OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
3:46 PM – Tuesday, August 12, 2025
A controversial California Senate bill aimed at bringing more affordable housing to the Pacific Palisades has been put on pause.
The wildfires that swept across Eaton and the Palisades in January burned 40,000 acres. The Palisades Fire alone damaged 6,800 buildings.
Now, efforts to rebuild the community have reached a conflict.
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On February 20th, Senate Bill 549 was introduced to the California Legislature. If passed, it would address housing shortages by giving authorities the power to purchase lots where homes were burned down and build low-income housing. The proposal targets areas where Realtor.com reports the median home listing price to be $4.9 million. The bill would supposedly create “Resilient Rebuilding Authorities” funded by property tax collection.
Residents of Pacific Palisades oppose the bill, seeing it as a “land grab.”
“It does sound quite a bit like Big Brother deciding what’s good for all of us,” Aileen Haugh, a resident, told FOX 11 Los Angeles. “It’s irritating to think that other people are going to make decisions of what gets built and how it gets built.”
Another resident and the president of the Pacific Palisades Residents’ Association, Jessica Rogers, said, “we had some low-income housing, and we had affordable housing.” She added that they only want authorities to rebuild what they had on January 7th, the day the fires started. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Rogers also wrote a letter to lawmakers to voice her opinion on the proposed bill, supported by over 23,000 fellow residents.
“They’re asking for a land grab,” Rogers said, explaining that she believes this should not be a situation where politicians get to decide on a “pet project,” but instead where residents in the community “get to decide what happens in our rebuild phase, period.”
“Just give us our homes back, and protect us from fire,” she added.
State Senator Ben Allen (D-Calif.), who initially proposed the bill, sent out the following written statement regarding the issue:
“I appreciate the input of the folks who have weighed in about the bill, and along with legislative colleagues have decided that it would be best for us to pause the bill until next year to give us more time to see if we can get it right,” said Allen. “For me to feel comfortable proceeding, the bill will have to be deeply grounded in community input, empowerment, and decision-making, including the support of the impacted councilmembers.”
The bill will be paused until 2026.
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