Before Bidwell Mansion even stopped smoking, Chico’s homeless were being blamed | Opinion
The loss of Chico’s Bidwell Mansion in a devastating fire Wednesday morning was akin to Sacramentans waking up to see the Tower Bridge consumed in fiery hell. It is an indescribable loss of a state landmark that cuts deep to the heart of the city of Chico and all who love the north state.
The pink Victorian-era Bidwell Mansion was built in 1865 by the city’s founding family, John and Annie Bidwell. It was a symbol of the pioneering days of Chico, as well as a rare, tangible example of early California statehood.
Every school child in Chico has a memory of visiting the mansion, especially around Christmastime when the house was dressed in holiday splendor.
The tragedy of losing the Bidwell Mansion — and it looks likely to be entirely lost, just a shell of the home precariously remains — was compounded when a fire official suggested in the immediate aftermath that Chico’s crown jewel was lost because of a nearby “warming fire.”
The phrase “warming fire” is nothing but thinly-veiled language for blaming the incident on people who are homeless.
The remark was unbecoming of the fire department and irresponsible, particularly considering Chico’s fraught history with homeless people. It was a lapse of both judgment and human decency.
City can’t stop the rumor mill it started
Come Thursday afternoon, the Chico Fire Department had already begun walking back their initial comments, but Chico Fire Assistant Chief Chris Zinko had already told a local television station exactly what he thought.
Action News Now reported that Zinko said the fire was “reported as an illegal burn around 3:15 a.m. and a person was seen leaving the area” and that “they are working to identify that person.”
That single statement set the city’s teeth on edge. A homeless person has set the city’s beloved Bidwell Mansion on fire? The way the city rolled information out to the public created the possibility of fanning anti-homeless prejudices long held. Social media comment sections on local pages were already roiling by Wednesday evening.
Chico has a history of hostility toward homeless people, which even a federal judge has called problematic. Rather than providing necessary shelter and services, it defaults to disproven methods, such as moving homeless people around like a game of three-card monte as city leaders argue and counter-sue to avoid responsibility.
This history has made Zinko’s statement all the more troublesome.
A devastating loss for Chico
We simply don’t know what caused the Bidwell Mansion fire yet and it was irresponsible of Chico officials to suggest anything else.
On Thursday, Chico City Manager Mark Sorensen told the Chico Enterprise-Record that there had only been an emergency services call for a suspected warming fire in the area, around the time the fire broke out. (A small, wooded creek that runs through campus and directly past the mansion, and the Chico Fire Department responds frequently to small campfires alongside it.)
“However,” Sorenson added, “currently the root cause of the blaze does not appear to be the result of a warming fire. That is as far as I would want to go at this time. The facts of the matter are coming together.”
But it was too late. The implication made by Zinko that morning now has bigger legs than the truth ever will.
Renovations at the mansion
Bidwell Mansion was undergoing massive repairs to numerous parts of the home, including a roof refurbishment that necessitated extensive scaffolding around the building. Any number of flammable incidents might occur during the roofing process.
Meanwhile, Chico’s overnight temperatures dip to near-freezing this time of the year and indeed, on Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, the city clocked a temperature of just 32 degrees.
Had the city built enough shelter beds for everyone who needed them, there would be no need for warming fires. But the city has chosen instead to embrace policies that hurt homeless people — like too many other California cities more focused on the wants of their housed residents.
Anti-homeless sentiment in Chico
The city of Chico is already attempting to wriggle out of a settlement agreement from 2022, in which a federal judge ruled that the city cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances or conduct evictions on people who are homeless without available shelter to offer them first.
But since the federal Grant’s Pass ruling earlier this year, which said local governments can enforce camping regulations against homeless people without violating their Eighth Amendment rights, the city has argued it has no legal responsibility to hold itself to a settlement agreement that stipulates the opposite.
In 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said that the number of anti-homeless ordinances and how Chico officials were wielding them had helped fuel “dehumanizing” attitudes against unhoused people, according to reporting by Chico Sol.
The city of Chico bans people from sitting on sidewalks in commercial districts or from resting in building entrances and restricts the use of shopping carts in public. It also enforces the closure of Bidwell Park after nightfall, a huge public park of more than 3,600 acres.
The city has had numerous issues setting up approved camping sites and shelters, mainly thanks to NIMBY backlash and a lack of political will — and all to deal with a homeless population that is approximately one-tenth the size of Sacramento’s.
During a 2021 hearing in the Warren v. Chico case, Senior Judge Morrison C. England, Jr. told the city that it seemed it was “trying to enforce ordinances to make the public feel good,” and not because those ordinances had anything to do with the actual law.
The judge chastised the city for writing anti-homeless ordinances based on community attitudes rather than on facts. Judge England also said Chico leaders had a responsibility to educate the public and stop the spread of misinformation. Three years later, Judge England’s admonishment will be put to the test again in a fire investigation that must be fair and factual.
Now we’re going to find out if Chico will base its investigation on the facts — or on its prejudices.
This story was originally published December 14, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
