Paradise, California is being rebuilt, but the town is still far from what it was before the Camp Fire destroyed it in November 2018. By early 2022, the town had issued certificates of occupancy for 4,528 residential units. The population, however, tells a more sobering story: as of July 2024, roughly 9,100 people live in Paradise, compared to about 26,200 before the fire. The rebuilding is real and ongoing, but Paradise is a fundamentally different place than it was.
How Much Housing Has Been Rebuilt
The Camp Fire destroyed nearly 14,000 homes, making it the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history at the time. Between the fire and January 2022, the town issued certificates of occupancy for 4,528 residential units, meaning those homes were completed and cleared for people to move in. That figure includes 242 units in multi-family buildings, all rental housing, which represents about 32 percent of the roughly 750 apartment and multi-family units lost in the fire.
Construction has continued since 2022, but the pace has been shaped by familiar obstacles: insurance shortfalls, supply chain delays, contractor shortages, and the sheer cost of building to modern fire-resistant standards. Many former residents settled elsewhere during the years it took to clear debris, restore utilities, and begin permitting. Some never came back.
Population Recovery Remains Slow
The census numbers capture how drastically the fire reshaped the community. Paradise had 26,218 residents in 2010. By the April 2020 census, that number had plummeted to 4,764. The July 2024 estimate puts the population at 9,114, a meaningful recovery from the post-fire low but still only about 35 percent of the pre-fire community.
That gap reflects more than just housing supply. Many longtime residents, particularly retirees and people on fixed incomes, couldn’t afford to rebuild or chose not to wait years for the town’s infrastructure to come back online. Younger families and workers drawn by new construction and lower housing costs relative to other parts of California have made up some of the difference, but Paradise’s demographic profile has shifted.
Stricter Building Codes for New Homes
The Paradise that’s being rebuilt looks different by design. The town adopted some of the most stringent local building standards in California, aligned with the Institute for Business and Home Safety’s Wildfire Prepared Home standard. Every new structure requires a Class-A fire-rated roof (the highest rating), enclosed eaves that prevent embers from entering the attic, ignition-resistant construction materials on exterior walls and decks, and a five-foot non-combustible zone around the building. That buffer zone means no mulch, no wood chips, no vegetation right up against the house.
These requirements add cost, but they reflect hard lessons. The Camp Fire moved so fast partly because embers traveled ahead of the flame front, igniting homes through vents, gutters, and wood fences. The new codes target those exact vulnerabilities.
Power Lines Are Going Underground
One of the most significant infrastructure changes is the burial of electrical lines. PG&E equipment was found to have sparked the Camp Fire, and the utility has since moved more than 90 percent of distribution power lines within Paradise underground. Work continues on the remaining sections, including projects along Skyway and Pentz Road expected to wrap up by early 2026.
Underground lines eliminate several common ignition sources at once: no more downed wires from storms, no trees falling into power lines, no car-versus-pole accidents sparking fires. PG&E calls the approach “more than 98 percent effective” at preventing those types of ignitions. For a town built in a forest on a ridge, that’s a substantial change in baseline risk.
Water, Roads, and Community Facilities
The fire didn’t just burn homes. It contaminated the water system, melting plastic service lines and introducing hazardous chemicals into the pipes. The Paradise Irrigation District undertook a major recovery project to repair and replace damaged water infrastructure, including replacing a key reservoir with two 1.5-million-gallon steel tanks. Restoring clean, reliable water service was a prerequisite for any meaningful rebuilding, and the project moved through environmental review and approval in 2021.
Hazardous tree removal has been another enormous effort. Along Honey Run Road alone, agencies identified 2,256 fire-damaged trees that posed a falling risk, with 769 inside town limits and the rest in surrounding Butte County. All were removed by licensed operators, and the road is being assessed for safe reopening. Across the broader burn area, tens of thousands of dead trees had to come down before neighborhoods could be cleared for construction.
On the community side, Paradise received a nearly $17.9 million federal grant to establish the Paradise RISE center on the high school campus, a workforce development facility with training programs run through the local school district, Butte College, and construction industry partners. The project reflects a practical priority: training local workers to fill the construction and skilled-trade jobs the rebuilding effort demands. A new five-story building in town includes community space, open areas, and a children’s play area, adding back some of the public gathering places the fire erased.
What Paradise Looks Like Now
If you drive through Paradise today, you’ll see a town in transition. New homes with modern materials sit on streets where empty lots and bare foundations still outnumber occupied houses in some neighborhoods. Mature pine trees are gone from many blocks, replaced by open sky and young landscaping. Commercial activity has returned along Skyway, the main road through town, but the variety and density of shops, restaurants, and services is thinner than before.
The town is functional. Schools operate. Grocery stores and gas stations are open. The fire station and town hall are staffed. But Paradise has not been “rebuilt” in the sense of returning to its previous size and character. It is roughly a third of its former population, with thousands of lots still empty and infrastructure projects still underway. What has emerged is a smaller, more fire-resistant version of the original community, shaped by people who chose to stay or return and by building codes that didn’t exist before 2018.