In 2025, the Eaton Fire leveled thousands of homes in Altadena, including the one on North Marengo Avenue where I grew up. My parents, retired physicists Jonathan and Christine, evacuated late one night and lost everything they’ve ever owned but the car, the clothes on their back and their two dogs. They were determined to rebuild from the start, over my initial objections and despite their tenuous construction budget.
All it would take is a major construction delay, tariff on building materials, or a denied insurance claim for my parents to find themselves out of savings and with a half-framed shell of a house. Even if construction goes as planned, I worry they will have too little saved to cover future expenses, and few other options to cover rising healthcare costs except selling their home. They don’t want to sell. They want to live where they know the names of the streets, and know their way home.
In June, my family filed paperwork with the county to attempt to split the parcel, a critical option to cover the gaps in their resources. The difficulties my parents face are not unique.
Now, as families like mine continue to struggle with rebuilding, California lawmakers are wrongly considering taking away some of the very tools that could make rebuilding possible.
Senate Bill 1090 is designed to prohibit the type of single family home lot splits that are normally available to all Californian homeowners by suspending two important housing laws in Altadena. Senate Bill 9 allows a duplex, or a second single family home if the owner still lives on the property. Senate Bill 1123 makes it easier to build modest townhome projects on vacant infill lots. These laws promote low-density housing: single family homes, duplexes, and townhomes, but not apartment buildings, not high rises.
Suspending these laws now, while so many fire survivors still have not been made whole, would worsen our hardship. Insurance payments too often fall short of the full cost of rebuilding, government assistance is limited, construction costs keep rising, and too many displaced families like mine are going into debt balancing their immediate housing needs while trying to rebuild.
For some homeowners like my parents, dividing a property is how you afford to rebuild. Let other survivors choose to build close to home for an aging parent, or for an adult child trying to start a family of their own. If our neighbors just don’t want to manage a construction project, let them sell to a builder capable of returning housing to the property. There is hardship enough for those selling their burned lot without Sacramento clouding in uncertainties the right to rebuild. Leaving the settled law alone is literally the least we could all do, and it would be so helpful.
Taking these options, these rights, these retirement plans away from fire survivors will not preserve Altadena’s community. Instead it locks out the very residents who lack the capital to fully rebuild on their own, turning their displacement from a temporary crisis into a permanent eviction.
Proponents of 1090 claim this bill is necessary for fire safety, to prevent deceptive practices by outside developers, and to preserve community character.
Altadena should absolutely rebuild with strong fire safety standards. New homes will built above and beyond those standards, with adequate emergency access and fire resistant design. As a people we have learned so much about fire safety since the local craftsmen of the 70s, the 50s, and the 20s who framed the lost skyline of my childhood back yard. A duplex built today is no more inherently at risk of fire than a single family home. If a particular road, parcel, or project cannot safely accommodate additional homes, that concern should be evaluated through objective safety standards rather than a blanket ban covering an entire community.
We can protect the present and future residents of Altadena by inviting the participation of experts, of developers who have best learned the lessons of those decades past. The debate over SB 1090 rests on the false choice between protecting residents and allowing developers to participate in the recovery.
Developers include local contractors, small homebuilders, and people who take on the financial and logistical risk of turning vacant land into homes. Altadena needs them. The community cannot replace thousands of destroyed structures without the businesses and workers capable of financing, permitting, and constructing housing. My elderly parents could explain how curing concrete is an exothermic phase transition, but they cannot pour a level foundation and certainly do not have the expertise to rebuild on their own.
Let the state establish safeguards against unsolicited offers, deceptive practices, and excessive concentration of property ownership. Address these problems without stripping Altadena residents of property rights enjoyed by homeowners throughout the rest of California. Lawmakers could limit unwanted developments by institutional investors by capping how many lots any one corporation or developer could own in the burn area, or by strengthening protections against unsolicited offers and require greater transparency about the buyer of a fire-damaged property.
Some pro-SB 1090 groups have conceded that SB 9 should be excluded from the bill, but even suspending just SB 1123 would still make it harder to replace all the lost housing. Townhomes are among the few attainable homeownership opportunities left for survivors hoping to return to a smaller home than what they lost, in a region where buying a home of any size is increasingly out of reach. It makes little sense to respond to the destruction of thousands of homes by making it harder to build replacements!
Preserving Altadena should mean helping longtime residents like my family finally come home. It should mean creating room for children, parents, renters, home owners, and neighbors to remain part of the community. It should mean rebuilding homes safely and also recognizing that more housing helps more people share in Altadena’s future.
I am very focused on the question of whether my parents ever live in Altadena again. It’s hard for me to prioritize a preference for the neighborhood character over an ability to be part of that character. Lawmakers should be helping my family rebuild, not throwing up roadblocks on their path home.
Andrew Post grew up in Altadena and now lives in Pasadena; his parents remained in his childhood home until it was lost in the Eaton Fire. An activist with YIMBY Los Angeles, he is an attorney and mathematician that works in software development