Two Bills, One Window: SB 1090, SB 1229, and Who Decides What Gets Rebuilt

After a wildfire takes a neighborhood, there is no version of recovery that gives people back exactly what they had. The address can be rebuilt. The lot lines can stay the same. But the particular texture of a place — the way a block of bungalows sat together, the mature trees, the porches people actually used, the decades of small unrepeatable choices that added up to a community’s character — is not something a building permit restores. Something new gets built instead.

So the honest question was never whether a rebuilt community will differ from the one that burned. It will. The real question is who gets to decide what “different” means — and that gets settled in a window that opens the day the fire goes out and closes long before most families have finished arguing with their insurer.

Right now, two bills moving through the California Legislature are aimed at that window from opposite ends of the state, through entirely different legal machinery. Neither is law. Together they say something that neither says alone.

The same problem, stated twice

Rebuilding after disaster has never been easy in California. Fewer than 40% of homes destroyed in the state’s most destructive fires from 2017 to 2020 have been rebuilt, according to a 2025 Los Angeles Times investigation — a pace driven by low insurance payouts, rising construction costs, and permitting requirements.¹

That slowness is not a neutral fact. It is the mechanism. Every month a household spends displaced, underinsured, and exhausted is a month in which selling the lot becomes more rational than rebuilding it — and in which a buyer with cash, contractors, and no emotional stake can move faster than the family that lost the house.

The evidence that this is happening is not speculative. More than 40% of homes sold in the Pacific Palisades in the summer after the January 2025 fires were bought by investors, according to Redfin, which defined investors as buyers with “LLC,” “Inc,” “Corp,” or “Homes” in their names.² Altadena, thirty miles inland and burned the same week by the Eaton Fire, has been watching a version of the same pattern.

Two very different legislators, representing two very different places, reached for two entirely different tools to address it.

SB 1090: the local land-use lever

SB 1090 — authored by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, with Asm. John Harabedian as coauthor, and known to the community that organized around it as the “Keep Altadena Land in Altadena Hands” Act — carries the official title “Planning and zoning: housing development projects: urban lot splits: subdivisions: 2025 Eaton Wildfire: Altadena.”³

Its lever is local land-use control. California has spent several sessions building a framework of ministerial approvals — by-right, no-hearing, no-discretion housing and lot-split approvals that local governments must grant if an application checks the boxes. That framework exists for a real and defensible reason: discretionary review is where housing goes to die, and California needs housing.

But a ministerial approval is indifferent to who is applying. In a burn zone, the same by-right lot split that was designed to let a homeowner add units becomes a fast, unappealable path for whoever bought the burned lot. SB 1090’s response is to turn that machinery off in a narrow place for a limited time — bounded to Altadena’s burn-area ZIP codes (91001 and 91003) — restoring the County’s ability to apply discretionary review to lot splits, subdivisions, and housing development projects on burned parcels. It amends four sections of the Government Code to do it.³

Where it actually stands: SB 1090 passed the Senate 30–9 on May 27, 2026.³ On July 1, 2026 it passed both of its Assembly policy committees — Housing & Community Development, 11–1, and Local Government, 10–0.⁴ It is not law. Its next step is a vote on the Assembly floor, which cannot happen before the Legislature returns from summer recess on August 3, 2026, and which would still be followed by Senate concurrence and the Governor’s signature or veto. Amendments are still being worked; the author accepted committee amendments on July 1 that set the moratorium’s window at 2027–2030 and carve out qualifying affordable-housing development.⁴

SB 1229: the state coastal permitting lever

SB 1229, authored by Sen. Ben Allen, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, carries the title “Coastal resources: coastal development permits: disaster exemption.” It amends a single section of the Public Resources Code — § 30610, part of the California Coastal Act.⁵

Its lever is state permitting jurisdiction. Under current law, a home destroyed by a disaster inside the Coastal Zone can be rebuilt without California Coastal Commission review, so long as the replacement is largely the same and no more than 10% larger than the original.⁶ After the January 2025 fires, Gov. Newsom went further, broadening that exemption to cover rebuilds that aren’t even similar in design, and suspending the Commission’s authority over rebuilding in Los Angeles outright to speed up what has been a grueling slog.⁶

SB 1229 narrows the exemption along a single seam: ownership at the time of the disaster. The owner of record before the fire keeps the fast track. Someone who acquires the property after the disaster loses it, and must obtain ordinary Coastal Commission approval where the rebuild would encroach on recorded public-access or open-space protections. The bill’s presenter in committee described it as legislation that “keeps the door open for disaster victims to rebuild their homes without delay, but closes it to speculative developers seeking a profit.”⁶

