Pacific Palisades Rebuilding Has Begun, but $2.4 Billion in Approved SBA Loans Sits Uncollected with a June 30 Deadline Looming.

The Rebuild Is Real, but Slow

Walk through Pacific Palisades on a weekday in June 2026 and the silence that defined the neighborhood through most of last year is gone. According to the NY Post, the sound of hammers has replaced the rumble of excavators. Wooden framing is going up on lots that sat as ash and chimney stacks for months after the January 2025 fires.

The path here was neither fast nor clean.

LA Mayor Karen Bass publicly predicted debris clearance alone would take 18 months. The Army Corps of Engineers, operating under the Trump administration, completed the work in under eight months. That is a legitimate win, regardless of how you feel about either Bass or Trump.

But debris removal was only the first obstacle. City permitting moved slowly. Insurance companies, by multiple accounts, dragged their feet for months leaving homeowners without the cash they needed to move forward. The NY Post reports that Trump signed an executive order early this year taking federal control of the permitting process in both the Palisades and Eaton burn zones.

Residents were skeptical at the time. Some told the Post that permitting was no longer the main bottleneck by then, and that LA had started moving faster on its own. Timing matters when you're assigning credit.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was dispatched to manage the federal coordination. According to the NY Post, his team held quiet meetings with local residents to identify where the process was stalling, and he met directly with Mayor Bass, who had previously told Trump to stay out of it and "handle his business, because we are handling ours." Whether the federal intervention accelerated the timeline in a measurable way, or whether it largely ratified progress already underway at the city level, is a genuinely unresolved question. Both things can be partly true.

The Bigger Problem: $2.4 Billion Approved but Not Disbursed

The more urgent story right now is the money.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has approved nearly 13,000 applications totaling more than $3.4 billion in disaster assistance following the January 2025 fires, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press. That makes the Los Angeles region the largest recipient of SBA disaster assistance in all of Fiscal Year 2025.

Of that $3.4 billion approved, only about $1 billion has actually been disbursed as of June 20, 2026.

Roughly $2.4 billion in approved funds sit uncollected, representing real homeowners and businesses who qualified for help and have not yet completed the final steps to receive it.

The SBA's deadline to accept approved loan funds is June 30. After that date, undisbursed loans will be available only on a case-by-case basis, not automatically. Approved borrowers can complete the process through the MySBA Loan Portal, by scheduling an appointment at appointment.sba.gov, or by walking into one of two local recovery centers: the Pali Hub at 15239 La Cruz Dr. in Pacific Palisades (weekdays, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or the Eaton Fire Collaborative's Collaboratory at 540 W. Woodbury Rd. in Altadena (weekdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.).

For survivors who need help understanding the permitting process, LA County Recovers is hosting a free virtual Rebuilding Together Workshop on July 10 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. via Zoom, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press. It will cover the Unified Permit Process, walk through how to submit a County Disaster Recovery Permit application, and include a live Q&A.

Mortgage Relief Got a Major Upgrade

For homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages because their house is gone or uninhabitable, the California Housing Finance Agency has significantly expanded its CalAssist Mortgage Fund. The program now offers up to 12 months of mortgage payments, up from the original three-month cap, with assistance of up to $100,000 that does not need to be repaid, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press.

CalHFA pays mortgage servicers directly. Homeowners who already received three months of assistance can apply for additional support to bring their total to a full year. Eligibility covers homeowners who are current, in forbearance, or behind on payments.

A free in-person CalAssist workshop is scheduled for Saturday, June 27 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Altadena Community Center, 730 E. Altadena Dr. Homeowners can also apply online or call 800-501-0019.

What Happens After June 30

Critics of the federal intervention make a reasonable point: local officials and advocacy groups have argued that Trump's executive order on permitting arrived after LA had already begun streamlining its own processes, meaning the federal takeover was more political theater than practical acceleration. They also note that the SBA loan gap, $2.4 billion approved but uncollected, is partly a function of survivor capacity. Disaster victims juggling insurance battles, temporary housing, and grief do not always have the bandwidth to navigate federal loan portals on a bureaucratic timeline. Blaming the gap entirely on the survivors misses that structural reality.

Those concerns don't erase the progress, but they complicate the narrative of a federal rescue that arrived just in time.

The concrete, pressing question as of June 20, 2026 is whether the roughly $2.4 billion gap between SBA approvals and actual disbursements closes before the deadline. If it doesn't, survivors who qualified for disaster loans will face a harder, case-by-case process to access funds they were already approved to receive. The SBA's customer service line for disaster assistance is 800-659-2955.