The Eaton Fire burns in the community of Altadena. Firefighters were unable to get water from hydrants that ran dry, as homes and businesses burned, on Jan. 8, 2025. Photo by Ted Soqui for CalMatters
By Sameea Kamal
Can California learn from other states about housing recovery after a natural disaster?
That’s the idea behind Assembly Bill 239 by Assemblymember John Harabedian, a freshman Democrat from Pasadena whose district was at the center of the 14,000-acre Eaton Fire. The bill, modeled after a hurricane-response plan in Texas, aims to speed up housing recovery by coordinating federal, state and local responses through a state-led task force to address the Palisades and Eaton Fires.
“I think that government agencies generally don’t do a good job of talking to each other,” Harabedian told CalMatters. “There isn’t a ton of coordination on these types of things, because natural disasters, thankfully, don’t happen all that often.”
The concept of a state-led task force originated from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina severely damaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005 and little progress was made on rebuilding housing even six years later, the agency said in a 2011 memo.
Texas took up that recommendation in 2019, two years after Hurricane Harvey, which caused more than $125 billion in damages and “highlighted critical gaps in Texas’s ability to provide timely and efficient housing recovery for displaced residents,” according to Harabedian’s office.
Harabedian’s bill is similar to the Texas law: It would create a task force with representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the state housing department and local governments. The task force would expedite the housing response to Los Angeles County fires that have damaged or destroyed an estimated 18,000 homes and other structures.
That group would appoint a state disaster housing coordinator to oversee money distribution, coordinate efforts between the different levels of government, and would be required to report housing recovery progress in the impacted areas to the Legislature quarterly. If passed and signed into law, it would go into effect immediately.
“I think it’s difficult for any one jurisdiction to coordinate across all of these entities outside of the state, because our local leaders are hyper-focused and doing a tremendous job on meeting the immediate needs of their communities,” said Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, a Democrat from Culver City who co-authored the bill. “I think the state and the federal government have a larger responsibility to look both regionally and beyond.”