In summary
A bill to shield Altadena from two density-boosting housing laws is meant to let the town rebuild on its own terms. Some worry it could keep many homeowners from rebuilding at all.
Altadena may get a reprieve from two of California’s marquee housing laws after a bill to temporarily exempt the fire-torn community sailed through back-to-back Assembly hearings on Wednesday.
The two laws being put on hold — Senate Bill 9 from 2021 and Senate Bill 1123 from 2024 — legalize the construction of up to 10 small houses on plots otherwise reserved for single-family homes and make it easier to split land into smaller parcels which can be sold off individually.
Senate Bill 1090 by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat whose district includes Altadena, would exempt the unincorporated town’s single zip code from the two laws through 2030.
That’s meant to give Eaton Fire survivors “the time they need to rebuild their community without the overpowering influence of predatory developers looking to take advantage of the devastation and suffering,” Pérez said at a press conference on Wednesday morning.
Altadena “shouldn’t be a playground for people who want a return on investment,” added the town’s Assemblymember John Harabedian, a fellow Democrat. The bill is “about protecting Altadena and keeping Altadena Altadena.”
With the rebuilding effort in Altadena progressing slowly, mired by sluggish insurance payouts, pending litigation and escalating construction costs, only a few dozen permits have been filed that make use of these state laws, either by professional property developers or individual homeowners.
Some pro-housing advocates and even some Altadena residents worry that the new bill, which supporters frame as a curb on out-of-town investors, could inadvertently make it harder for some fire survivors to rebuild and remain.
The stated purpose of the legislation is “to stop greedy developers from taking advantage of Altadenans, which, of course, we all agree with,” said Caroline Paules, a town resident and founder of a small home construction company, speaking before the Assembly’s housing committee. “I believe what it actually does is prevent Altadenans from housing themselves — and also Altadenans from helping to house each other.”
Preventing speculators from profiting from the Los Angeles rebuild without also harming homeowners is a tough balance to strike. Lawmakers are also considering a bill to give the California Coastal Commission more authority over reconstruction projects pursued by anyone who purchased a property after a future disaster. That’s meant to check investor-led redevelopment. It could also make it more difficult for survivors to sell their properties should they decide or be forced by necessity not to rebuild.
SB 1090 received unanimous support from both the Assembly housing and local government committees, even if some “Yes In My Backyard”-aligned members expressed some apparent discomfort.
The debate over the legislation pits California’s longstanding efforts to turbocharge housing construction against the interests of many Altadenans who want to rebuild the community as it was. It also raises questions about who and what gets prioritized when a community is rebuilt after a natural disaster in California.
“I don’t think it’s NIMBYism and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to say, ‘We’re still in a state of emergency. Let us recover,’” said Nic Arnzen, chair of Altadena’s Town Council and a supporter of Pérez’s bill.
Arguments like these are a fixture of California housing debates. Locals often object to new, denser development, or to the policies promoting it, on the grounds that while more homes may be needed statewide, the conditions specific to a particular town or neighborhood — whether it’s heightened wildfire risk, historic significance, the physical scale or demographic make-up — argue that it shouldn’t be built here. But Arnzen and other supporters of SB 1090 say that the temporary nature of the bill and Altadena’s extraordinarily unusual circumstances make this a legitimately special case.
The two housing laws at issue were intended to gradually add density to urban areas as existing homes are periodically sold and as rare vacant parcels are developed, he said. They were “never meant to apply to towns that were two-thirds destroyed.”
Before the fire, 95% of all the houses in parts of Altadena touched by fire were single-family homes, according to a UCLA analysis.
Forcing the state laws upon the burn area would “completely reshape the character of the neighborhood,” said Arnzen.
A lot split as a lifeline
Though Pérez’s bill is written to help Altadenans rebuild on their terms, Andrew Post worries it might prevent his parents from rebuilding at all.
Post’s parents, retired physicists Jonathan and Christine, lost their house on North Marengo Avenue. They were determined to rebuild from the start, over their son’s initial objections. But an as-yet uncertain insurance payout, the couple’s modest fixed incomes and uncertain construction costs make for a tight reconstruction budget.
Unexpected construction delays or a denied insurance claim and “they could be dead broke and have an unfinished house,” said Post. Even if construction goes as planned, the couple will have little left to live off of.
In early June the family filed paperwork with the county to see if they could split the parcel, as allowed under the law.
