Park Fire evacuees can apply for $2,000 grants to ease displacement costs

CHICO, Calif. — Park Fire evacuees can now take advantage of a new $2,000 grant to assist with costs associated with displacement.

Sierra North Valley REALTORS and the Tehama County Association of Realtors hosted a grant application event in Chico on Friday, Sep. 6. Applications will be accepted through Oct. 25.

"When you have people who are evacuated they're not expecting to leave their homes, they're not expecting to get a hotel room," Sierra North Valley Realtors CEO Alisha Ake said. "It’s important that we give back to our communities and allow them to have some of that financial burden removed from them or at least help in any way that we can."

The grant is funded by theREALTORS Relief Foundation, under the National Association of REALTORS. The association gave $1 million to assist those impacted by the Park Fire.

Applicants don’t have to be insured to apply. Ake says many of the people who were impacted by the fire did not have insurance due to the state's ongoing insurance market crisis.

"Unfortunately this goes back to the [2018] Camp Fire," she said. "When that happened, we saw a huge surge of insurance not being renewed for our mountain communities, even our foothill communities so what we’re hearing a lot of right now is people didn’t have insurance at all and now they’ve lost everything."

Northstate Assemblymember James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) told KRCR Thursday, he believes insurance is one of the biggest issues in the state right now.

"There’s no affordable insurance," Gallagher said. "Too many insurers have pulled out of California, we need to stabilize that market, get more people back in and the competition is what will lead to more affordable rates. We got to do that first and I worry we’re not acting fast enough."

More information about the application can be found online here.