Where it actually stands: SB 1229 passed the Senate 29–9 on May 19, 2026, with Sen. Scott Wiener the only Democrat voting no. It cleared Assembly Natural Resources 9–4 on June 8 and Assembly Appropriations 8–3 on July 1, and on July 2, 2026 it was read a second time and ordered to third reading — meaning it now sits on the Assembly floor file awaiting a vote, which likewise cannot occur before the Legislature reconvenes on August 3.⁵ It is not law. Because it was not amended in the Assembly, an Assembly floor vote would send it directly to the Governor.⁵

What they share, and where they diverge

The comparison is worth drawing precisely, because the similarities and the differences are both instructive.

What they share:

• The same diagnosis. Both start from the premise that disaster creates a window in which who moves fastest determines what gets rebuilt — and that it isn’t always the households who lost homes.
• The same seam. Both draw their line at the boundary between the people who were there and the entities that arrive afterward, rather than at design, density, or size as such.
• The same reluctance. Neither slows down an actual survivor rebuilding their own home. Both are attempts to keep a fast lane built for displaced families from functioning as a shortcut for everyone else.

Where they diverge:

	SB 1090 (Pérez)	SB 1229 (Allen)
Lever	Local land-use / density approvals	State coastal permitting
Mechanism	Suspends ministerial by-right approvals; restores local discretionary review	Conditions the Coastal Act disaster-rebuild exemption on pre-disaster ownership
Geography	Inland — Altadena burn-area ZIPs (91001, 91003)	Coastal Zone only — Palisades, Malibu, and similar
Direction of authority	Returns discretion to local government	Extends the reach of a state agency
Code touched	Government Code (four sections)	Public Resources Code § 30610
Timing	Aimed at the Eaton Fire recovery now underway	Prospective only — expressly would not apply to the January 2025 fires

That fourth row deserves a pause, because it is the most interesting disagreement between two bills that agree about the problem. SB 1090 treats state preemption of local discretion as the thing that opened the door. SB 1229 treats the absence of state review as the thing that opened the door. Both can be right, because they are describing different doors. But anyone who reads either bill as a clean statement of principle about state versus local control will be reading in something that isn’t there.

The limits neither bill hides

Both come with real, on-the-record objections, and an educational explainer that omits them isn’t worth reading.

SB 1229 is preventive rather than remedial: neither the Coastal Commission nor Sen. Allen could provide examples of investor-owned projects that have actually misused the exemption. The Commission’s spokesperson was candid that “we don’t have any record or knowledge of this having happened,” while noting that because most disaster rebuilds are handled by local governments, the Commission cannot know the full extent.⁶ Sen. Wiener’s dissent came from the pro-housing left, not the development right: he warned it “could set a troubling precedent that we’re more focused on only empowering the original owner to build.”⁶ California YIMBY, officially neutral, argued the emphasis is misplaced — that the real reason survivors sell is insurance, construction, and permitting costs.⁶ And at least one Palisades homeowner interviewed by CalMatters worried the change would scare off the only buyers she has, leaving her unable to build and unable to sell.⁶

SB 1090 draws its own criticism, from affordable-housing advocates who warn that switching off ministerial approvals in a burn zone can catch nonprofit and owner-occupant projects alongside the speculative ones, and from those who note that a delayed effective date invites exactly the rush it means to prevent. These are not bad-faith objections. They are the cost side of a real tradeoff.

That is the craft problem, and nobody has fully solved it: write the rule loosely and it becomes a developer’s on-ramp; write it tightly and it becomes one more obstacle for the survivor it was built for. SB 1090 and SB 1229 are two attempts, and they should be read as attempts.

Why two bills matter more than either one

Here is the thing worth taking away.

Altadena sits well inland and has never been within Coastal Commission jurisdiction; SB 1229 does not touch it. The Palisades is not governed by the ministerial-density framework SB 1090 addresses. The two bills cannot borrow each other’s tools. They share no author, no committee path, no geography, and no legal mechanism.

And they arrived at the same instinct anyway.

That convergence is the signal. When two legislators, working independently, in different regions, reaching for different statutes, both decide the line worth drawing is between the people who were there and the people who showed up after — that is not an Altadena anxiety, and it is not a coastal one. It is a pattern in how California disasters are followed by a scramble over what comes next, surfacing through whatever legal instrument happens to be available in a given place.

What actually holds the window

But law is a backstop, not the first line of defense — and both of these bills illustrate why.

