Six months after California’s Eaton Fire, Black residents of Altadena find themselves at the epicenter of a mounting national crisis as state and federal foreclosure moratoriums expire.
A Capital B analysis of public records found that roughly three dozen fire-ravaged properties have been added to pre-foreclosure lists — a public record of homes where owners have fallen behind on their mortgage payments and received formal warnings from lenders — since the fires broke out in early January. Strikingly, more than half of the properties where the owners’ names were made public are owned by Black families, even though Black people comprise less than 20% of Altadena’s population.
“It’s a nightmare,” said Everard Horton Williams Jr., who lost his home to the flames and is now struggling to cover his mortgage payments and a new lease in the city of Monterey Park. At the same time, he has been supporting his parents who lost their home to the fire as well.
Last month, his father, Everard Horton Williams Sr., passed away at 85.
“I can’t help but believe that the trauma and stress of losing a home of 48 years and then trying to stabilize his life accelerated his demise,” Williams said. His mother, who is 85, now wants to sell their family home because she cannot fathom the expense nor the five-year rebuild timeline given by homebuilders in the area.
As property values fall in disaster-prone areas and insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable, a growing national wave of forced sales and foreclosures threatens to erode generational wealth and destabilize entire Black communities, experts said.
A federal foreclosure moratorium for fire victims expired on July 7, and a state program where mortgage companies agreed to let borrowers delay their monthly payments for 90 days has also run out. And some of the companies included in the state program never gave borrowers a break, according to the LAist, LA’s NPR station.
Climate change is relentlessly reshaping the American dream of homeownership, transforming extreme weather from a distant threat into a direct financial crisis for millions.
Foreclosures across the U.S. caused by weather-related incidents are expected to soar by 380% over the next 10 years, according to First Street, a research firm that studies the impact of climate change.
Florida, Louisiana, and California are projected to account for more than half of all climate-related mortgage losses this year. In total, weather disasters will account for nearly 7% of all foreclosures this year.
By 2035, climate-driven events could account for up to 30% of all foreclosures, the recent study found.
“Mortgage markets are now on the front lines of climate risk,” said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street. The study found that half of all recent major climate-related events were followed by elevated foreclosure rates. “Our modeling demonstrates that physical hazards are already eroding foundational assumptions of loan underwriting, property valuation, and credit servicing.”
Lenders are already bracing for more than $1 billion in credit losses this year, with that number projected to climb to $5.4 billion within a decade. That is the equivalent to wiping out the wealth of an entire midsize city’s worth of homeowners.
For families living paycheck to paycheck, especially in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, this translates into thousands of families being forced to sell or losing their homes outright, typically with little or no remaining equity.
“We’re seeing so many families now that are having to sell just for the value of the dead land because they don’t have enough insurance on the property, they don’t have the time or strength to rebuild, or just can’t afford to pay for a mortgage and a new lease,” said Williams, who is 62 and whose employer recently laid off 7% of its staff.
Nationally, Black households are twice as likely to never own a home again after foreclosure than white borrowers, and are 15% more likely to live in a neighborhood vulnerable to severe weather than the average American.
The study found in cities like New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where foreclosure rates already run two to three times the national average, a single flood or hurricane can trigger a spike in foreclosures that is up to 40% higher in low-income neighborhoods. As insurance premiums climb (sometimes doubling or tripling in just a few years) and coverage becomes harder to find, families who can’t afford these new costs are left with impossible choices: sell at a loss, fall behind on payments, or risk foreclosure.
In Los Angeles, “property values in Black neighborhoods have been slower to recover since the 2009 market crash,” explained Michael Lens, professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UCLA.
“So if you’re a property owner in Altadena, maybe you’re underinsured in terms of being able to rebuild that home and you’re also less likely to be able to just pay or sell the property and walk away,” he said.
Black Homeownership Under Siege: Lessons from Katrina to Altadena
Each wave of forced sales chips away at the stability of entire communities, turning once-stable Black neighborhoods into landscapes of vacant lots and lost opportunity, and making it even harder for the next generation to build back what was lost. The financial fallout is cascading through the housing market and the broader economy — and tearing apart families.
