Hours after losing her home to the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, Charlotta La Via looked out her hotel window and half-wished she’d booked the hotel across the street when she saw a “for rent” sign looked at a building nearby.
A luxury apartment complex in downtown Santa Monica was advertised that looked more like a five-star hotel than a conventional home, with prices to match. But she and her husband didn’t hesitate. Almost as soon as they finished traveling around, they signed a lease on a three-bedroom apartment.
“Aren’t you impulsive?” their 18-year-old daughter asked. At the time, three-bedroom apartments in the complex – including a pool, gym, doorman and a rooftop terrace with idyllic ocean views – were being marketed for more than $20,000 per month.
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“No, we have to jump on it,” La Via told her. “There will be a lot of people watching.”
Within a few days, there are almost no vacancies in a complex with many vacancies. The La Vias, who moved in on Wednesday with nothing but a few go-bags and some hastily purchased Ikea furniture, were told their lease was one of 25 new leases since the fire broke out on Jan. 7.
De La Vias, both physicians, are fortunate to have the money to cover the rental costs that eclipse the earning power of more than 90% of Californians. But their experience also tells a broader story about the scarcity of rental housing in the US’s second-largest city, even before the fires, and the disaster’s likely domino effect on Angelenos of all income levels.
Before the fires, LA was a city where rental housing was available but often out of reach for lower-income families. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment was just under $4,000, which is only affordable for households with an annual income of more than $160,000, about twice what the average household actually earns.
With more than 15,000 buildings estimated to have burned to the ground, most of them residential, the pressure is on to find alternative housing for tens of thousands of people who have either lost everything or cannot return to their homes as the communities where they live lived have been reduced to temporary, toxic wastelands.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order making it illegal for landlords to raise their rents, but evidence gathered by housing activists suggests hundreds of property owners are already benefiting from the increased demand, especially in areas adjacent to the largest burn. in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
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A five-bedroom house in Santa Monica identified by activists rose from $12,750 a month before the fires to $28,000 after; the listing was withdrawn two days after its exposure. Another Bel Air home spotted by a local news channel was for sale for $29,500 per month, down from previously listing for $15,900; that listing disappeared in less than a day.
Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman has vowed that anyone found raising prices above legal limits would be both prosecuted and “publicly shamed.” Yet it is not clear that any public agency has the staff or oversight powers to control the problem, which is ultimately a matter of supply and demand under crisis conditions in an urban area of ten million inhabitants.
“I don’t know how effective these tools are,” said Ben Winter, a housing expert who has worked for the city of Los Angeles and the federal government and now develops low-income housing in the private sector. ‘What is our stick to enforce them? Don’t know.”
The pressure will ripple through virtually the entire housing market – not just through rental properties, but also through home purchases, which have become increasingly unaffordable for those without generational wealth.
At the low end, it will likely push more people out of housing, at a time when the number of people living on the streets has declined modestly. In other words, the fact that the La Vias will have to spend a fortune to live in a luxury apartment for the next two years is bad news for everyone, regardless of income level.
And it doesn’t just stop at house prices. As homeowners and communities prepare to rebuild on a massive scale, contractors and building materials across the city will become scarcer and more expensive — even before taking into account the possibility that undocumented construction workers could be rounded up and deported by the newly installed Trump. administration. Insurance costs are expected to rise, perhaps dramatically.
After most disasters, federal government support is the most effective counterbalance to these pressures, but this too is questionable as Donald Trump and his allies suggest that aid for Los Angeles could come with strings attached – if it comes at all .
Winter, who spent two stints at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that under previous administrations, federal aid — usually in the form of block grants at the local level — would most likely not be targeted to affluent Pacific fire survivors. Palisades, but lower-income communities elsewhere in Los Angeles are likely to face longer-term affordability and housing security challenges.
Now the Trump-era gaming and name-calling threatens to call all of that into question. According to Winter, LA’s best chance was for Congress to consider funding in multiple disaster-affected areas at once. “In a world where many disasters have occurred in multiple regions spanning the political spectrum, that is beneficial for us,” he said. “If it’s just LA, it’ll probably be harder for us to get a really big check from them.”
Newsom has called for a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild devastated communities and wants to relax environmental and other planning rules to speed up the process. But that, too, is easier to wish than to implement, because L.A.’s city planning agencies are backlogged and understaffed, barely keeping up even before the fires.
According to a 2023 independent study, it took an average of 549 days for building permits to be approved for multifamily buildings in Los Angeles — and that the buildings themselves took nearly five years to complete, if they were completed at all.
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In another part of the world, an unprecedented disaster that wiped out entire neighborhoods could prevent survivors from returning to their former homes. But that hasn’t historically been the California way and is unlikely to happen now. Since 1990, nearly half of all new homes in California have been in at-risk areas – some of which are desirable hillside locations with easy access to nature and ocean views, such as Pacific Palisades, and some are more affordable foothill suburbs from the coast. mountains inland.
When disaster strikes – usually wildfires or mudslides – there may be a lull before people retreat, but this rarely lasts long. In Montecito, the hillside community best known as the home of Prince Harry and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, a devastating mudslide in 2018 that left 23 people buried alive has prompted authorities to impose modestly stricter rules on where to eat. certain plots may be built. no part of the community should be off limits.
Home sales fell 20% in the immediate aftermath, but quickly recovered. According to Cristal Clarke, a local real estate agent, even families who had lost loved ones generally dug their properties out of the mud, rebuilt them and moved back in.
It was a similar story in La Conchita, a small coastal community 15 miles south of Montecito, which was swamped by mud in both 1995 and 2005. A government geologist concluded that future mudslides were inevitable and there were calls to buy the city, deeming it uninhabitable.
According to Mike Bell, the unofficial mayor of La Conchita, homes went for sale for as little as $5,800. However, most people had no intention of going anywhere, calls to leave the city faded, and houses now cost more than $1 million.
Even the risks no longer worry locals as much as they used to.
“What risk?” Bell asked provocatively. “It’s hard to be in California and be in a place that’s completely safe.”
