The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The most sympathetic case for NIMBYism is still wrong

Wildfires leveled thousands of homes in California. Now the state could block even more from being built.

A natural disaster can do in one day what decades of public zoning fights cannot: Erase entire neighborhoods and force thousands of decisions, all at once, about what will replace them.

That’s the question now — still — hanging over Altadena, the Pacific Palisades, and other Los Angeles-area communities that burned in the catastrophic January 2025 wildfires. More than a year and a half later, rebuilding remains painfully slow. All this is unfolding in a region already desperately short of homes, with one of the most expensive housing markets in America.

Now, California’s legislature is set to vote on a law bowing to local anti-density pressure that could make that all the worse, and set an ominous precedent for housing affordability. This is, on one level, a regional story about a fire-traumatized community trying to get back on its feet and shape its future, but it reflects something much larger, too. It highlights the kind of zero-sum politics increasingly pervasive nationwide, that casts ordinary homebuilding as something sinister, and that elevates local control above all else. These instincts help explain why it’s become so hard for the US to build the things we need, and why the fight for affordable, abundant housing remains so fraught, in California and nationwide.

Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country

The roots of this dispute go back well before the fires. For the better part of a decade, California has been trying to solve one of the central contradictions driving our national housing shortage: Almost everyone agrees that the country needs more homes, yet almost everyone has a reason they should go somewhere else. The state has passed laws weakening exclusionary zoning, legalizing denser “missing middle” housing, and taking some housing decisions out of the hands of local governments that refuse to permit enough homes.

That push included, in 2021, a now-famous statewide law, Senate Bill 9, which overrode local zoning to enable homeowners statewide to build up to four housing units on their lots. Another pair of laws, SB 684 and a subsequent expansion, SB 1123, made it possible to subdivide vacant lots zoned for single-family houses and build up to 10 smaller homes on them.

The 2025 fires are now testing California’s pro-housing progress. In Altadena, an unincorporated suburb about 14 miles north of downtown LA, the Eaton Fire destroyed a huge share of homes. Many survivors are now rebuilding the single-family homes they lost in the disaster. Others, facing meager insurance payouts and massive construction costs, have sought to rebuild at higher densities to make doing so financially feasible, or sold their lots to developers and moved elsewhere.

Only a small share of rebuilding applications so far have relied on SB 9 or SB 1123, but a revolt has nevertheless ensued among opponents of denser developments. Lawmakers in Sacramento now want to stop the use of one of California’s pro-housing laws in the community. By August 31, the state legislature could pass yet a new law: SB 1090, which would suspend SB 1123 in Altadena until 2030, blocking the additional housing it would have allowed.

Altadena is by all accounts idyllic, lined with storybook bungalows bordering the San Gabriel Mountains. The impulse to want it to be built back as it was before is only human and understandable. Neil Tyler, a fire survivor who supports SB 1090 and is currently rebuilding his home, told me that many in the community are deeply anxious and angry that a developer could buy burned lots and transform them into clusters of 10 homes that would feel alien to the Altadena they’re trying to recover. It “exploded into the community’s fear and opposition and pretty much outrage over someone trying to profit off the backs of all of our pain and suffering,” he said.

I’ve written extensively on the national housing shortage and the local zoning laws that help cause it. Altadena offers an unusually sympathetic case for the desire to maintain hyper-local control — it’s terribly unfair for your community to burn down overnight. And it challenged me to think more deeply about what is owed to a community suffering such incredible loss.

Ultimately, the fight over SB 1090 clarified to me more strongly why the local level is the wrong one to make decisions about housing supply, and why it’s important for California’s hard-won housing laws, along with similar state laws elsewhere in the US, to withstand the very local resistance they were enacted to overcome. The metro LA area, including Altadena, is extraordinarily expensive in large part because local control has already caused it to underbuild housing for decades. SB 1090 would convert some fire survivors’ desire to preserve Altadena’s low-density form into restrictions on other people’s rights and choices, while blocking homes the region desperately needs.

The case for rebuilding…more

Debates over arcane laws with names like SB 9, SB 1123, and SB........

© Vox