The developers of the new structure promised affordable apartments for all the seniors from Journey’s End who had been displaced in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. But it had been so long since the 2017 firestorm wiped out 2,800 homes in Santa Rosa, including the 162 mobile homes at Journey’s End.

How many of the Journey’s End residents would still be around?

“She and I would hold hands and I’d say, ‘Let’s just keep you alive until you can get back there,’ ” Howe  recalled. “Barbara would say ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it.’ ”

She made it.

On Aug.19, King, who had been living in Santa Rosa with one of her three sons, became one of the first residents to arrive when Burbank Housing and Related California completed the first building to rise at the former Journey’s End property. Eventually four buildings will sprout from the property — 162 affordable senior units, renamed Laurel at Perennial Park; and 260 market-rate apartments.

From her third-floor window, King enjoys watching the bulldozers preparing the next building site as she drinks her coffee and reads her newspaper. She misses the mobile home park but can’t believe her luck to end up in a spacious apartment complex with a library, grand piano, community gardens, lounges and theater.

It’s a new type of urban architecture for a city that had seen little in the way of multifamily development in decades.

“I absolutely didn’t anticipate the openness of the interior design and the gorgeous decor of this place,” King said. “Who did this? Who got all this beautiful stuff together? It had to be somebody with a lot of class and taste.”

LEFT: The dining area at Laurel at Perennial Park in Santa Rosa. RIGHT: Lights inside a dining area at Laurel at Perennial Park. Photos by Yalonda James/The Chronicle

 

Six years after the Tubbs firestorm scorched a 12-mile swath through Santa Rosa, the parts of the city that were torched are mostly rebuilt. Most of the 1,200 single-family homes that were destroyed in Coffey Park have been replaced — many of them bigger than what was there before — while the majority of the 1,500 structures burned in the wealthier enclave of Fountaingrove have been reconstructed.

Yet, the evolution of Journey’s End shows that some of the Santa Rosa that has emerged from the ashes is different than what stood before. The fact that the fire swept through urban neighborhoods, and incinerated homes in what had previously been open agriculture land, underscored the dangers of building out, rather than up. While Santa Rosa planners had long been trying to attract housing builders to build higher density, rather than sprawl, it took the Tubbs Fire for the idea to gain traction.

Now a new crop of buildings are taller and denser than anything that had previously existed in the sprawling North Bay city, which has grown from 30,000 residents when Journey’s End opened in the 1950s to nearly 180,000 today.

That shift has been facilitated by Rep. Mike Thompson, who sponsored a bill making disaster tax credits available for affordable housing developments that prioritize victims of the fire. The state also awarded nearly $40 million in funding for multifamily housing catering to fire victims.

Megan Basinger, director of housing and community services for the city, said about 370 units in five projects will be funded from the combination of the disaster tax credit and the state money. Other market-rate towers are in the works downtown, putting Santa Rosa in good position to meet its state housing goals of permitting 4,600 units by 2031.

“Almost every project you see going on in Santa Rosa right now, every tower crane, is being funded by disaster credits,” said Larry Florin, CEO of Burbank Housing. “They were an incredible boon to the recovery efforts and 100% we would not be here in this position if it were not for that.”

The growth and transformation of Santa Rosa is something that King has been watching since she arrived there in 1957, at age 17. At the time it was a semirural market town that was home to the Naval Auxiliary Landing Field as well as regional headquarters for the U.S. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. There was little of the Wine Country tourism that has transformed much of Sonoma County over the past two decades.

King raised her four kids and six grandkids in the town and worked as a youth counselor at the long-shuttered Los Guilicos School for Girls, a 350-acre correctional facility for “delinquent and wayward” teenagers. She later worked as a health care tech in a hospital emergency room, and at Hewlett-Packard’s Santa Rosa facility.

Eventually, in 2012, after a decade in Arizona caring for her parents, she moved back to Santa Rosa, finding a welcoming community of seniors at Journey’s End. There she was president of the residents association, organized dances and potlucks and spent afternoons with Chingy, her shih tzu, while entertaining neighbors who came by to pick peaches off her peach tree.

“They were scrumptious — I’d say, ‘Take all you want,’ ” she said.

On the night of the Tubbs Fire, King was asleep when some younger neighbors banged on the door.

“They said, ‘Nana get out, get out, get out,’ ” King recalled. “I said, ‘Why, what’s going on? ’  When I went to my bathroom the window was glowing orange from the flames. I had my PJs on and grabbed my dog, my portable oxygen, my purse and the dog’s leash.”

At first she tried to drive to Coffey Park, where one of her sons and some of her grandchildren lived. The police turned her around.

“They said you can’t go up there — Coffey Park is on fire,” she said, “I said, ‘My kids, what about my kids? ’ ”

As it turned out, everyone in the extended family made it out safely. King ended up at the home of another one of her sons, and wound up staying there until this past August when she moved back to the old Journey’s End property.

Last week, King was in the lounge area when she met Florin and Ann Silverberg, CEO of Related California’s Northern California Affordable division.

“Are you the people responsible for this beautiful place?” she asked them.

Florin and Silverberg explained how hard they had worked to ensure that there would be a place for former Journey’s End residents who wanted to return. They had managed to keep contact with about 110 of the displaced tenants, and about 40 are expected to eventually move into the new buildings.

Florin said that many residents had moved on — to Lake County, to Sacramento, to Arizona — where a dollar goes farther than it does in the Bay Area.

“People have to move on with their lives,” he said.

Silverberg explained that the legacy of the Tubbs Fire weighed heavily as they planned the new community, which will have a 1-acre park separating the senior development from the market-rate apartments. Most developments are filled with newcomers; this one was designed in part for the people who had been driven out by the Tubbs Fire.

“We wanted it to be high-quality, beautiful, affordable, of course, but enriching as an experience,” Silverberg said. “We want amenities that support this community that already existed and had been through so much.”

Silverberg explained how the previous property owner had insisted that they not keep the Journey’s End name, which had taken on sinister implications given the fact that two people had died in the mobile home park during the Tubbs fire. She asked King what she thought of the new name.

“I think it’s very elegant,” King said.