Los Angeles-area landlords appear determined not to let a disaster go to waste, with tenant rights organizations and displaced people searching for shelter reporting that the prices for apartment rentals and hotels have increased by as much as 100 percent since wildfires engulfed sections of the city.
Because California is in a state of emergency, laws targeting price-gouging, including a ban on landlords raising rents by more than 10 percent of pre-emergency levels, should be in effect. But that hasn't deterred some landlords from apparently raising their rents by far more than that, creating bidding wars — which potentially allows them to "accept" an offer higher than the state-mandated limit — and leading activists to accuse them of callously exploiting displaced survivors who have lost almost everything to the fires.
"Authorities are focused on arresting the looters and boasting about how they've arrested so many of them, but they haven't done anything about these landlords who are looting people's wallets, trying to profit from the misery that they're are facing right now," Larry Gross, executive director of Coalition for Economic Survival (CES), told Salon.
Such drastic increases are worsening a rental housing market that was already tight before wildfires propelled by strong winds began ripping through Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other heavily-populated neighborhoods last week, wiping thousands of homes off the map. Some refugees unable to afford the new prices have found temporary shelter with friends and family, while others are huddling in their cars or in encampments set up across the city. But where they may be in a few weeks or months is a question few of them have a comfortable answer to.
It's not just people fleeing from fire-affected areas who are vulnerable to unfair treatment. Based on current state law, units made vacant are still nominally under rent control, but a landlord is free to set the new starting rent at any amount they want. As landlords seek to maximize their income, activists warn, they might evict their current tenants on short notice in order to make room for newcomers willing to pay the higher price. And like increasing rents by more than the legal amount, this tactic is often practiced with impunity.
"We will see a rise in not only in [rental price-fixing], but also the abusive and illegal, but unpunished, practices that landlords use to get tenants out of their rent-stabilized homes so they can re-rent to tenants at price-gouged market rates: issuing frivolous three-day notices, lying to people and threatening them, and filing evictions aggressively," Paul Lanctot, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Tenants Union, told Salon. "In the past week, members have already reported landlords issuing invalid 3-day notices… before the fires were even starting to be contained."
Ryan Bell, Southern California regional organizer for the nonprofit Tenants Together, recalled how as wind and fire pummeled Los Angeles, a tree fell onto a rented house that was already in the middle of a lawsuit he was involved in because the landlord had refused relocate its tenants despite noisy construction all around. After the tree damage, the landlord changed his mind and evicted them because it was "no longer safe for habitation."
"Days later I look up this same unit on Zillow, which appears to have been quickly repaired, and the price has suddenly gone up 23.8 percent," he said.
While landlords face nominal restrictions during a natural disaster, actual prosecution for violators is rare, easily circumvented and, according to tenant rights advocates, insufficient in preventing widespread abuse. In 2018, the California attorney general’s office filed just two cases against landlords and real estate agents for alleged illegal price hikes after fires destroyed thousands of homes across Northern California.
Tenants rights advocate Chelsea Kirk, who serves as director of policy and advocacy at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, told Salon that in her eight years of organizing, the most "justice" she's seen meted out to landlords amounted to a "slap on the wrist."
"They're used to being told to fix an issue and to not do it again rather than facing any serious penalty. Maybe they'll pay a fine that they can recoup in a month or two anyway, especially with the rates we're seeing," she said. "It's hardly a disincentive against illegal behavior."
On the weekend after the first fires, Kirk set up a public crowdsourced spreadsheet that to date contains more than 1,380 Zillow listings in which landlords appear to have raised rents by more than the legal limit, some by double or triple the original amount. Other individuals and organizations have launched parallel efforts, with the Los Angeles Tenants Union urging tippers to submit reports of sudden rent increases they have witnessed. Within a week, they received thousands of complaints.
So far, Kirk has been unable to formally submit the spreadsheet to Los Angeles County officials due to "bureaucratic red tape," and is resorting to filing complaints individually via the 311 city services channel. Even then, Kirk said, the list has been effective as a public resource and naming campaign that could "shame" landlords for exploiting its tenants, in addition to exposing them to a flood of angry calls and future criminal prosecution. Some of the illegal listings on the spreadsheet have since been taken down or revised to comply with the limit.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local governments across the country, under pressure from housing rights groups, enacted rent freezes, eviction moratoriums and rent relief programs to protect tenants from potential homelessness. The policies worked for a time, then expired — by 2023, eviction rates in California had returned to pre-2020 levels. In an open letter published Wednesday, more than 30 organizations urged Los Angeles County officials to bring back those policies in response to the ongoing crisis.
"This surge in demand for housing will only compound our already-historic housing and homelessness crisis. We need rapid policy change to prevent spikes in rents and evictions, and ensure stability as our County moves forward,” the letter said.
Compared to previous housing crises caused by natural disasters, state and county officials are expressing a much firmer stance against opportunistic landlords and real estate agents, perhaps reacting in part to the magnitude of the fire's destruction and the depth of public outrage over their behavior. On Tuesday, Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park proposed increasing price-gouging fines from $10,000 to $30,000, a sum that activists say would still not be enough of a deterrence against corporate landlords who can make many times that number in rents.
Another proposal, a motion before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to ease restrictions on short-term rentals, has been criticized by activists as a short-sighted mistake that would backfire on tenants.
"It's just going to encourage landlords to get more evictions, either through legal or illegal means, in order to get higher rents," said Gross, the CES executive director. "What we really need is an emergency eviction moratorium and rent freeze, not this."
Meanwhile, the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta has set up a new website and hotline (at 800-952-5225) where Los Angeles residents can file complaints about price-gouging, with Bonta himself promising to go after landlords who broke the law. State prosecutors are currently working on more than 10 active investigations, with more cases being added daily, according to his office.
“Folks across the region are being preyed upon by greedy businesses and landlords, scam artists and predatory buyers looking to make a quick buck off their pain,” Bonta said. “They are seeking to re-victimize the victims of the fires — to exploit them in their vulnerable state.”
"We have boots on the ground conducting investigations as we speak, building the criminal cases against price gougers," he added.
Even with those spoken assurances, tenant organizations have been disappointed before, and many of them are not taking for granted that the government means what it says this time. While repeat offenders and high-profile corporate landlords may face charges, many activists note that hundreds of other landlords are likely to escape prosecution even as tenant eviction courts remain open. And state law itself contains loopholes that are common knowledge among landlords.
"They're prohibited from raising rents by 10 percent, unless someone voluntarily offers to pay more," said Gross. "And so it's very easy for a landlord to send a message to somebody saying, 'well look, I have a lot of people who've signed up, but wink, wink, if you could voluntarily offer more, I could get you the apartment.'"
Tenant organizations are drawing up plans with or without government help. One of the ideas floated by Kirk and other activists has been to partner with private attorneys to sue landlords and bring injunctions against real estate marketplaces like Zillow and Airbnb, which have been accused of turning a blind eye to illegal price fixing on their website.
While Airbnb now says that they are blocking users from increasing rents by more than 10 percent, far higher price increases are reportedly still taking place in the marketplace — according to thousands of volunteers flooding crowdsourced spreadsheets, local news outlets, government channels and social media with tips accompanied by links and screenshots. The latter is a necessity, activists say, because Zillow and Airbnb still do not display rental price history despite concerns about a lack of transparency.
It's just the kind of collective action that tenant organizations hope will fill the hole where government cannot or will not step in.
"It's important that we harness this moment," said Kirk. "We have all these volunteers, all these people across LA who are rallying to demand action from the governor, to demand legislation that will protect tenants from natural disasters and people who would take advantage of them in a time of crisis."
