By Rachel Jonas and Robert Fagnani, Special for CalMatters

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We were supposed to celebrate our younger son’s first birthday in our backyard on January 11th, 2025. Instead, four days before his party, we watched the Palisades fire take our home. We’d packed what we could, put our kids in the car and drove to Tennessee to live with family because we had nowhere else to go.

Our house is gone. Our older son’s preschool is gone. The library, the restaurants, the small routines that made up a life are all gone. What remains is a mortgage on a property that no longer exists and a rebuilding process that every expert we’ve spoken to says will take two to four years, minimum.

We did not expect to become advocates. But in the months after the fire, we kept running into the same impossible questions from other families — questions about forbearance, credit and what their mortgage servicer was actually required to do. Nobody had clear answers, so we founded Disaster Mortgage Relief and have spent the past year listening to hundreds of families across the Palisades and Altadena navigate a financial system that was simply not built for what we are living through.

That experience is what brings us to Assembly Bill 1847. The California Bankers Association recently argued that this bill — which would extend and strengthen mortgage protections established under last year’s fire emergency mortgage relief law, AB 238 — could end up restricting access to credit. 

We want to engage with that, because we think it gets the situation almost entirely backwards.

AB 238 gave people whose homes burned up to 12 months of mortgage forbearance. But the rebuilding timeline in the Palisades and Altadena is not 12 months. Debris removal, utility restoration, insurance disputes, permit approvals, contractor shortages and construction inflation have made this a multi-year process for virtually everyone we work with. 

The original forbearance framework was built around a recovery timeline that does not exist in reality. Now that fire survivors’ forbearance periods are expiring, we are watching the consequences in real time: Families who were current on their mortgages before the January 2025 fire — who followed every rule — are seeing their credit scores fall by 200, 300, even 400 points. 

Some are being pushed toward foreclosure. Some are being handed balloon payments of $100,000 or more, due at the exact moment they are trying to finance construction.

This is not a story about irresponsible borrowers. These are teachers, small business owners, young families who made these neighborhoods what they were. Most still desperately want to come home. But the financial pressure is forcing many of them out for good.

We understand lenders need predictable rules and functioning credit markets. California cannot solve one crisis by creating another. But the greater threat to future lending is not temporary forbearance; it is mass borrower failure, collapsing credit, abandoned rebuilds and neighborhoods that never recover.

AB 1847 does not forgive debt. It does not eliminate lender rights. It does not tell banks they won’t be repaid. It allows payments to be deferred during rebuilding and moved to the loan’s back end. 

The CARES Act, which gave borrowers of federally-backed mortgages up to 360 days’ relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrated that similar structures were operationally feasible on a national scale. 

For many families, freeing up two or three years of principal and interest and applying that money to construction is the difference between rebuilding and permanently leaving. It requires no taxpayer money; it simply restructures debt that already exists so families have a realistic chance to come home.

In our case, my family is still in Tennessee, saving every dime we can to hopefully afford to rebuild the home we lost.

Climate events are no longer temporary and localized. They destroy entire communities at once and displace families for years. The financial infrastructure around homeownership needs to catch up to that reality.

The question before California is simple: when disaster survivors are trapped between a destroyed home and a mortgage system that no longer matches modern recovery, will we force families into financial collapse or adapt the system to the world we now live in?

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.