Last year’s wine country wildfires destroyed nearly 2,700 homes in Santa Rosa, knocking out 5 percent of the city’s already scarce housing stock. Along with the practical difficulties of resettling and rebuilding, city leaders were confronted with two thorny and related questions: 1) Whether and how to rebuild in fire-prone areas, and 2) Whether to build more housing than was originally there to help ease the city’s sky-high housing prices.
