Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass promised Californians who lost their homes in their engineered firestorm that there would be reduced red-tape to allow reconstruction to begin within weeks.

More than six months later, not a single home has been rebuilt. In fact, not a single construction has even started.

People suspected that Newsom and Bass would not let this crisis go to waste and would seize people's property in order to build apartment buildings for the poor.

That's exactly what they're doing. They're refusing to grant permits to let people rebuild, so that their multimillion-dollar properties become effectively valueless.

Then they're going to offer peanuts to buy these distressed, deliberately-impoverished landowners out.

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BREAKING - The California Senate has passed SB 549, granting LA County authority to purchase fire‑destroyed lots for minimal cost and convert them into low‑income housing, directly contradicting Gavin Newsom's previous assurance to homeowners that such government‑driven property conversions wouldn't happen.

Beege Wellborne wrote about this last week.

Adam Carolla predicted this. (Video below the fold).

Beege Wellborne writes: "You knew he was right."

That sick feeling only grew as months passed. The empty words of a nervous-as-a-cat Bass, defensively deflecting Donald Trump's directions to make residents as whole as possible as soon as possible, hang in the air still.

In hard-hit Altadena alone, the rebuilding process six months later is sucking the lives and hope out of people.

And every dime they ever had.

...Addressing the concerns of homeowners at a recent community meeting, Barger told them, "You have lost so much, you shouldn't have to worry about permitting fees getting in the way of rebuilding your home. For most families, these fees may have exceeded $20,000. That's a barrier we cannot allow to stand."

The deferral of fees only applies to people who lived in their own single-family homes before the fire. It does not apply to non-owner-occupied rental properties, multi-family housing units or commercial structures.

The county estimates that if 60% of homeowners in Altadena and elsewhere in unincorporated Palisades rebuild, it would amount to $84 million in building permit fees.

Permitting is only one hurdle. For most, state and local building codes have changed in the decades since many of these homes were originally built, meaning the house has to have changes and extras that insurance covering a like-to-like rebuild does not account for.

"It adds expenses that we didn't expect. Like, solar is required on all new builds, and so is the easement from the property line. It's got to be five feet now and ours was only three," says Toomey, as she stands under a backyard oak tree that survived.

"And insurance doesn't pay for that stuff. That's on us," Silvernail adds.

Soil sampling is now required, and that tacks another $5000-$8000 onto the process.

The very long and tedious process, which is beginning to look as if it's specifically designed to soak as much money out of the homeowner as possible before they give up in disgust and move elsewhere.

There have been only an unconscionable 44 building permits approved in LA County since the fires.

...But the process is still slow. As of midday July 1, 2025, the LA County Permitting Progress Dashboard showed 890 rebuild applications in the Eaton Fire area, but only 44 building permits have been issued, taking an average turnaround of about 10 weeks to get through the process.

And speed matters. A survey of fire victims found that the longer it takes to rebuild, the more likely it is people won't move back.

"So even folks that fully intend to move back today, if this process, either through permitting or financing or insurance, takes more than three years, the percentage of people that want to move back drops to like 50%," Kawahara says.

Those are the single-family homeowners' travails.

Back in February, I wrote about a new Los Angeles ordinance that had come into effect, requiring low-income housing to be erected, replacing apartment buildings that were lost.

What that meant to fire victims who'd lost their rental homes was they might never have a home to return to if the landlord rebuilt their building and they now earned too much to make the qualifications for the low-income threshold.

In effect, LA County would be making them homeless.

Read the whole thing.