Drive west on Skyway past the Magalia Post Office and you will pass a stretch of graded, fenced land on Lakeridge Circle, directly across from Holiday Market. For most of the past six years, that lot sat as raw acreage, one of the quieter reminders of everything the Camp Fire took with it. As of this year, that has changed. On February 6, 2026, the Community Housing Improvement Program broke ground there on the Lakeridge Circle Apartments, a 64-unit complex that will eventually house 64 families within walking distance of a grocery store, a post office and a bus stop.
What makes this project worth understanding isn't just its size. It's that seven years after the fire, across every community it touched, Lakeridge Circle is the only housing development funded through a Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery anywhere in Butte County's burn scar. Paradise, Magalia, Concow and Butte Creek Canyon all lost housing stock in November 2018. Only this one corner of Magalia got this particular kind of help to rebuild it.
Eighteen Acres, Eight Buildings, One Address
The site itself covers 18 acres across eight contiguous lots, running from the north corner of Lakeridge Circle down to just north of the Lakeridge Park parking lot. The finished project will hold eight two-story apartment buildings with a mix of one, two and three-bedroom units, plus a single resident community building. Amenities on the plans include a laundry room, a computer lab, a community garden and an outdoor recreation area, with CHIP staff and volunteers offering resident services on site.
CHIP will act as both developer and property manager once construction wraps, meaning the same organization that broke ground on the project in February will be the one answering the phone when a resident needs something fixed. CHIP president and CEO Seana O'Shaughnessy pointed to the location itself as part of the reason the site was chosen in the first place. The lot sits across the street from a grocery store, the post office and a bus stop, close enough to schools and recreation that residents won't need a car for daily errands.
The Long Path to a Groundbreaking
Most people driving past that lot over the last few years had no way of knowing how long the process behind it had already run. The timeline, pieced together from CHIP's own project records and local coverage, looks like this:
- 2020. The site is first identified through a community-based disaster recovery plan developed specifically for the Upper Ridge, aligning with both the Butte County General Plan and the Upper Ridge Community Plan.
- October 2022. Entitlement design documents for what CHIP internally called the "Magalia Apartments" are drafted, putting the project on paper for the first time.
- September 2023. CHIP publicly announces the project, at that point planned as 63 units, its first affordable housing development in Magalia.
- August 2024. CHIP's own project page still lists the development as being in early planning, with a financing gap between $6.8 million and $17.77 million still unresolved and a stated goal of applying for tax credits later that year.
- February 6, 2026. The project breaks ground as a 64-unit complex, with a reception at the Magalia Community Center followed by a ceremony at the construction site itself.
Six years passed between identifying the site and turning the first shovel of dirt. That gap is not a story about bureaucratic delay for its own sake. It's a story about how hard it is to finance rental housing that isn't expected to turn a profit, in a place where the population and tax base were both cut by roughly two-thirds.
"After a disaster, building back affordable rental housing is very hard," O'Shaughnessy said of the project. "Most of that was burned, and it's too cost-prohibitive for them to build it back. So in order to provide housing for the folks who lived here before that need affordable rents, we now have to build apartment complexes."
Why Nowhere Else on the Ridge Has One
Before the fire, much of Magalia's affordable rental stock wasn't built by developers at all. It was owned by small, local landlords, houses and duplexes rented out informally at rates working families could manage. The Camp Fire destroyed more than 13,500 single-family homes and more than 275 multifamily structures across the burn scar, and that category of housing, owned by individuals rather than institutions, was among the hardest hit and the least likely to come back on its own. Rebuilding a single rental house pencils out very differently than rebuilding a 64-unit complex with dedicated federal disaster recovery financing behind it.
That's the reason Lakeridge Circle stands alone. CDBG-DR funding exists specifically for this kind of gap, where the private market won't rebuild affordable rental stock at the volume a community lost it, and public agencies step in instead. Seven years into recovery, exactly one project in the entire burn scar has made it through that funding process to a groundbreaking. CHIP's other major multifamily project in the area, Paradise Community Village, was rebuilt and reopened after the fire as well, but Lakeridge Circle is the only one carrying the CDBG-DR designation specifically.
Who Gets to Live There
Lakeridge Circle Apartments will serve households earning between 30 and 50 percent of the area median income for Butte County, a range aimed at family units, seniors and individuals who need income-restricted rents to stay in the community. The Housing Authority of the County of Butte has already approved project-based Section 8 vouchers for 25 of the 64 units, which will provide rental subsidies for some of the lowest-income households on the list.
The address matters here as much as the income guidelines. A 64-unit complex placed somewhere without walkable access to a grocery store, a post office or transit would create a different set of daily problems for the people living there. This site was chosen in part because it solves for that, putting residents within walking distance of Holiday Market, the post office on Skyway, and a bus stop that connects to the rest of the Ridge.
What the Corner Looks Like From Here
Construction was already underway when CHIP held its groundbreaking ceremony back in February, and the framing on those eight buildings will keep climbing from here. The project won't undo what the fire took from Magalia's rental market on its own. Sixty-four units is a fraction of what existed before 2018, and CHIP's own project records acknowledge that the remaining county allocation for this kind of funding is not enough to replicate this elsewhere. What the groundbreaking does confirm is that at least one piece of the Upper Ridge's pre-fire housing mix, the kind that let people of different incomes live in the same neighborhood, is coming back in a form the market alone wasn't going to rebuild.
For now, the story on that corner is a construction site. But it's a construction site with a name, a funding source, and seven years of paperwork behind it, which is more than most vacant lots on the Ridge can say.
If you're curious what new construction like this means for your corner of Magalia, the team at Doug Speicher knows this stretch of the Ridge as well as anyone. Get your free home valuation and a straight answer about what's changing around you.
