A natural disaster can do in one day what decades of public zoning fights cannot: Erase entire neighborhoods and force thousands of decisions, all at once, about what will replace them. 

That’s the question now — still — hanging over Altadena, the Pacific Palisades, and other Los Angeles-area communities that burned in the catastrophic January 2025 wildfires. More than a year and a half later, rebuilding remains painfully slow. All this is unfolding in a region already desperately short of homes, with one of the most expensive housing markets in America. 

Now, California’s legislature is set to vote on a law bowing to local anti-density pressure that could make that all the worse, and set an ominous precedent for housing affordability. This is, on one level, a regional story about a fire-traumatized community trying to get back on its feet and shape its future, but it reflects something much larger, too. It highlights the kind of zero-sum politics increasingly pervasive nationwide, that casts ordinary homebuilding as something sinister, and that elevates local control above all else. These instincts help explain why it’s become so hard for the US to build the things we need, and why the fight for affordable, abundant housing remains so fraught, in California and nationwide.

The roots of this dispute go back well before the fires. For the better part of a decade, California has been trying to solve one of the central contradictions driving our national housing shortage: Almost everyone agrees that the country needs more homes, yet almost everyone has a reason they should go somewhere else. The state has passed laws weakening exclusionary zoning, legalizing denser “missing middle” housing, and taking some housing decisions out of the hands of local governments that refuse to permit enough homes. 

That push included, in 2021, a now-famous statewide law, Senate Bill 9, which overrode local zoning to enable homeowners statewide to build up to four housing units on their lots. Another pair of laws, SB 684 and a subsequent expansion, SB 1123, made it possible to subdivide vacant lots zoned for single-family houses and build up to 10 smaller homes on them.  

The 2025 fires are now testing California’s pro-housing progress. In Altadena, an unincorporated suburb about 14 miles north of downtown LA, the Eaton Fire destroyed a huge share of homes. Many survivors are now rebuilding the single-family homes they lost in the disaster. Others, facing meager insurance payouts and massive construction costs, have sought to rebuild at higher densities to make doing so financially feasible, or sold their lots to developers and moved elsewhere. 

Only a small share of rebuilding applications so far have relied on SB 9 or SB 1123, but a revolt has nevertheless ensued among opponents of denser developments. Lawmakers in Sacramento now want to stop the use of one of California’s pro-housing laws in the community. By August 31, the state legislature could pass yet a new law: SB 1090, which would suspend SB 1123 in Altadena until 2030, blocking the additional housing it would have allowed.   

Altadena is by all accounts idyllic, lined with storybook bungalows bordering the San Gabriel Mountains. The impulse to want it to be built back as it was before is only human and understandable. Neil Tyler, a fire survivor who supports SB 1090 and is currently rebuilding his home, told me that many in the community are deeply anxious and angry that a developer could buy burned lots and transform them into clusters of 10 homes that would feel alien to the Altadena they’re trying to recover. It “exploded into the community’s fear and opposition and pretty much outrage over someone trying to profit off the backs of all of our pain and suffering,” he said. 

I’ve written extensively on the national housing shortage and the local zoning laws that help cause it. Altadena offers an unusually sympathetic case for the desire to maintain hyper-local control — it’s terribly unfair for your community to burn down overnight. And it challenged me to think more deeply about what is owed to a community suffering such incredible loss. 

Ultimately, the fight over SB 1090 clarified to me more strongly why the local level is the wrong one to make decisions about housing supply, and why it’s important for California’s hard-won housing laws, along with similar state laws elsewhere in the US, to withstand the very local resistance they were enacted to overcome. The metro LA area, including Altadena, is extraordinarily expensive in large part because local control has already caused it to underbuild housing for decades. SB 1090 would convert some fire survivors’ desire to preserve Altadena’s low-density form into restrictions on other people’s rights and choices, while blocking homes the region desperately needs. 

The case for rebuilding…more

Debates over arcane laws with names like SB 9, SB 1123, and SB 1090 might sound abstract, impenetrable, and boring. But the principles are fairly straightforward, and they explain a lot about what feels so wrong with American life right now. 

The economics of housing is not so different from that of any other good: When lots of people want a thing but we don’t make enough of it, it will become ever more expensive. This has happened in LA and many other parts of the US over the last century. Starting in the 1960s, LA used local zoning laws to sharply decrease allowed densities for new housing in the city. By 1990, the city’s theoretical population capacity had fallen from roughly 10 million to about 4 million, even as its economy and demand to live there grew. Sure enough, LA’s population today is just south of 4 million, and housing costs are predictably out of control. 

