Plan to give Coastal Commission more power over fire reconstructions

from Nadia LathanCalMatters

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3.3 million dollars.

That’s how much Mei Sung estimates it will cost to rebuild her Pacific Palisades home.

With her two-bedroom house on top of a hill bordering the Pacific Ocean, she’s had what she considered a strange abode since 2005.

He doesn’t know if he will now build it on the empty lot there.

“Because of all the costs with the construction on the hills, on the coast, I don’t know if I’m going to rebuild or not,” she said. “I might have to sell.”

More than a year after wildfires tore through Los Angeles, state lawmakers are considering a new proposal that would give the powerful California Coastal Commission greater oversight of homes destroyed by future natural disasters. New buyers will need approval from the commission to rebuild, a reversal from current state law that allows homes destroyed by fires or other disasters to bypass the controlling state agency.

Buyers today can rebuild homes without a commission inspection as long as they are substantially the same as before the disaster and are no more than 10% larger than the original home.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded those exemptions to include redevelopments that are not similar to their original design when he suspended the commission’s authority over Los Angeles’ rebuilding efforts to speed up what has been a grueling task for the city.

In Malibu and Pacific Palisades, where many homes hug the Pacific coast, dozens of parcels of land have been bought by developers from homeowners who can’t afford to pay millions of dollars to rebuild their houses from scratch.

More than 40 percent of homes sold in the Palisades last summer were bought by investors, according to real estate company Redfinwhich defines investors as buyers with “LLC,” “Inc,” “Corp,” or “Homes” in their names.

Some residents questioned what the expanses of investor-owned lots could mean for the character of the fire-torn communities, said Senator Ben Allenwho is the author Senate Bill 1229 and represents the Palisades area.

The legislation is one of a handful of bills this session that would expand the commission’s powers rather than weaken them, bucking a trend of long-standing disdain among top state and federal leaders over how the agency has overseen development along California’s prized coastline.

The potential law would not apply to homes destroyed by last year’s fires.

Senate Democrats overwhelmingly supported the bill when it passed the chamber last month. San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener was the only Democrat to join the Republicans, voting against it by a 29-9 vote.

“It could set a troubling precedent that we’re more focused on just empowering the original owner to build,” Wiener said. “I thought it was a very, very dangerous precedent, and that’s why I felt the need to vote no.”

There is a long way to go

Disaster recovery has never been easy in California.

According to data of 2025 Los Angeles Times an investigation. Low insurance payments, rising construction costs and permitting requirements are some of the reasons.

For many in Los Angeles, the decision not to build anew comes down to affordability and practicality, between skyrocketing mortgage rates and a lack of stamina to endure what can be a months-long, byzantine permitting process.

Before the fire, Sung’s estate was valued at $2.5 million. She said she received $700,000 in Mercury insurance payments after the home was destroyed on Jan. 7, 2025. Although her land is not for sale, nearby lots are worth about $1 million. She is considering selling it to a developer.

“There’s already so much weight on these properties,” Sung said of the redevelopments. “People can’t afford to build because of all these requirements,” such as the higher fire safety regulations and fire codes that are common in wildfire-prone areas, she said.

Dirty reputation of housing

Critics, including Newsom, accuse the commission of not authorizing enough affordable housing or of doing it too slowly for years, as lawmakers have gutted numerous housing laws to facilitate the rapid construction of more apartments.

In the Palisades, where affordable housing was already scarce, criticism of affordability was sharper. Only a few hundred units in a city of roughly 28,000 were deemed affordable, and post-fire local mandates to build more became their own flashpoint, separate from the coastal commission.

The 12-member voting committee is chaired by California Coastal ActA 50-year-old law created after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill to protect the coast and its natural habitats.

It is one of the most closely scrutinized state agencies in California as federal and local officials question how it has used its authority over nearly 900 miles of coastline to block certain projects, such as turning down a billionaire Elon Musk’s request to increase the number of Space X rocket launches off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Newsom and other top Democrats appointed three development support officers to the commission last year to help get more housing approved along the waterfront.

Wealthy Los Angeles real estate developer Jamie Lee was tapped by Newsom last October to replace Effie Turnbull Sanders, a lawyer lauded by environmentalists for defending issues of environmental justice in the agency.

Last May, Speaker of the Democratic Assembly Robert Rivas selected Monterey County Supervisor Chris Lopez and Chula Vista Councilman Jose Preciado to the commission, both considered pro-development.

Newsom and President Donald Trump have found common ground in attacking the commission. The governor publicly rebuked the agency and issued a sharply worded mandate when he suspended its authority over Palisades restoration efforts.

“The extent of destruction from these fires has created a need for immediate shelter and temporary housing that will require unlocking every available strategy to accommodate displaced persons,” he wrote.

Both Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature have pushed for limits on the commission’s powers, including an attempt to exempt the entire city of Santa Monica from the commission’s purview.

Last week, Newsom’s office briefly considered a proposal that would exempt mixed-use and multifamily housing projects along the Santa Monica waterfront from the Coastal Act.

The proposal would assume all those projects comply with the act unless the commission can prove otherwise within just 30 days, according to a copy of the plan obtained by CalMatters.

Trump has also repeatedly railed against the commission for blocking projects it deems environmentally dangerous. Long-standing tensions between the president and the commission have accelerated in the president’s push to extract more oil from the coast. That tension accelerated last week when the federal government announced the agency was investigating.

“People are already blocked”

Allen, the bill’s author, said the governor’s orders create an opportunity for abuse by investors to circumvent coastal rules and build projects that are harmful to the environment.

“We just want to make sure we don’t roll back too many of these important protections,” Allen, who is running for insurance commissioner, said of his legislation, and that it would not apply to homes destroyed by last year’s fires, but to future natural disasters.

The bill aims to filter out investors by allowing only the pre-disaster property owner to bypass Coastal Commission approval.

Environmentalists who support the bill said the governor’s actions jeopardize the key issues the commission works to protect — natural habitats and public beach access — by allowing developers to take advantage of fewer rules.

“An outside developer who buys, say, a burned lot for the low market value, he gets the same fast-tracking as a displaced family.”

Jennifer Savage of the Surfrider Foundation

“An outside developer who buys, say, a burned lot for the low market value, he gets the same fast-tracked as a displaced family,” said Jennifer Savage, associate director of policy at the Surfrider Foundation. “And the law is not designed to do that.”

The commission, which briefly challenged Newsom’s orders, supports the bill for similar reasons.

“This closes a loophole that could be misinterpreted as allowing larger replacement structures to be located in hazardous or environmentally sensitive areas in disaster recovery,” spokesman Joshua Smith said in an emailed statement.

Neither the Coastal Commission nor Allen could provide examples of investor-owned projects abusing the law.

“We don’t have any information or information that this has happened, although since most disaster repairs are done by local governments, we don’t know for sure to what extent this is happening,” Smith said.

California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, said legislation focused on recovery should address why so many wildfire survivors choose to sell their land in the first place.

“I’m not sure the emphasis on the Coastal Act makes sense,” said spokesman Matthew Lewis, saying the problem is insurance, construction and permitting costs that make restoration too expensive for most people.

The group that endorsed Allen for commissioner has no official position on the bill. Lewis said he doesn’t know enough about the issues Allen is trying to address to say whether the legislation could make it harder for owners to recover.

Sung worries that such changes will scare away developers worried about falling under the commission’s authority, making it harder for her and her neighbors to sell.

“If anything, it just keeps the landowner stuck. Because you can’t afford to sell and you can’t afford to build. And so you’re stuck with this property that has absolutely no use for anybody.”

CalMatters reporter Yue Stella Yu contributed reporting.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.