The Altadena Town Council Wednesday, June 24, will be hosting an emergency meeting as local leaders continue to push back against outside forces taking control of the ever-evolving Eaton fire rebuilding effort.
Last week, hundreds of people attended the regularly scheduled meeting of the town’s advisory board to hear a presentation from state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Pasadena, about SB 1090: Keep Altadena Lands in Altadena Hands Act.
Renée Pérez and Assemblymember John Harabedian, D-Pasadena, introduced the bill in response to corporate buyers exploiting loopholes in existing state land-use laws like SB 9, SB 79 and SB 1123 to buy up burned lots in the Eaton fire area, which local advocates fear will change the makeup of the town for decades to come.
The worry is potential increased density in an area that just experienced a devastating fire and speculators pressuring fire survivors to sell their properties at a vulnerable moment.
SB 9 allows up to four housing units on single-family zoned land, SB 79 makes it easier to build multi-family housing near public transit stations and SB 1123 expanded SB 684 eligibility to vacant single-family zones allowing 10 or fewer parcels and residential units.
SB 1090 would provide an exemption from SB 9 and SB 1123 being applied in the Altadena area based off zip code to make sure it applies to the entire community, Renée Pérez said last week.
Wednesday’s meeting will continue the discussion and debate from the previous meeting and coordinate the town’s pressure campaign on the governor’s office for more state housing exemptions
Despite not living in Altadena when the Eaton fire sparked in January 2025, the devastation still impacted Noel Hyun Minor’s family. Her son attended Saint Mark’s School, which burned down and she has been part of the recovery efforts at the school and at Altadena Town and Country Club.
Paired with her connection to Altadena is her experience as a land-use attorney, working on former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s campaign, being a planning deputy at L.A. City Hall and a lobbyist. Minor is part of Altadena Recovery Watch, which is part of a coalition of local organizations supporting SB 1090 in the face of corporate purchases of burned single family lots.
Minor said the state laws being exploited in the Eaton fire area were not intended for large swaths of development, but rather to be used as urban infill and in one-off situations.
“We’re in a completely different situation now,” Minor said. “The entire town is gone. Applying laws written for scattered urban infill cases risks turning that exception into Altadena’s prevailing development pattern.”
She said local land-use planning tools already exist to allow Altadena homeowners to build multiple dwellings on their property. In addition, SB 1090 would build in protections for Altadena that have been afforded to the Palisades and exempted the coastal town from state housing legislation.
“We know it’s market viable now and that’s why we’re seeing so many projects propose it and the speed of that is accelerating,” Minor said of laws like SB 1123. “So right now is the time that we need that protection from that law to make sure that we really understand what is the plan that we want for Altadena.”
Minor said the bureaucratic nature of these state statutes being used makes it easy for corporate buyers to navigate while homeowners are less familiar with these types of ministerial processes. The result, Minor said, is box designs that take away from Altadena’s craftsman history of architectural design.
“As a community we should demand better design,” Minor said. “The things that are being built now are going to set the stage for decades if not a century of development.”
For total-loss fire survivor and community organizer Shawna Dawson Beer, Altadena determining its path forward for itself is a key component to why she and others are coming forward.
“The local community does not have a real seat at the table, does not have a real voice in the conversation and very unfortunately we have been subject to outside forces for too long,” Dawson Beer said.
She called the actions of corporations since the fire as bordering on disaster profiteering and said it has been “a tale of two fires” in terms of the lack of protections Eaton fire survivors have seen compared to their Palisades counterparts.
SB 1090 will be next heard in committee on Wednesday, July 1.
Wednesday’s meeting is from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at The Collaboratory, 540 W. Woodbury Road.
“We are a warning, we’re a bellwether,” Dawson Beer said. “It’s us this time, but what we continue to fight for is not just our town, but for every other town because this is us, but it’s going to be someone else next.”