In Altadena, the situation is compounded by the fact that many of the original loan holders have died since the fire — or, in some cases, even before it — according to public obituaries, leaving heirs ill-equipped to shoulder the rising costs. This phenomenon echoes a broader trend in Los Angeles, where the deaths of Black elders and the inability of their baby-boomer children to maintain inherited homes has become one of the leading drivers of Black homelessness, as documented by two New York Times investigations.
Rather than returning to community hands, most of Altadena’s burnt lots are being snapped up by private companies, signaling a corporate takeover of a climate-ravaged landscape.
Of the nearly 150 fire-damaged properties sold since January, at least 50% were purchased by corporate entities. That is more than double the national average of 23% for single-family home sales. Just six companies now hold 42% of these properties, with Black Lion Properties LLC alone spending nearly $9 million to acquire at least a dozen lots. This rapid consolidation, often by buyers with little public presence or accountability, has left many residents anxious about the future of their neighborhood.
“It is so difficult navigating this stuff without the knowledge or time to vet the people you’re working with either attempting to rebuild or sell,” said Williams, who is the first ever African American undergraduate department chair at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles.
Research shows that corporate homeownership disproportionately harms Black households by crowding out Black buyers from homeownership opportunities and eroding generational wealth. In Atlanta, for example, large investors buying up homes in majority-Black neighborhoods caused Black families to lose over $4 billion in home equity over a decade, accounting for three-quarters of the decline in Black homeownership rates.
“Our whole lives are out on display and we’re trying to put them back together, but we’re vulnerable,” Williams added.
Corporate ownership most often targets middle-income, majority-Black areas, converting homes into rentals and driving up rents, which not only makes it harder for Black families to buy homes but also accelerates displacement and deepens the racial wealth gap
Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans homeowners remain at the highest foreclosure risk among major U.S. cities. The city faced a complex crisis shaped by disaster-related mortgage defaults and uneven policy responses.
Originally, despite widespread property destruction and mortgage delinquencies, foreclosure filings fell below pre-storm levels due to temporary relief measures. However, relief was uneven: prime mortgage holders regularly received automatic aid, while subprime borrowers, mostly Black residents, had to seek help and were often denied, increasing their foreclosure risk.
Recovery programs like the Road Home initiative shortchanged predominantly Black neighborhoods, leaving them with greater financial burdens and less support to rebuild. As a result, many Black residents remain displaced, homeownership rates in historic Black neighborhoods declined, and those who returned face higher housing instability and costs. Similar patterns emerged after Hurricane Harvey in Houston, with delinquent mortgage payments rising 20 points in affected Black communities.
Andreanecia Morris, executive director of the housing advocacy nonprofit HousingNOLA, which has helped renters and homeowners in New Orleans in the aftermath of natural disasters, said the state and federal government’s inability to address the cracks in the post-disaster housing crisis is leading to an increase in homelessness.
“We wonder why homelessness is where it is, but when we look at support after these disasters for insurance and mortgages, we’re subsidizing people who make more than $200,000 a year,” she said in May. “We’re not investing in the people who need it most. And then we’re perplexed when these programs don’t solve or interrupt the most horrifying outcomes.”
For Black middle-income families, oftentimes their prospects are similar to that of white low-income families, explained Lens. “A Black middle class family is more likely to own the type of home that’s more indicative of what a low-income white family is going to own,” he said. “So if you take Black and white families of the same income, the Black family is going to, on average, have much lower wealth, which makes recovering from something like this and keeping your home more difficult.”
And despite all of these inequities, Williams is afraid that Altadena has been forgotten, washed away by new, more pressing natural disasters and destruction, much like the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
“You can only be at the center of attention for so long before the next destructive thing pushes you down,” he said. “And that makes you vulnerable to lose it all.”
The Williams family’s GoFundMe can be found here.
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