Price-gouging laws designed to protect tenants in crisis aren’t stopping some LA landlords

Los Angeles was already in a housing crisis before the wildfires consumed large parts of the county: There weren’t enough homes to keep up with demand, making it one of the least affordable real estate markets in the country. Now, the word “crisis” fails to capture the situation on the ground. Thousands of people suddenly need homes. And thousands of homes are suddenly ash.

Los Angeles was already in a housing crisis before the wildfires consumed large parts of the county: There weren’t enough homes to keep up with demand, making it one of the least affordable real estate markets in the country. Now, the word “crisis” fails to capture the situation on the ground. Thousands of people suddenly need homes. And thousands of homes are suddenly ash. In academic terms, you might frame this as a supply-and-demand problem: fewer houses, a sudden influx of people in need, prices go up. Econ 101. But with housing, particularly with rental markets, prices don’t just “go up” on their own. Landlords decide to raise them — and there’s evidence that’s happening all over LA right now, despite laws designed to prevent them from price-gouging during an emergency. See here: Real estate agents are already seeing prices of rental units climb hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month — sometimes as much as 20% in the span of a week, my colleague Chris Isidore reports. Similarly, the progressive news site Popular Information reviewed Zillow rental data to find “dozens” of properties where landlords sharply increased prices since the fires began on January 7. In one case, Popular Information identified a five-bedroom home listed on December 31 for $8,750 a month. As of this week, the rent had been bumped up 125% to $19,750. In another instance, a $4,100 a month three-bedroom house shot up 93% between the end of December and January 7. “Unfortunately, this is an all too common occurrence after a natural disaster, which is why most states have price-gouging laws on the books,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative.