the developers who come in and snatch up all the properties of all the folks that can’t afford to come back,” she said. “Then there’s the investors and the people who build back bigger. Often not safe, just bigger. It’s facilitated by not just developers, but by everybody involved in rebuilding infrastructure, the government, FEMA; it’s all designed to open the doors to gentrification and capitalization.”

Ayers-Flood emphasized that what kept Talent from losing more displaced fire survivors was the city’s long-standing commitment to economic and cultural diversity, both before and after the fire. Equally essential to the recovery was the strong network of trusted nonprofits deep-seated within the community.

“These collaborative partnerships rooted in equity and inclusion have positioned the region to attract funding to help in the recovery.”

Rooted in the region’s Latino community, Coalición Fortaleza is orchestrating the first resident-owned community in Southern Oregon.

Coalición, as locals refer to them, emerged within months of the fire. Erica Alexia Ledesma, Coalición’s executive director, remembered sitting with 70 of Talent Mobile Estates’s tight-knit community of fire survivors.

“It was peak of the pandemic. Many had just lost everything they owned in the fire. We were wearing masks in the high school gym. It felt kind of illegal to be gathering. Our community started asking, ‘How can we rebuild our homes? Can we all put our money together and buy one of the one of the parks?’”

Two weeks after the meeting, community leaders met with CASA of Oregon through Zoom with the hopes of creating a cooperative ownership model.

In contrast to the traditional privately owned mobile home parks, where residents own their home but lease the property it sits on, resident-owned communities collectively own the land, roadways and other improvements. Rather than being beholden to park owners motivated by profit, resident-owned communities offer permanent affordable housing security through stabilized rent and wealth building through ownership and asset appreciation.

Navigating the process of recovery and land acquisition, Ledesma quickly realized the gaps that exist, the systemic profiteering, and the importance of having representation from the impacted community. To ensure that the region’s Latino community wasn’t exploited or neglected, Coalición focused on advocacy, outreach, and organizing the community engagement so that the marginalized groups of the region would have a voice in the decisions that ultimately impact their livelihood.

While negotiations with the previous owner of Talent Mobile Estates and the state were underway, Ledesma kept a low profile. “We’d heard from so many survivors that many people are feeling left out and forgotten. We didn’t want to boost hope before it was a reality.”

In July, Coalición Fortaleza hosted an open house spotlighting two of the homes that will soon become southern Oregon’s first resident-owned community. With the remaining manufactured homes to be on site by the end of the year, Coalición and its community partners are encouraging fire survivors to pre-apply for a manufactured home in Talent Mobile Estates. Selected by lottery, the pre-applicants will be screened in two phases. The first phase will focus on former Talent Mobile Estates residents displaced by fire. The second phase will choose families who lost a manufactured home in the two Southern Oregon fires.

As fire survivors continue to endure subpar transitional housing conditions, regional leaders hold out hope that Coalición’s resident-owned model might provide a solution not only to the fire’s survivors but also the chronic affordable housing crisis that has plagued their community.