With the flames that flattened Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood extinguished and the cleanup plans well under way, what looms next is a tough question that has no easy or quick answer:

Will residents stay or sell? And will the subdivision, the most ravaged single neighborhood in the Wine Country fires, be rebuilt home by home — or totally reimagined?

For a city that has historically been slow to build workforce housing — only 200 rental units are now under construction in Santa Rosa — Coffey Park poses an unheard-of opportunity. In the Bay Area’s dense urban landscape, huge swaths of open space rarely become available for development. Those bookended by transit corridors are rarer still.

To the east of Coffey Park is Highway 101. To the west are newly laid commuter train tracks. It could be the ideal commuter village, if residents are willing to sell their single-home plots to developers of multiunit buildings.

At this point in the process, whether that will happen is a complete unknown.

“Every one of these owners has a distinct parcel,” said Charlie Eadie, a consultant who helped rebuild downtown Santa Cruz after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. “Their first option is going to be rebuilding and making it safer and better than before. If that’s the predominant sentiment, then your transformation potential will be limited. You’ll end up with a rebuild of the pattern that was there before.”

Much will depend on the extent to which burned-out residents band together to plan what comes next. If everyone goes at it alone, the developments will be hopscotch. But if they form close alliances, which is what happened in Oakland after the 1991 hills fire, common planning can move the reconstruction along more quickly.

In the more affluent and smaller Fountaingrove neighborhood to the east, which was also burned largely flat, at least 50 homeowners have already selected a common structural engineer to start mapping out a new, more modern spread of spacious homes. Coffey Park residents are talking, but taking things more deliberately.

“Nobody really knows how this is going to play out, because nobody has done this before,” said Jeff Okrepkie, who used to live on Espresso Court and is helping organize the group Rebuild Coffey Park.

“I’m an insurance agent by trade, and what I’ve come to understand is that this will be one of the most complicated rebuilds the country has ever seen,” Okrepkie said. “Everybody that wants to rebuild will have to deal with insurance, their bank, the builder, the city and the county. That becomes a huge issue.”

James Lee Witt, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who is heading the nonprofit Rebuild NorthBay, says his experience with disaster recoveries indicates that as many as half the burned-out residents won’t return. Out of that collection of personal tragedies can come a reformation, he said.

“Particularly in some of the floods I handled ... I was able to do a volunteer buyout relocation program where the government bought up properties in floodplains to be able to do something more practical with the land,” Witt said. “There’s opportunity here to build back better and safer than before. But before you can do anything, you’re going to have to drill down into the zoning for the neighborhoods, what people are willing to do, what money will be coming in — all of that.

“And I have no idea how long it will take to even draft a strategy for that here,” he said. “Six months? More? You just can’t tell at this point.”

The subdivision of Coffey Park, built in the early 1980s, was home to people of varied ethnic and economic backgrounds. Teachers shared fences with engineers and mechanics. Their kids rode bikes together to the park. Mourning the loss of that identity will take time, officials say. But everyone has their price point — eventually.

“People are grieving right now,” said Santa Rosa City Councilwoman Julie Combs. “They are thinking that they want to get back what they had. That is the first response when people are grieving a loss. As they take more time, they may want to sell their land or build differently. We will be open to that, but we cannot require it.”

She added, “I would love to see more housing in Coffey Park.”

She’s not alone. Shirlee Zane, chairwoman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, said she will do whatever she can to build higher-density, transit-oriented development in the burn zones — particularly Coffey Park, which is bordered by the SMART commuter line’s tracks.

“I think this fire, and the rebuilding, is going to blow up our culture here,” Zane said. “I’ve been saying ‘build, baby, build’ since the beginning of this year because of the terrible housing shortage we have, and this is an opportunity to do different types of building.”

Zane said the new Coffey Park should include “grocery stores, dog parks, smarter senior housing, single-family homes, higher-density stuff — everything, so we can choose wisely. Of course we have to respect the homeowners, but I do think a lot of people — particularly the newer generation — are open to something other than this suburban sprawl we are all so stuck in.

“I hope NIMBYism dies right now,” she said.

But that’s not what Okrepkie and some of his Coffey Park neighbors are envisioning. At a recent meeting attended by more than 250 people, most residents said they intended to keep their land.

“There’s a lot of original owners and families who don’t want apartments and condos in their neighborhood,” Okrepkie said. “It has a neighborhood feel, and it’s not very dense. There are a lot of young children and young couples who bought their houses during the economic downturn. It was their first opportunity to buy a bigger home for a very low price. I just don’t see people being OK with giving that up.”

For some, though, the answer lies out of town. Melissa and Cole Geissinger are among them.

They’ve sorted through the debris of their Coffey Park home, made peace with their losses, and are now hoping to build a small home on her family’s land in Sebastopol. It’s a fresh start, where they won’t have to think about toxic cleanups or living around bad memories.

“We’re not sure what our plans are 100 percent yet, but the toxins are deeply concerning to us,” said Melissa Geissinger. “We’re about to have a baby. We’re concerned about what they would mean to our baby.”

Roughly 2,900 homes were torched by the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, and 1,000 of those were in Coffey Park. Many, unlike the Geissingers, will certainly want to return and rebuild. But if a cluster of homeowners — say, everyone who lived on a cul-de-sac or a block — agreed to sell, developers could cobble together enough land to build high-density condos or apartment buildings.

That would require zoning changes, though officials say they are willing to be flexible with the rules in the wildfires’ aftermath and have promised to fast-track some building permits.

Changes to building codes could also sway residents’ decisions to sell or stay. For example, since 2011, the state has required that all new single-family homes have sprinkler systems. The installation cost can amount to about $10,000 for a 3,000-square-foot home. Other costs could quickly pile up, particularly if the City Council includes Coffey Park in an extreme fire hazard zone. Insurance payouts might not cover everything.

“The big thing to think about is money,” said Laurie Johnson, a disaster recovery consultant who has helped cities including New Orleans and Kobe, Japan, rebuild after catastrophes. “Residents will have insurance. There will be resources from FEMA. But there will also be gaps at income levels where insurance isn’t enough to rebuild high-value properties. That’s the stage we are moving into.”

Julia Donoho, an architect and attorney who is helping Coffey Park residents, said the idea of re-creating the neighborhood into something with shops and apartment complexes is a nonstarter.

“If you start talking about replanning, that’s a whole different issue we don’t have money for,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. We have individual owners who have insurance to rebuild their houses, and what we need to do is rebuild quickly and rebuild consistently.

“Sure, you can change densities,” she said. “But right now you have a neighborhood designed for that population, not a bigger one. If you want to replan, you’d have to redo the whole thing — zoning, sewer, electrical connections, a huge number of things. And to do that would take years, and could even take eminent domain. And I don’t think anyone has the cojones for that.”

Lizzie Johnson and Kevin Fagan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn, @KevinFagan