Two years — max.
That’s the amount of time Zaire Calvin, 48, after conversations with survivors in other wildfire-ravaged communities, has assigned to rebuilding in Altadena.
Time is of the essence.
“I have a 2-year-old daughter and an 85-year-old mother,” he said. “My mother just yelled at me this morning to get an RV for her to live in on her lot, because she’s terrified she’s not going to see Altadena again.
“It needs to be done within two years. If you say 8, 10 years, my daughter will be 12 and she won’t grow up and know Altadena by that time. Let’s set an example of what a real recovery looks like.”
Like so many Black families who saw their property consumed by January’s catastrophic Eaton fire, time is an everyday reflection. How much time do I have? Can I rebuild? Is it even worth it? Should I stay, or should I go?
A new report out released Tuesday hit home in Altadena, where residents such as Calvin, whose 59-year-old sister Evelyn McClendon died in the fire, could relate to its top line:
Altadena’s residents are immersed in a post-Eaton fire rebuild process complicated by a slow-moving permitting process, economic uncertainty, underinsurance issues and the entry of outside investors, who have bought up two-thirds of severely damaged homes in the area, according to the UCLA fact sheet.
The stakes are high if Altadena is to retain the cultural diversity it once had, say researchers from the university’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, both part of the Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Their “Who’s Coming Home?” report out Thursday — the first in a planned series on the town’s recovery — contemplated how disasters intersect with race, homeownership, and equity.
It’s inaugural data show an unincorporated L.A. County town where many residents, particularly of color, are tepid about whether they can or should rebuild, unsettled about the future, despite broader county efforts to speed up the process of recovery and a general outcry against the entry of investors buying up property. Black home owners appear to have the steepest climb to rebuild, according to the authors.
In essence, the report shows a mixed bag of patterns, nine months since the catastrophic Eaton fire, driven by fierce winds, ignited in the Altadena foothills and consumed thousands of homes, churches, businesses and schools and killed 19 people.
(Courtesy, The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute )Using property sales records and listings, permit application data, and fire damage assessments, the UCLA team found that as of August, nearly six in 10 Black-owned homes suffered severe damage — the highest rate of any group. But roughly seven in 10 of all severely damaged homes showed no visible steps toward recovery, with Black (73%) and Asian (71%) homeowners slightly more likely to remain stalled.
Latino homeowners have filed rebuilding permits at the highest rate, 30%, an early sign that some families are trying to move forward despite widespread underinsurance, soaring construction costs, and complex permitting requirements, according to the report.
In effect, researchers see both progress and “warning signs,” noting that only 5% of damaged homes have been sold. But they see reasons for concern in that among those that are being sold, they are going to outside investors.
“We generally just see that families just remain in this limbo, and this holding pattern. The sheer number was quite surprising,” said Gabriella Carmona, senior research analyst at LPPI. “And specifically, some of the racial disparities, or differences on what progress has looked like and how homeowners have been impacted, especially when we zone in on the folks who experience severe fire damage.
But even for those wanting to stay, it’s slow-going. About one in four homeowners have entered the permitting process though many have seen their applications stalled.
Carmona noted this is likely because families lack the costly technical plans and construction calculations that are needed.
“This mix of hope and hurdles shows recovery is still fragile, and that targeted support is needed to help families return home,” Carmona said.
Calvin, a community activist whose family lost two homes in the Eaton fire, said Black families have long borne the brunt of post fire woes — a fact Thursday’s report appeared to affirm.
“The Black community is going through the same frustration, the same pain, and it’s always 10 times worse for the Black community because you have less access to resources, you have less exposure, you have less everything,” he said. “That’s why this has been such a hard fight. There are people still living in very bad conditions that is happening still. There are still people displaced. There are still people who got placed somewhere and then lost that place because someone will pay a higher rent and got kicked out.”
Many want to rebuild, but they either can’t afford it, or are immersed in a process that is slow moving, cumbersome and potentially costly.
Officials, as the report acknowledged, have been trying to make it less slow.
This week, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger touted the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ unanimous approval of an ordinance that extends the Eaton Fire Disaster Interim Ordinance through Aug. 22, 2026.
Barger said the extension continues “critical” provisions that streamline rebuilding and recovery for residents affected by the fire.
It wasn’t long ago — in June — when she lamented that “we are simply not meeting the mark,” Barger told those gathered at a weekly virtual Altadena Community meeting. “I hear your frustration, and quite frankly I share them. We are far behind where we should be.”
Barger, who has pledged to cut red tape in the rebuild process, said she has directed the county’s Public Works Department to “drill down” on the issue, with hopes of finding where the bottlenecks are.
She struck a different tone this week, saying she was “excited that so many residents have already begun rebuilding.”
She noted that as of Monday more than 200 projects have started construction and called for site inspections. And many more owners were conducting roof reframing and running utilities.
