Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

There's not much you can do. Either the second has to be paid off by you, or it has to be refinanced by her. But there is no legal method to force someone to refinance.

Mr. Roach answered too quickly, since I know he knows there is an alternative. He is correct that you cannot force a refinance. What you can do, however, is force a sale of the property. If you own even 1% you can file an action for partition by sale to get your 1% out of the property. In a partition action, if the parties don't settle (which they pretty much always do) the sheriff is ordered to conduct what basically amounts to a foreclosure sale of the property, and then the parties litigate the distribution of the proceeds. As you can imagine, the property fetches WAY less when sold that way; so everybody loses if they force it to court ordered sale. That is why everyone always settles partition actions by either jointly selling the property or one buying the other out. In your case, they would just have to refinance to "buy you out."