Remote workers from San Francisco flocked to Lake Tahoe during the pandemic. Now, thousands of people are being forced to evacuate as the Caldor fire bears down on the serene Northern California enclave.
Avery Hartmans  Â
- Thousands of people were ordered to evacuate parts of Lake Tahoe amid the spread of the Caldor fire.
- Lake Tahoe saw an influx of residents amid the pandemic as remote workers fled the Bay Area.
- The region is also an enclave for tech billionaires like Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg.
As the Caldor fire continues its relentless spread through Northern California, it's bearing down on one of the region's most serene - and exclusive - enclaves: Lake Tahoe.
On Monday, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection issued an evacuation order for all of South Lake Tahoe, an area that borders the Nevada state line and is in the path of the encroaching fire, which ignited on August 14 near Little Mountain in the Sierra Nevada mountains, according to KCRA in Sacramento.
The fire has since burned more than 191,000 acres, and Cal Fire said on Tuesday that the fire is 16% contained, a decrease from 19% on Sunday, according to KCRA. Firefighters say that the blaze could take another two weeks to contain.
Smoke from the blaze began impacting the region's residents last week, many of whom had begun decamping for San Francisco or Southern California, The New York Times reported last week.
Lake Tahoe has long been a vacation destination for residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, but in recent years, tech billionaires have began putting down roots along the shores of the lake. During the pandemic, Bay Area residents followed suit, snapping up real estate on the lake and its surrounding towns.
Now, they may be in the direct path of a wildfire.
Here's how Lake Tahoe became an oasis for wealthy residents, particularly amid the pandemic, before becoming the latest region threatened by the effects of climate change.
Lake Tahoe was a popular vacation destination as far back as the late 1800s, but tourism began booming in the middle of the 20th century due to a combination of factors, including the construction of casinos on the Nevada side of the lake and the 1960 Winter Olympics at nearby Squaw Valley.
Source: Go Tahoe North
In the 1950s and '60s, Lake Tahoe drew the likes of John F. Kennedy, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., as well as Frank Sinatra, who owned the Cal-Neva Hotel and Casino. The region has continued to draw a mix of musicians over the years, including Cher, Gene Simmons, and Mike Love, and actors like Jeremy Renner.
Source: Go Tahoe North, SF Gate
In recent years, as Silicon Valley has minted a new generation of multi-millionaires and billionaires, those ultra-wealthy techies have flocked to Lake Tahoe as well.
In 2018, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison purchased the Cal Neva Lodge - the resort previously owned by Frank Sinatra - for $36 million. Ellison plans to turn it into a Nobu hotel and restaurant, but the project has been put on hold during the pandemic.
Source: Outside Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter
Ellison also owns several additional multimillion-dollar properties in Tahoe, including a 7.6-acre compound in the wealthy area of Incline Village, Nevada. The compound, which was compiled in three separate deals, has 420 feet of lakefront, two piers, and a private beach. There's also a pool and spa and several separate dwellings, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
In 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bought two adjacent properties near Tahoe City for a total of $59 million. The combination of the two properties provided Zuckerberg with 600 feet of private waterfront on the lake.
Source: Business Insider
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom owns a home on Lake Tahoe's north shore. The lakefront property has vaulted ceilings in the living room and a secret pub, and mid-century-inspired luxury interiors.
Source: Architectural Digest
But it's not just tech CEOs who have descended on Lake Tahoe. As the pandemic hit the Bay Area in the spring of 2020, many local residents fled to the vacation town.
Local school enrollment boomed last year. Lake Tahoe School, a private school for kids in pre-K through eighth grade, hit its maximum enrollment in 2020, and its sister schools in nearby Truckee and Reno, Nevada, saw 10% to 20% jumps in enrollment, Insider reported.
Source: Insider
One local realtor told Outside Magazine that the Tahoe-area real estate boom was "absolutely bananas" in 2020. Clients converged from Los Angeles and the Bay Area as their companies shifted to remote work. Buyers snapped up homes, sight unseen, and some made unsolicited offers to local homeowners.
Source: Outside Magazine
Truckee, California, a town just north of Lake Tahoe, saw an 88% jump in home sales from December 2019 to December 2019, according to Outside, citing Zillow data.
Source: Outside Magazine
In Incline Village, the median home price reached $2.175 million, about 2.5 times higher than the year prior, according to SF Gate.
Source: SF Gate
Overall, more than 2,350 homes were sold in the Tahoe region in 2020, totaling $3.28 billion in sales - a jump from $1.76 billion the year prior, according to Outside, citing data from local realtor Sierra Sotheby's.
Source: Outside Magazine
The influx of Bay Area residents was particularly high in Truckee, which saw a 1,082% increase in residents migrating from San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, citing United States Postal Service data. Many of the new Tahoe-area residents worked for tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple.
But now, as the fires descend on Tahoe, many of those new residents are fleeing once again, The New York Times reported. Smoke from the Caldor fire began overwhelming the region last week, shrouding the lake in a dense haze that sent the air quality past hazardous levels.
Source: The New York Times
"This is what climate change looks like," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Nature Conservancy, told The Times. "It's overlapping crises. People try to escape one crisis and stumble into another one."
Source: The New York Times
On Monday, thousands of residents on southern and western shores of the lake were ordered to evacuate as the fire burned a few miles from South Lake Tahoe, leading to standstill traffic on local highways. Officials said more than 20,000 structures are at risk as the fire bears down on the region, according to The Times.
Source: The New York Times
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