Look at what they have in common structurally: each is narrow, each is jurisdictionally bounded, each took over a year to reach a floor vote it still hasn’t received, and each addresses a window that opens within days of a fire and does most of its damage within months. SB 1229, by its own terms, would not have applied to the fires that prompted it. SB 1090 is still being amended eighteen months after the Eaton Fire, with the recovery it governs already well underway. Even a good statute arrives late to the thing it is trying to prevent.

What actually determines who holds that window is rarely the statute. It is whether the people who live there are organized enough, connected enough, and informed enough to act together while it matters — whether there is a network in place before the disaster that can be mobilized during it. Neighbors who know each other. Local organizations residents already trust. Information that reaches everyone, not just the people already paying attention. A community with that capacity is simply harder to outrun: by a fast-moving buyer, by a rule written for someone else’s situation, by the ordinary confusion of trying to rebuild a life.

That is what RRPN exists to build. Our purpose is strengthening recovery and resiliency networks — helping communities develop and strengthen the organized, connected capacity to face disaster and recovery together, the social safety net that determines what happens in the weeks when a statute is still in committee. Altadena demonstrated it: neighbors who barely knew each other before the fire built, in a matter of weeks, a network capable of showing up together at hearing after hearing. That capacity is what put SB 1090 on a committee agenda in the first place. It did not come from the bill. The bill came from it.

Policy analysis — reading the bills closely, getting the mechanisms right, telling people plainly where things actually stand — is a tool in service of that work. It is not the point of it. Good policy helps. An organized, connected community is what makes the policy possible, and what carries a neighborhood through the long stretch when there isn’t any.

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RRPN has not taken a position on SB 1090 or SB 1229. This is an educational explainer. We will continue tracking both as the Legislature returns from recess on August 3, 2026.

Bill status current as of July 17, 2026. Legislative status changes quickly; leginfo.legislature.ca.gov is the authoritative source for both bills.

Footnotes

1. Los Angeles Times, “Rebuilding California after major wildfires,” September 30, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2025-09-30/rebuilding-california-after-major-wildfires ↩

2. Redfin, “Los Angeles Wildfires: One Year Later.” https://www.redfin.com/news/los-angeles-wildfires-anniversary/ — investor-purchase share as cited in CalMatters (see note 6). ↩

3. LegiScan, “California SB1090 | 2025-2026 | Regular Session” — bill title, sponsors, code sections amended, and roll-call history (Senate Third Reading, May 27, 2026: Ayes 30, Noes 9). https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/SB1090/2025 — Note: LegiScan’s history for SB 1090 lags the Legislature’s own record and does not yet reflect the July 1, 2026 Assembly policy-committee actions; see note 4. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Committee vote counts as reported by the office of Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez and published in Gab Apo, “Bill Shielding Altadena From Development Pressure Clears Two Assembly Committees,” Pasadena Now, July 3, 2026. https://pasadenanow.com/main/bill-shielding-altadena-from-development-pressure-clears-two-assembly-committees — The Local Government count is independently corroborated by that committee’s own July 1, 2026 hearing record, in which the roll closed 8–0 and the bill was announced out 10–0 after two members added on: CalMatters Digital Democracy hearing transcript, Assembly Standing Committee on Local Government, July 1, 2026, https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279764. The Housing & Community Development hearing transcript records the chair announcing 10–0 in the room (https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279759); the 11–1 recorded tally reported by the author’s office reflects votes added after the hearing, which is ordinary committee practice. The accepted amendments are described by the author in the Housing & Community Development transcript and reflected in the July 2, 2026 amended text. As of July 17, 2026, leginfo had not yet published the July 1 committee roll calls and LegiScan’s SB 1090 history had not been updated past June 11, 2026; leginfo remains the authoritative record: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB1090 ↩ ↩²

5. LegiScan, “California SB1229 | 2025-2026 | Regular Session” — bill title, sponsor, code section amended, and roll-call history (Senate Third Reading, May 19, 2026: Ayes 29, Noes 9; Assembly Natural Resources, June 8, 2026: Ayes 9, Noes 4; Assembly Appropriations, July 1, 2026: Ayes 8, Noes 3; July 2, 2026: read second time, ordered to third reading). https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/SB1229/2025 — Authoritative state source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB1229 ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Nadia Lathan, “Should coastal commission get more power over rebuilding after wildfire? Some lawmakers say yes,” CalMatters, July 1, 2026. https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/07/coastal-commission-rebuilding-wildfire-exemptions/ — source for the 10% rebuild threshold under current law, the Newsom executive action broadening the exemption, the Krell and Wiener quotations, the Coastal Commission’s and California YIMBY’s statements, and the homeowner interview. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