Some landlords are trying to profit from the misfortune of Los Angelenos

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the Los Angeles area fires rage on, tens of thousands of people are left displaced. Those who lost homes to the flames are scrambling to find new or temporary housing, but face a massive barrier: Many listing prices on the market have shot up—by a lot. 

Last Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, which bans any rent increase above 10 percent for the period of the crisis. But a number of news reports found this week that asking rents for homes have skyrocketed across Los Angeles County—sometimes by as much as 86 percent. With focus on a new wind and fire threat issued for today, government enforcement of “price gouging” could be problematic. 

Jacking up the rent to meet surging demands is a common and often illegal practice after climate-fueled disasters like fires and hurricanes. For Los Angeles specifically, a fire-squeezed and pricey rental market could exacerbate an existing housing crisis and further widen the gap between the rich and poor in the city, experts say. 

In September, a furnished, four-bedroom home in the ritzy LA neighborhood Bel Air was listed at $15,900 per month on the online real-estate marketplace Zillow. On Saturday morning, as firefighters struggled to contain the still-burning Palisades fire a few miles away, the same home was relisted for $29,500, LAist discovered. 

When the news outlet asked the listing agent about why the advertised rent for the Bel Air home had surged, “she said she was getting another call and hung up,” LAist’s David Wagner wrote. The listing was later taken down. But it’s far from the only instance in which a landlord or agency is looking to profit off the city’s fire-fueled housing plight. A New York Times’ analysis of Zillow active rental listings revealed that several property rental prices in West Los Angeles have risen by more than the legal 10 percent since last Tuesday. 

Officials are asking people to report any instances of price gouging to the California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office. In a press conference on Saturday, Bonta warned that the practice is “a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and fines.”

Research shows that housing changes often extend beyond the affected area of a city as people try to avoid future fires. For example, after the Camp fire decimated the northeastern California town of Paradise in 2018, a mass exodus of survivors flooded the nearby town of Chico, nearly doubling its population of 92,000. One year later, the median asking rent for a two-bedroom home was 25 percent higher on average, NBC News reports. 

The same thing often happens after hurricanes. A 2023 study analyzing 19 eastern and coastal states from 2009 to 2018 found that the occurrence of a hurricane in a given year or the previous year reduces overall affordable rental housing, especially for counties with higher percentages of people of color. Experts stress that renters can be more vulnerable than people who own homes because they are less likely to have adequate insurance or qualify for as much immediate financial assistance from the government after a storm. 

“[It’s] the fundamental sin in our disaster policy in this country, that everything is based on property and possession,” Carlos Martín, a housing and climate researcher at Harvard University, told NPR in July. “It compounds these differences between the landed-gentry haves and the rest of the country that are have-nots.”

Since 1960, the Los Angeles metropolitan area’s population has nearly doubled from more than 6 million to over 12 million today. But housing availability is lagging behind: LA had a shortage of about 337,000 homes as of 2022, according to data from Zillow. 

Journalist Jireh Deng wrote for Inside Climate News last week about how housing policies have encouraged development in hillsides and mountains to fill some of the gaps, which put people directly in fire-vulnerable areas and made it difficult for emergency responders to access certain areas quickly. 

The fires did not discriminate between high- or low-income neighborhoods in LA, damaging or destroying celebrity homes and affordable housing complexes alike. However, recovery will undoubtedly look different for those who were already struggling to manage in one of the most expensive cities in the US. In the short term, Airbnb’s nonprofit wing and a local nonprofit group, 211 LA, are coordinating free temporary housing for displaced people, while some hotels are offering discounted stays. 

But people who lost their homes are currently facing a tough decision: to stay and try to rebuild or leave the city altogether. Experts say the fires will likely trigger a surge in homelessness. While some people may be able to afford a new house, the impending rise of insurance costs in the wake of the LA fires could make home ownership too much of a stretch for many.  

On Monday, Gov. Newsom proposed $2.5 billion in additional funding for emergency response efforts and to help kickstart recovery in LA, though President-elect Donald Trump and a group of House Republicans have discussed tying wildfire aid conditionally to a debt ceiling increase agreement in Congress. 

It’s difficult to know how LA’s housing crisis will play out as the fires rage on and threaten to wreak even more havoc across the distressed city. The impacts will likely endure for years, experts say. 

“A lot of people were barely scraping by, and this will push more people over the edge,” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, said in a post on the university’s website. “For most people, the recovery doesn’t take weeks or months. It can take years and sometimes even decades for communities to recover.”