Those numbers are just LA proper — but housing markets are regional, and LA’s suburbs have been just as responsible for the area’s chronic housing scarcity. One of the most pervasive drivers is single-family zoning, a form of “exclusionary zoning” that makes it illegal to build anything other than a single-family house on most residential land in the US. 

Altadena, where the median home is valued at around $1.12 million, is zoned overwhelmingly for single-family dwellings — a policy California has sought to chip away at with state laws like SB 9 and 1123. The idea is that allowing more homes on a single lot will expand supply, which helps lower housing prices; in tandem, it allows physically smaller homes to be built instead of just large single-family houses, which also lowers housing prices.  

Reforming exclusionary zoning in this manner also does something that can help fire survivors trying to rebuild their lives. It tends to raise land values, because a parcel that can support several homes is worth more than one where only one can legally be built. 

Consider a hypothetical: An empty lot might sell to a builder for $500,000 if it’s only zoned to support a single-family house. The builder might then spend $1 million on construction and other development costs and sell the house for $1.8 million, making $300,000 in profit. If the plot could instead support six smaller homes under SB 1123, the builder could pay $800,000 for the land, spend $3 million on construction, and sell each home for $750,000, making $700,000 in profit. This is a simplified example, and real-world comparisons are much more complicated, but the underlying principle is basic land economics: Increasing a parcel’s development capacity increases what a developer can justify paying for it. Allowing greater densities can be positive-sum — the original homeowner can get a higher price for their sale, the new home buyers can get much less expensive houses, and the builder can make a greater profit.  

“These small-scale density tools could in fact be a financial lifeline that allows some Altadena homeowners to fill what is often a six-figure gap in their financing in order to rebuild their home and provide some housing for some other folks,” said Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing LA, one of several California pro-housing groups opposing SB 1090. 

Caroline Paules, an Altadena resident who also opposes SB 1090, noted that rebuilding to modern fire-resistant standards is expensive; building densely can help mitigate that cost. Paules is a mechanical engineer and co-founder of a startup that builds small prefabricated cottages, and had hoped to use SB 1123 to build in Altadena, with seven cottages each on lots previously reserved for single-family homes. If SB 1090 passes, she said, she may not be able to. “I completely resonate with the desire for Altadena to be what it was, because it was beautiful and perfect,” she said. But “no matter how traumatizing and painful it is, I think we have to release trying to shove Altadena into what it was before the fire.”

How California’s pro-housing push swerved

Last year, after the fire destroyed between one-third and one-half of Altadena’s homes, the Los Angeles County planning department promoted SB 9 and 1123 as rebuilding options in a brochure for fire survivors. But earlier this year, as neighbors became increasingly concerned about rebuilding plans, LA County abruptly changed course and voided applications filed to build under SB 1123. The county now took the position that the Altadena lots didn’t qualify under SB 1123 because so many surrounding homes had burned that the parcels couldn’t be considered infill projects.

The reversal echoed what happened last summer, when Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass suspended SB 9 in the Palisades after residents had already begun submitting applications — a midstream rule change that made an already grueling rebuild harder. Most of Altadena wasn’t included in that order because much of it isn’t designated as a very-high-fire-hazard zone, so residents who oppose the higher-density developments have sought other routes to block it. 

Much of the recent backlash has centered on plans to build under SB 1123 by Stone West Homes, a Southern California-based developer. Between summer 2025 and early 2026, the developer was involved in buying seven Altadena lots where homes had burned, planning to redevelop them into about 10 small houses each — 70 homes total. These were large lots, most of them between two to four times the size of a typical new single-family lot. The developer has said the lots were purchased for more than single-family development could have justified, but opponents have disputed that. (That is a complicated question to adjudicate, and not one I’ll pursue here.)

In March, LA County told the developer its application was being canceled. “They basically flipped a switch,” Chris Manasserian, a lawyer for the developer, told me; they then sued LA County for what they allege was an illegal reversal.  

The fight soon moved to the state’s capital. By June, California state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, whose district includes Altadena, rewrote an existing bill, SB 1090, to include a moratorium on SB 9 and SB 1123 in the community, setting this whole episode into motion. 

The LA County planning department did not respond to a request for comment. Pérez did not make herself available for an interview. LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena and has vigorously promoted SB 1090, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. 

