Browne, a retired bus driver, now finds himself staring down estimated rebuilding costs of as much as $1.8 million. “A lot of people are selling and going elsewhere to start over, saying it’s too hard to come back here,” Browne says. “I gotta come back.”
In Altadena, the decision to stay or go is at once deeply personal and openly cooperative because of the community’s standing as a historical stronghold of Black homeownership.
According to Census Bureau data, the national homeownership rate among Black Americans was 45.7 percent in 2023. About 75 percent of Black Altadena residents owned their own home in 2020, according to the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. More than half of Altadena’s homeowners (57 percent) were 65 or older. The picture of a community at a crossroads becomes apparent when you take into account that an analysis by UCLA found that nearly 6 in 10 Black-owned homes sustained severe fire damage—a larger percentage than any other racial group.
While Browne’s story may be especially wrenching because of the terrible timing, he is hardly alone. A 2025 nationally representative survey by the insurance shopping website ValuePenguin found that 1 in 4 homeowners said they received nonrenewal notices in the previous 12 months. And an analysis by the online lending marketplace Lending Tree of 2023 American Community Survey data found that 13.6 percent of owner-occupied homes in the U.S. were uninsured.
