(Bloomberg) -- Urban dwellers who fled San Francisco during pandemic lockdowns are now facing massive wildfires in popular places of refuge.

An inferno that’s grown to the second-largest in state history has led to thousands of evacuations in Napa and Sonoma counties, where real estate demand has soared since the start of the pandemic as well-to-do Californians seek places with more space and scenery. Now, many people are being forced back to the city.

“It’s surreal,” said Janie Green, 63, who decamped with her husband Jeff to their house in St. Helena in March. As weeks of coronavirus shutdowns turned into months, they had been considering getting rid of their San Francisco apartment altogether. But on Friday, the couple returned after evacuating their Napa home.

“The thing about life right now is that decisions are being made for us,” Green said. “You’re being guided by what’s important and necessary.”

Californians are confronting a convergence of disasters with the wildfires, extreme weather and sudden power outages -- all alongside a pandemic that’s taken more than 12,000 lives in the state. Along with the LNU Lightning Complex that’s burning around the wine-growing regions north of San Francisco, large blazes to the east and in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties to the south have been raging since last week, sending residents fleeing and smoke choking the Bay Area.

People like the Greens are among the fortunate in the dire situation, yet their plight shows that no haven is entirely safe. San Francisco, like dense urban areas across the U.S., is facing the prospect that residents will flee for the long term in the pandemic, while outlying areas prosper. Rents in the city plunged 11% this month from a year earlier and condo sales are cooling. Meanwhile, contracts for home sales in Napa County almost doubled this summer, according to Compass.

“This has temporarily entirely halted that trend,” said Deniz Kahramaner, the founder of Atlasa, a data-focused real estate brokerage based in San Francisco. “A lot of my buyers who were looking to buy in those places are now seeing the options, seeing what’s going to happen. Some of them are starting to say, ‘Well, what if we come a bit closer to San Francisco.’”

Ginger Martin, a real estate agent for high-end homes in Napa and Sonoma counties, said she’s had an “incredibly brisk” season because of the pandemic. Last week, she was showing a $4.2 million home to prospective buyers as one of the LNU fires burned nearby. Later that evening, the neighborhood was evacuated.

Martin said it’s too soon to say what effect the blazes will have. Business typically slows down around fire season, she said, especially after the 2017 Tubbs Fire in wine country, which destroyed more than 5,600 structures and killed 22 people. The current LNU fire has been in more remote areas, so far burning nearly 900 structures, with five deaths.

For homebuyers, the bigger issue is insurance, she said.

“Since the 2017 fires it’s gotten a lot harder to get really good insurance, and if you’re up in the hills where there was a fire area, it’s almost impossible or you’re paying two to three times what the norm is,” she said.

Rental Escape

Many of the San Francisco escapees had temporary accommodations. Anastasia Nishnevich, 30, left the city at the beginning of July with her boyfriend for a rental house in Pope Valley, a Napa town nestled among the region’s mountains and vineyards.

“We had the feeling that we were getting the most out of the lockdown situation because it was just so beautiful,” said Nishnevich, a former Uber and Netflix engineer.

Last Monday, a postal carrier warned her boyfriend of the Hennessey fire burning south of their rental. By Tuesday, Nishnevich saw evacuation notices for Pope Valley, sending her and her boyfriend back to their apartment in downtown San Francisco.

How long the return will last is unclear. With smoke filling the air, it’s difficult to spend time outside, while pandemic shutdowns are still in place for indoor businesses. That’s forcing people to remain cooped up in their apartments, the very thing that drove them away from the city in the first place.

Nishnevish and her boyfriend packed most of their items when they left Pope Valley, but kept some clothes at the rental house.

“You’re leaving things because you want to have the hope you’ll be able to come back,” she said. In San Francisco, “everything is dead. Everything is closed.”

The Greens also plan on returning to Napa, betting that city life isn’t going to hold its allure for a long time. Their country home -- which they operated as a bed-and-breakfast before the pandemic -- was a refuge for their kids and grandkids in recent months. At 64, Jeff, a financial adviser at Stifel Financial Corp., doubts he’ll ever have to go back to working in an office full-time.

Also tugging the Greens back to Napa: their chickens.

“We want to make sure they’re OK,” he said.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.