When the Marshall Fire’s hurricane-force winds tore through the Sans Souci mobile home park on Dec. 30, 2021, they ripped half the roof off 70-year-old Jody Bill’s home, rolling it up “like the lid of a sardine can.”
Half her house was exposed to the elements. Her pipes froze, then broke. A friend regularly stopped by to shovel snow from her living room.
Despite having limited insurance, Bill’s repairs remain inadequate. A tarp now covers the new roof section, and her former insurer has refused to renew her policy. “It’s nonlivable, and I’m living in it,” she said.
The struggles of mobile home residents like Bill highlight the uneven recovery from the Marshall Fire, even three years later. Despite millions in federal aid, preexisting vulnerabilities, inadequate insurance and bureaucratic hurdles have left people behind. Boulder County’s mobile home parks — home to some of the area’s most economically vulnerable residents — have recovered more slowly than other areas. While nearly two-thirds of single-family homes destroyed by the fire have been rebuilt, fewer than half of wind-damaged mobile homes have been repaired, based on those receiving financial assistance from the city or county.
Bill spent her insurance payout on temporary roof repairs, a rental apartment while her home was unlivable, and fixing her car, which also broke during this period. But she doesn’t have the money to permanently fix her home and hasn’t received financial support from the government or local philanthropy.
She’s not alone. The winds damaged 456 mobile homes across Boulder County, most within the City of Boulder limits. Of those, only 159 have been repaired with government assistance, primarily from the city. Neither the city nor county tracks repairs funded by residents out of pocket or insurance payouts, but many homes remain damaged.
For some, affording repairs is impossible. Surveys show almost three-quarters of mobile home residents have household incomes of $40,000 or less, and most lack insurance. Repairs typically cost $10,000 to $20,000, according to Bill Cole, Boulder County’s housing partnership and policy manager — a big expense for many.
“It’s a luxury to have insurance on your home,” said Jeri Curry, executive director of Marshall ROC, a coalition supporting long-term recovery. She added that the out-of-pocket costs are significant. “Ten thousand dollars to a mobile home owner is like $300,000 to a single-family home.”
Some residents with little or no insurance turned to federal aid, but hit regulatory barriers, according to interviews with residents. Bill, for instance, is disqualified from federally funded wind damage repair grants — administered by Boulder County — because her home was built before 1976, the year federal safety and construction guidelines for mobile homes were enacted, even though older homes are more vulnerable to damage.
Sans Souci is also outside Boulder city limits, making her ineligible for the city grant programs. Meanwhile, the Community Foundation Boulder County focused its substantial — but insufficient, given the Marshall Fire’s $2 billion in damages — wildfire fund on supporting thousands of underinsured survivors whose homes were destroyed by the fire.
“I don’t know what to do,” Bill, who is an artist, said. “As of the 30th [of December], it’s going to be three years of this. I think we’re looked at as the bottom of the list.”
Bill’s story reflects a larger issue: In several of the seven affected parks, a majority of mobile homes were built before 1976, according to data from the City of Boulder and a survey of San Lazaro residents. In one park, 69% of the homes fall into this category. All these homeowners are ineligible for federal aid, as are undocumented immigrants.
In the meantime, Bill has moved all her art from the living room to the other side of the house or into storage to protect it from damage. She wants to replace her home with a converted shipping container, designed to better withstand disasters, but the $100,000 price tag is out of reach. Her current home is more vulnerable than it was three years ago. With Sans Souci’s high risk for wildfires, wind and flooding, another disaster feels inevitable — and when it comes, residents like Bill will face an even steeper climb toward recovery.
A slower county response
Most of the mobile homes within city limits that were damaged by wind qualified for federal funding, according to Laurel Mattrey, a senior policy adviser for the city. And many of those who did not qualify are eligible for repairs funded by the city’s Climate Tax dollars.