More than 470 permits have been issued for the Eaton fire area, including more 350 residential units, Barger said.
And even still, she said Monday, that “we still have more work to do.”
That work has included weekly check-ins by Building and Safety staffers with engineers and architects, working through plans that have stalled because they need to be reworked.
Carmona, of the UCLA team, noted that the county’s efforts offer a kind of silver lining. But even still, Carmona and the UCLA team remain concerned about forces that could make Altadena’s recovery look much like that of other disaster-ridden towns that gentrified.
“While these steps aim to ease recovery, early evidence suggests that outcomes remain uneven and are deeply influenced by factors such as race, ownership status, and access to resources,” according to the study’s authors.
The report points to previous wildfire disasters — from the 2023 Maui fires to the 2021 Marshall Fire and the 2018 Camp fire — where underinsurance and bureaucratic delays forced the economically vulnerable residents from their communities, a kind of “climate gentrification” that occurs when the disaster recovery itself raises housing costs and displacement.
“I think the fear here is that we’ve seen this playbook in a lot of other fire and natural disaster circumstances,” Carmona said. “So what can we do to ensure the recovery system and safety nets that need to formed are making sure that we aren’t just repeating a cycle in which we are just adding Altadena to that list.”
In the case of the Eaton fire, Black homeowners appear to be the most vulnerable, Carmona noted, since such a large proportion in a town renowned for its Black homeowners rates were impacted.
Before the Eaton Fire, Black, Latino, and Asian households in Altadena owned their homes at nearly twice the countywide rate—with 74% of Black households, 61% of Latino households, and 72% of Asian households owning their homes, the report notes.
The data confirm earlier concerns about displacement of Black ownership in Altadena, and it’s impact on generations of wealth in the area.
The UCLA report also leans on the expertise of others who have been working in the community since the immediate aftermath of the fire.
It quotes Lori Gay, president & CEO at the Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County, whose organization has been supporting displaced residents since early in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
Gay echoed a theme of the report, which suggests that many residents are, in effect, waiting and seeing what others do, and are holding off until they see other movement. Will businesses return? Will other homeowners return?
“The stalled recovery data agrees with what we are hearing from the clients and others we serve,” Gay said, in a release accompanying the data sheet Thursday. “Altadena already had infrastructure limitations before the fire, and many families are now taking a wait-and-see approach: many are waiting to see if their neighbors rebuild, some want to know if local businesses and services will return, and most are stuck figuring out how to pay for rebuilding because of financial barriers like underinsurance, little to no government support or the high cost of construction.”
Just ask Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, who is seeing it all play out on the ground.
Chen sees two main reasons for people being in limbo when it comes to rebuilding.
The first is what survivors call “the gap,” the difference between what insurance is paying out and what it actually costs to recover, rebuild and remediate. That gap, Chen said, is on average $300,000.“That’s a yawning gap for many of us, that’s enough to keep us in limbo,” Chen said.
Then there is the constant struggle to deal with agencies from insurance companies to county offices or the Small Business Administration.
Survivors who have enough money to pay for their needs upfront have to wait months to get reimbursed, and in the meantime, some slide into debt, said Andrew Wessels, one of the authors of the survivor network’s response to Edison’s compensation plan, and the network’s strategy director.
Wessels’ home on Glen Avenue is still standing but requires major reconstruction and remediation. He and his family, including his 2- and 6-year-old children, have moved 12 times and nine months, and endure long waits for insurance repayment, “and my story is one of the better ones,” he said. “I feel fortunate we had the financial means, even as limited as it is, to float.”
Many others, he said, do not.
The upshot is that the recovery, Gay added, is not all about debris removal, but also about the provision of ongoing funding resources and governmental policies that are more targeted to ensuring the most vulnerable families have a path to move back to the area.
And that’s the biggest question, the report’s authors noted.
Overall, proportionally few property owners have decided to leave. But many haven’t moved forward on a rebuild either, mired in insurance delays, financial barriers, or uncertainty about long-term plans.
But with the prospect of more investors moving in, the UCLA team posed the question of what that means for the area, in particular any impacts on longer term affordability.
“From the warning signs that we are seeing, we do think that when this vacant land is being put up for sale, investors are interested,” Carmona said. “Whether that’s good or bad, that falls on people who have different opinions about it. But this does indicate that if homeowners aren’t interest in coming in, folks who have the interest to either rent out units or reconstruct what they want Altadena to be are at the ready.”
That will likely have a bearing on the town’s future, if everyday homeowners aren’t moving back.
Carmona said that even if they do, Altadena won’t be the same. What it was before the fire was a town that grew up with its own challenges and triumphs, which led to what it was.
What does matter, Carmona said, is whether homeowners and residents — not just outside investors — have a say in the future.
“It’s a matter of whether or not the community that previously existed in Altadena … whether they feel they have a choice in the matter.”