The SB 9 suspension was eventually dropped from the bill, leaving only the moratorium on SB 1123, which would take effect only for applications submitted after October 1 of this year. To some residents, 1123 is much more threatening: It allows greater densities, and it’s more likely to be used by outside developers than pre-existing Altadena homeowners. Suspicion of developers has been central to the campaign for SB 1090. A website run by SB 1090 supporters portrays Stone West’s planned developments as “disaster capitalism” by “out-of-town speculators.” 

I find this hard to compute. It feels of a piece with a broader, slopulist zero-sum turn in American politics that treats any transaction in which someone profits as evidence of an injustice. Developers, for all the suspicion attached to the word, are people who build things, including homes — if we want homes, we need them. “It seems like we’ve just been demonized for something that makes perfect sense to do,” Manasserian said. Developers can just as well buy Altadena lots to build large single-family homes, but I haven’t seen the same anti-developer sentiment leveled against that possibility. 

I asked Neil Tyler what exactly makes the prospect of living near an SB 1123 development similar to what’s proposed by Stone West, with 10 houses on it instead of one, so threatening. He mentioned one cul-de-sac street where, he said, most homeowners had previously planned to rebuild, but many were now considering selling rather than living near an SB 1123 development. Summarizing their thinking, Tyler said: “I can’t pour my time and money and resources that are so stretched to now build my home back at this property, where all of a sudden right next to me could be a townhome that blocks my kind of way of life that I just want to recapture.” (The street that he’s referring to is lined with single-family homes on very large, low-density lots.) 

As a result, he said, SB 1123 in Altadena “is very directly further displacing people that intended to come back.” He believes it’s wrong for an outside developer to take advantage of the law to abruptly alter neighborhoods while residents are still trying to make decisions about returning. But he emphasized that he and others who share his views don’t oppose all density increases or deny that there’s a housing shortage. He supports accessory dwelling units (ADUs), for example, which California has legalized statewide and which he and other fire survivors are now building on their properties. He also raised concerns about local infrastructure capacity and fire spread and evacuation, part of which I examine below, but worth noting here is that SB 1123 does not waive ordinary utility requirements. Infrastructure, particularly in a place like America’s second-largest metro area, can grow to accommodate more people; it’s not a fixed limit on density. 

Local control clashes with regional needs

So far, only a very small share of the nearly 7,000 homes that burned in Altadena have been put up for 1123 redevelopment. Although the level of density they represent is higher than what’s typical on an Altadena residential street, they’re hardly high-density by metropolitan standards, especially in such a high-demand area. “We’re not talking about allowing six- or eight- or 10-story apartment buildings,” Khanmalek said. 

As with other housing fights across the country, the development opponents are highly vocal, but it’s far from clear that their views are unanimous. “I have yet to see someone draw a connection between what developers are intending to do and it actively harming an Altadenan,” said Paules. 

It may be true that some neighbors would not like to live near denser developments, and it understandably feels unfair for a wildfire to be the occasion that accelerates that change. But it’s also unfair to deprive fire survivors of property rights, and it’s unfair that communities in metro LA have long banned (and continue to ban) denser housing and fueled a housing shortage in the first place. Many residents want to protect the ability to occupy a very desirable part of the city at low density — the emotional impact of losing that can be very real, but it’s not something residents are owed in perpetuity.

Neighbors disliking the presence of new development is the universally cited reason for opposing building, and opponents can always find a reason that a particular time and place is the wrong one in which to build. The perceived costs of new housing are concentrated among nearby residents, while the costs of blocking it are borne by society as a whole. That asymmetry is why the right to build housing cannot depend on securing neighbors’ discretionary approval.

Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for California YIMBY, told me that his organization suspects SB 1090’s supporters want the three-year moratorium to eventually be made permanent. Though the bill’s supporters maintain that their circumstances are extraordinary, Gray and Khanmalek both fear it would create a precedent for more communities to seek exemptions from SB 1123. 

No growing, economically successful city can refuse to densify forever without ruinous implications for housing affordability that will eventually undermine its economy. California’s Gov. Newsom has generally stood firm against local governments seeking to defy state housing laws, but last year’s wildfires have tested that resolve. His office declined to comment on SB 1090, citing its general practice of not commenting on pending legislation. Should the bill reach his desk — which could happen as soon as next week if it passes the state legislature as many expect — the question will be whether he’s willing to supply the leadership that local officials have not. 

Southern California is already one of America’s most beautiful, sought-after places to live, and freed from its chronic housing scarcity, it could be better still: less punishingly expensive, and more capable of welcoming all those drawn to it. The fires have already taken enough from the region; they ought not be allowed to scorch the housing reforms that had begun to open up a more abundant future.

Source: Vox.