Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Supervisor Barger: More Than 1,025 Homes Are Under Construction Across the Eaton Fire Burn Area

Supervisor Barger’s latest recovery data shows construction accelerating — but insurance delays are keeping thousands of displaced residents on the sidelines

More than 1,025 homes are under construction across the Eaton Fire burn area, according to data released Tuesday by Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger’s office. Another roughly 3,000 applications to rebuild have been filed, and approximately 2,000 building permits have been issued.

None of that, Barger said, tells the full story. More than 6,000 households lost homes when the fire tore through Altadena and surrounding communities in January 2025. Fifteen months later, only about half of those households have submitted applications to rebuild — a gap that Barger attributes not to permitting delays, but to insurance checks that have not arrived.

“The fact that only half of wildfire survivors have submitted applications makes clear that significant barriers remain, especially financial ones,” Barger said in the statement from her office. “Many impacted residents have taken no action to rebuild because they lack the capital to move forward — an issue exacerbated by delayed insurance payouts.”

The release comes as Barger’s office has consistently disputed a months-long federal argument about the primary cause of Altadena’s recovery delays. The Trump administration — through EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, who met with Barger in February — has argued that local permitting delays are the primary obstacle to rebuilding. Barger has rejected that characterization, telling the federal officials during their February 4 meeting that the county had reduced its permitting review timeline to 31 business days, and that the real bottleneck is financial.

“Both administrators remain engaged and attentive to our local Eaton Fire recovery work,” Barger said in Tuesday’s statement. “I remain thankful that President Trump has an interest in supporting wildfire recovery efforts, and I welcome opportunities to work collaboratively with his administration to deliver meaningful relief for our residents.”

The arc of Altadena’s permitting timeline shows how far the county’s process has come. As of five months post-fire, in June 2025, only 15 building permits had been issued in the Eaton burn area. By the one-year mark in January 2026, that number had grown to more than 1,100 countywide for both fire areas. Now, according to Barger’s office, approximately 2,000 permits have been issued in the Eaton area alone — progress Barger has attributed to the county’s streamlined disaster recovery process, including the Altadena One-Stop Recovery Permitting Center she championed in the spring of 2025.

That progress has not reached everyone. For residents waiting on insurance settlements, a county permit is, in Barger’s framing, a secondary concern. A survey by the Department of Angels, a disaster relief organization, found that 47% of fire survivors reported delays in receiving insurance claim payments, according to reporting by Pasadena Now in February 2026. The co-founder of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, a group that says it represents approximately 10,000 fire survivors, has similarly characterized the insurance backlog — not local bureaucracy — as the defining obstacle to a full Altadena recovery.

The Eaton Fire ignited the evening of January 7, 2025, in Eaton Canyon near Altadena and Pasadena, driven by historic Santa Ana winds. It burned 14,021 acres, killed at least 19 people, and destroyed 9,418 structures in total, according to Cal Fire — making it the second most destructive wildfire in California history. The fire devastated entire residential neighborhoods in Altadena, including communities settled by African-American families during the Great Migration that had endured for more than a century.

The recovery has also been shaped by county and state action. In October 2025, the LA County Board of Supervisors unanimously extended the Eaton Fire Disaster Interim Ordinance through August 2026, maintaining streamlined permitting for fire-damaged properties in unincorporated areas.

For Altadena residents displaced into neighboring Pasadena and other communities, the 15-month mark represents a widening divide between those who have entered the pipeline and those still waiting at its gates — waiting not for permits, but for the insurance payments that would allow them to walk through.