Lake County has thousands more residents than it did in 2010, and fewer homes to put them in.
Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the county added 3,498 residents and lost 1,272 housing units. Federal estimates put almost the whole drop in one year: the housing count fell from 35,679 units in 2015 to 34,543 in 2016, a loss of more than 1,100 homes in 12 months.
That 12 months? The Valley Fire. The September 2015 blaze burned across Middletown, Cobb and Hidden Valley Lake, destroyed nearly 2,000 structures and took more than 1,300 homes with it. Over the same 2015-to-2016 stretch, Mendocino, Napa and Sonoma counties all gained housing units, by federal estimate. Lake lost them, and it lost them in the burn year.
The county doesn’t dispute the cause. Its own Housing Action and Implementation Plan, adopted last August, states it plainly: “The loss of housing stock in Lake County has been primarily due to the fires over the last 10 years,” and the county “has lost housing stock every year since 2015 due to wildfires.” State Department of Finance figures in the same plan put the total loss at 1,903 units between 2015 and 2023 — 1,426 single-family homes, 442 mobile homes and 35 units in larger buildings. The city of Lakeport’s housing element reaches the same conclusion, citing “multiple regional disasters, including flooding and wildfires” for a countywide reduction in housing units.
None of those documents says how many of the burned homes got rebuilt.
Nearly 11 years after the Valley Fire, there’s still no public tally of rebuilding. And by its own accounting to the state, Lake County lost a bigger share of its housing to fire than Sonoma County did in the 2017 North Bay firestorm. The county marked the anniversary last year with a newsletter titled “Valley Fire: Ten Years Later.” It carries no rebuild figures. The Board of Supervisors hasn’t gotten a recovery update with a rebuilt-versus-destroyed number since the fire’s second anniversary. The permit records that would answer the question have never been published.
The absence isn’t for lack of a place to put the number. Lake County is now writing the state-required plan that sets its housing targets for the next eight years, and that plan’s supposed to account for exactly this. State law directs the regional planners to weigh, among a dozen factors, the “loss of units during a state emergency during the previous planning period that have yet to be rebuilt.”
Here’s how Lake County’s draft methodology, resubmitted to state housing officials in December, handled that factor: “Data was not available regarding wildfire or other natural disasters and Methodology Committee members did not consider this a significant factor in determining the allocation of housing units.”
The committee reached for the same sentence three more times — to wave off assisted-housing losses, farmworker housing and homelessness, each dismissed with the same claim that the data wasn’t there.
For the fire losses, at least, the data was there. The county’s own implementation plan, adopted four months before that methodology went to the state, breaks the loss down by year and by structure type. The Department of Finance publishes it. The census records it. What nobody’s produced is the other half of the count — how many came back — and the body deciding how much new housing Lake County needs has now formally decided the question isn’t significant.
The gap has consequences on the ground. In Anderson Springs, one of the hardest-hit Valley Fire communities, 119 home sites sat ineligible for rebuilding permits for years while the community waited on a wastewater fix. Lake County is permitting new homes again, but by the state’s own count its housing stock in 2024 was still more than 1,200 units below where it stood the summer before the fire. How much of that gap is fire homes that never came back? The county has the permit records to say. It hasn’t.