In 2022, relatively soon after the Marshall Fire, the City of Boulder launched its Wind Damage Repair and Efficiency Upgrade Program using this Climate Tax funding.
The county, however, waited on federal funding and has been slower to act.
In January 2024 — two years after the Marshall Fire — the county secured $2 million for wind damage repair grants through HUD’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery. Nearly a year later, only 11 manufactured homes damaged by the winds have been repaired with these funds.
The county partnered with the city on repairs in 2022 and 2023 but delayed its own program until securing the funding and hiring a manager. Repairs also didn’t begin until warmer weather in the spring, according to Cole.
“These people were on hold forever,” Curry said, referring to the mobile home residents. “There was nothing that they could really tap into for a really long time.”
Of the damaged mobile homes still awaiting repairs outside city limits, 36 residents have submitted applications for a county grant — believed to represent only a fraction of those in need. While the program is open, it is still marked “Coming Soon” on city and county websites. To spread the word, county staff have held outreach events at San Lazaro and Vista Village, working with interpreters and the city’s Community Connectors, a community engagement program for historically excluded communities.
The county has identified six mobile home communities affected by the storm: Boulder Meadows, Vista Village, Mapleton, Orchard Grove, San Lazaro and Table Mesa Village. So far, all completed repairs have been at San Lazaro, though work has begun in other parks. Sans Souci, where Bill lives, is not on the list because of the pre-1976 exemption for federal aid. In October 2023, Marshall ROC teamed up with Mennonite Disaster Services and the Amish Communities of Colorado to repair 20 of the most severely damaged homes at Sans Souci and Table Mesa Village. While this helped some, it left homes like Bill’s and her neighbor Renee’s — with a hole still exposing her living room — untouched.
If repair costs remain between $10,000 and $20,000 per home, the county’s grant program might cover repairs for about 120 more homes — likely still falling short of the total need.
The county’s ability to manage these projects has been hampered by staffing challenges. A mobile home communities project manager, hired in May 2023 to oversee the program, left the position and has not been replaced, according to Cole. Cole has taken on that role on top of his current one. Cole is also running a second program to repair mobile homes in poor condition, funded by $5 million from Covid-era ARPA dollars. The county has also applied for more funding to repair mobile homes through a HUD Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement (PRICE) grant.
“I think we’re going to have more demand than we have resources, which hopefully will show that we need to continue to do the work into the future,” Cole said.
Some residents stuck with no way forward
A 2023 state action plan for the Marshall Fire stated that people like Bill, whose homes are too old to qualify for federal repair grants, could be eligible to have their homes replaced through a state-administered program. The same applies to homes needing repairs that cost more than half their replacement value.
Over 100 mobile homes likely qualify based on age alone, but Curry believes only 10 replacements were planned. She knows people who applied for a replacement two years ago and still haven’t heard back, and are afraid to make significant repairs that might disqualify them. “If you fix a home too well, then you aren’t eligible to get a replacement,” Curry said.
Recovering from a climate disaster is never easy — losing everything at once leaves lasting trauma that many Marshall Fire survivors, regardless of their previous wealth, continue to grapple with. A 2021 report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) found that disaster responses often deepen economic disparities: Those with less wealth lose a larger share of what they have and frequently receive less financial assistance. Crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe can exacerbate these inequities, favoring survivors with wealthier social networks. Research from CU showed that Marshall Fire GoFundMe campaigns reflected this disparity, with wealthier households both more likely to crowdfund and raising significantly more money when they did.
Nearly two-thirds of the 1,100 homes destroyed by the fire have been rebuilt, far exceeding the national average for such disasters, creating a sense of rebirth in the burn areas. Bill repeatedly pointed out the size of the homes being built in the Marshall Fire burn area across the road from Sans Souci. Some of those homes are not occupied by their original owners, but the image still makes her feel left behind.
“What makes people sad is they feel forgotten, because everyone else has moved on,” Curry said. “And they’re still stuck in this horrendous cycle.”