Wendy Lopez, a single mother of three from Guatemala, received an eviction order the day before wildfires destroyed Pacific Palisades, where she worked as a caregiver for people with disabilities.
The crisis only escalated the eviction process, Lopez said. The landlord for her rent-stabilized Mid City apartment has sent her threatening letters nearly every day. On 1 February , he raised her monthly rent from $1320 to $1430, exceeding the 4% legal rent increase limit. Moving is not an option, she said, because rent for similar housing elsewhere has doubled since the fires.
“Having this eviction at the same time as losing 50% of my income has been a huge source of stress,” Lopez, 45, said through an interpreter. “Without slowing this down, I won’t be able to pay.”
The Eaton and Palisades fires that swept across LA county on 7 January leveled more than 10,000 structures and left tens of thousands of residents homeless. The crisis cratered housing supply in a region already suffering from a severe shortage of affordable housing. The housing squeeze affects not only displaced wildfire survivors but tenants in eviction proceedings, who reported heightened harassment. As landlords engaged in predatory tactics, hiking rent by as much as 150%, community organizers and working-class tenants like Lopez have been urging elected officials to instate a countywide eviction moratorium and rent freeze.
“If we just let people get evicted, if we let them become homeless and lose them to other cities, we’re going to look back on this moment and wish we could have done something differently,” said Chelsea Kirk, a tenant organizer and director of policy and advocacy at the non-profit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy.
Three days after the fires, Kirk created a crowdsourced database to track listings in which the asking rents appeared to have jumped abruptly, some by as much as 50%. The spreadsheet went viral on social media and amassed more than 1,400 submissions of suspect listings.
Maria del Sagrario Hernández, a Mexican landscaper and house cleaner in the Palisades who lost most of her income after the fire, said she’s been facing eviction since December. Over the past few weeks, she’s been receiving threatening calls from different area codes asking why she has not yet moved out.
She’s looked for other housing, but prices have grown so high that she could only afford to rent a bedroom in an apartment or house, to share with other roommates.
“This is why we’re demanding that the city help us at this moment,” Hernández, 56, said through an interpreter. “Many people have lost work and are facing eviction. That’s more people without work, more people in the streets.”
California’s anti-price gouging statute prohibits landlords from increasing rent by more than 10% for 30 days after declared states of emergency. For properties listed after an emergency, rents are capped at 160% of the area’s fair market rent. But reports of price-gouging have ballooned more than 50 times since governor Gavin Newsom’s 7 January emergency declaration, according to a report released Monday by the Rent Brigade, an independent collective that Kirk formed with tenant advocates, web programmers and housing researchers.
Between 7-18 January, more than 1,300 listings on Zillow appear to have broken the state’s price gouging law, the report found. More than 1,100 landlords and real estate agents have engaged in the tactic, with 38 identified as repeat offenders. Altogether, the listings sought to illegally overcharge renters by $7.7m a month, or $92.4m a year.
Rent gouging affects both wealthy homeowners in Malibu and working-class tenants in Vermont Square and Koreatown. Both of the latter neighborhoods are more than 15 miles south of the Eaton fire burn zone, highlighting the ripple effect of the blaze on the housing market. “The idea that only people in the Palisades and Altadena are impacted, that losing your home is the only type of displacement, is just not true,” Kirk said.
Despite the publicity and outrage generated by the report and Kirk’s spreadsheet tracker, landlords and property owners have continued to flout the law. Over the past week, the Rent Brigade has flagged 800 more listings that exceeded the legal limit for rent increases, said Phil Meyer, a data analyst with the collective.
“Proportional to their rent, the units that working-class people lived in became more expensive,” he said.
Andrew Crowley had been unemployed for nearly a year when wildfires erupted in Los Angeles. Recently, he’d fallen behind on bills and barely made rent with earnings from freelance reporting work and donations from a GoFundMe campaign.
When his landlord lost his home in the Eaton fire, he asked Crowley to move out so he could shelter his mother, who was also displaced. With a poor credit score and no savings, Crowley couldn’t find a single listing he could afford. In a matter of days, he packed his bags, left some furniture with friends and moved into his aunt’s house in Las Vegas.
“It sucks I’m out of this place but I no longer feel like I’m in survival mode,” said Crowley, 35, who had lived in a small Pasadena studio for the past three years.
Prosecutors have begun to more aggressively enforce price gouging rules. The state’s attorney general Rob Bonta filed criminal charges against two realtors accused of violating the law and issued at least 650 warning letters to landlords and hotels. On Wednesday, more than three weeks after the fire, the LA ity council began debating a package of tenant protections, including a one-year rent freeze, to prevent evictions of residents displaced or impacted by the fires.
In response to demands from tenant unions, the board of supervisors passed a resolution on 21 January that enacted eviction protections for renters who are accommodating displaced people and pets. It also approved of a proposal to expand short-term rentals for survivors.
Tony Carfello, an organizer with the LA Tenants Union, said the city and county’s disaster response has been wholly inadequate, comparable to “a bandaid on a missing hand”.
Carfello said that many working-class tenants, previously employed as nannies, gardeners and landscapers in the Palisades, are already falling behind on rent. Landlords of rent-stabilized units, he said, have been harassing tenants to move out so they could rent to fire victims for higher prices. Though Newsom’s emergency declaration prohibits rent gouging for a month, Carfello said the crisis will likely continue beyond mid-February.
One year after the 2023 Maui fires, families were still paying 43% more rent on units with the same or few bedrooms, according to an October survey from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization. Nearly one-third of fire-affected households live in poverty, compared with 14% before the fires. In the two years after the 2018 Camp fire, the deadliest blaze in California history, rental prices in the three surrounding counties of Paradise rose more than 20%.
“What’s needed is urgent action,” Carfello said.