The typical Altadena homeowner hoping to rebuild is short $550,000 after accounting for past and expected insurance payouts, according to a survey by the nonprofit Department of Angels. Splitting up a lot and selling a chunk to a developer, as SB 9 allows, could help many homeowners close that gap, said Azeen Khanmalek, director of the pro-housing advocacy group Abundant Housing LA.
These density-boosting state laws should be seen as “potential tools and pathways to help some homeowners come back and rebuild, rather than as threats,” he said.
Post, who grew up in Altadena, said he’s sympathetic to concerns about density, historic preservation, parking and traffic — to a point.
Altadena prides itself as a historic refuge of relative affordability, diversity and tolerance in Los Angeles County. The best way to preserve that legacy is to enable more multiplexes and small starter homes, said Post.
“The character of the neighborhood is, I think, better preserved by keeping it affordable rather than by keeping the white picket fence architecture,” he said.
“I am very focused on the question of whether my parents ever live in Altadena again,” he added. “It’s hard for me to prioritize a preference for the neighborhood character over an ability to be part of that character.”
SB 9 in Altadena
Of the 5,645 parcels with damaged or destroyed homes in Altadena, 52 have active permits that invoke SB 9, according to a data dashboard commissioned by the town council. Of those, 14 are under construction and two are complete.
That relatively low number may partly reflect the typical geometry of Altadena parcels, said Devang Shah, a principal with Genesis Builders, which is building single-family homes for fire survivors.
“They’re narrow and deep,” he said, which makes it hard to pack in additional units or dice them up for sale.
Even so, the handful of submitted plans — and renderings depicting a type of multifamily dwellings largely alien to pre-fire Altadena — have provided ample fodder for some locals eager to protest denser development and the perceived threat posed by investors and developers capitalizing off the community’s tragedy.
John Chan, a Los Angeles architect who has pushed for redeveloping Altadena to be more pedestrian-oriented and who supports the use of density-boosting state laws, said a handful of poorly designed SB 9 projects — “sardine cans for rent extraction,” he said — have soured many locals on the possible upsides of density.
“It’s creating a backlash to SB 9 that I think is really going to hurt Altadena,” he said.
“Altadena not for sale”
In both Altadena and the Palisades that backlash began brewing almost as soon as the flames were extinguished.
In the summer of 2025, long before hinting at any aspirations for higher office, former reality TV star Spencer Pratt began posting on social media assailing SB 9 and “opportunistic developers” hoping to make use of the law to rebuild in the Palisades. Responding to that pressure, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued dueling executive orders to nullify the law in areas that fall within state-designated “very high” wildfire hazard severity zones inside Los Angeles county.
Newsom’s order only covered a small portion of Altadena. Even after the state expanded its fire severity maps, much of the Eaton Fire burn area did not fall into the “very high” category. The order therefore did little to quell anxieties among the residents who saw denser redevelopment not as an opportunity for struggling homeowners, but as a boon to out-of-town developers and speculators.
Pérez was hoping to address those concerns when she introduced an earlier version of SB 1090 this spring which would have banned large residential investors from making unsolicited offers to purchase parcels in the burn area. That hyperlocal focus also tapped into a growing national interest in preventing investors from purchasing single-family homes, a remarkably bipartisan cause championed by both Newsom and President Donald Trump.
The bill sailed through the California Senate on partisan lines.
In mid-June, Perez rewrote the bill to focus on the state density laws. Her office said the bill’s new focus reflects the more pressing concerns of many Altadenans.
“What I am not going to allow is for my community to be treated differently than the Palisades or than Malibu,” Pérez said on Wednesday.
Arnzen, for one, said he’s less concerned about existing homeowners selling to land speculators.
“I don’t fault people for selling to the highest bidder,” he said. “If I was selling my property, would I have the wherewithal to make sure it goes into the right hands? I don’t know.”
Instead, he wants to see temporary limits on what those new buyers can do with the property once they have it.
Arnzen said he moved to Altadena two decades ago because he wanted his young kids to grow up “in a small town, not in a cookie cutter subdivision, not in a city.”
After losing their home to the fire, he and his husband are now in the process of relocating to an accessory dwelling unit on their property, which they’ll live in while they rebuild. When construction wraps up, the two plan to move into the new house and rent out the smaller one “to push back on the housing crisis in the state,” he said. “Because I think we should all do our part.”
Jeremia Kimelman contributed the data visualization to this story.
via CalMatters https://ift.tt/YfZpUHe
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