LA Landlords are Jacking Up the Rent Amid Fires

As the survivors of the destructive Palisades and Eaton Fires try to recover, they’re now dealing with soaring rental and mortgage costs as some landlords try to take advantage of the crisis.

Why It Hurts: The LA housing market is already one of the most challenging in the nation, thanks to a lack of available homes and sky-high prices. The influx of thousands of now-unhoused residents could bring the market to a breaking point.

Behind The Price Hikes: The first step to recovery for wildfire survivors is finding a place to live — permanent or temporary.

In LA, both are proving to be difficult as they flood the market simultaneously.

• Since the start of the fires, some home prices have jumped by hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, while rents have catapulted by the thousands.
• In LA, raising rents by more than 10% is illegal during a state of emergency, so the state and city governments have kicked up enforcement and asked residents to report offenders.
• Additionally, Airbnb and Zillow are cracking down on the practice by either taking down listings or hitting owners with error messages when they try to pull a fast one.
• But in many cases, it’s not the landlords who people are worried about — it’s others also looking for places to live. Many are offering more than the listing, posting multiple months of rent, or coming in with all-cash offers for purchases.

Closing Costs: The widespread condemnation of the price gouging has already led many landlords to re-reprice their properties. But LA is such a massive county that stopping every bad actor (not the performance kind) may prove impossible.

When almost 20,000 homes and apartments were affected by the fires, LA may need to get creative in how it houses people, potentially leading to a renaissance in alternative housing, such as the construction of backyard units, turning unused office buildings into housing, and the easing of California’s infamously strict zoning and construction regulations.

Go Deeper: Even before the fires, LA and many other cities were already dealing with critical housing shortages.