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Hours after losing her house to the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, Charlotta La Via was looking out of her hotel window and half-wishing she’d booked the hotel across the street when she spotted a “for lease” sign on a building nearby.
It was advertising a luxury apartment complex in downtown Santa Monica, more like a five-star hotel than conventional living, with prices to match. But she and her husband didn’t hesitate. They signed a lease on a three-bedroom apartment almost as soon as they’d finished touring it.
“Aren’t you being impulsive?” their 18-year-old daughter asked. At the time, three-bedroom apartments in the complex – which includes a pool, a gym, a doorman, and a rooftop deck with idyllic ocean views – were being listed at more than $20,000 a month.
“No, we have to jump on it,” La Via told her. “A lot of people will be looking.”
Within a few days, a complex with plenty of vacancies has almost none. The La Vias, who moved in on Wednesday with nothing but a couple of go-bags and some hastily purchased Ikea furniture, were told theirs was one of 25 new leases since the fires broke out on 7 January.
The La Vias, both doctors, are lucky to have the funds to cover a rental cost that dwarfs the earning power of more than 90% of Californians. But their experience also tells a broader story about the scarcity of rental properties in the US’s second largest city, even before the fires, and the likely knock-on effect of the disaster on Angelenos of all income levels.
LA before the fires was a city where rental properties were available but often out of range for lower-income families. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment was just under $4,000, affordable only to households with an annual income of more than $160,000, roughly twice as much as the average household actually earns.
Now, with more than 15,000 structures estimated to have burned to the ground, most of them residential buildings, the pressure is on to find alternative housing for tens of thousands of people who either lost everything or cannot go back to their homes because the communities where they lived have been reduced to temporary toxic wastelands.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has issued an executive order making it illegal for landlords to hike up their rents, but evidence collected by housing activists suggests hundreds of property owners are taking advantage of the increased demand anyway, especially in areas adjacent to the biggest fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
One five-bedroom house in Santa Monica identified by activists saw its list price jump from $12,750 per month before the fires to $28,000 after; the listing was withdrawn after two days following its exposure. Another house in Bel Air spotted by a local news outlet was listed for $29,500 a month where previously it had been offered for $15,900; that listing disappeared in less than a day.
Los Angeles district attorney Nathan Hochman has vowed that anyone raising their prices beyond legally established limits would be both prosecuted and “publicly shamed”. Still, it is not clear that any public agency has the staff or oversight powers to keep the problem under control when it is, ultimately, a question of supply and demand under crisis conditions in an urban area of 10 million people.
“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 is now in the private sector developing low-income housing. “What’s our stick to enforce them? I don’t know.”
The pressure will almost work its way through the entire housing market – not just rentals, but house purchases, too, which have become increasingly unaffordable to those without generational wealth.
At the bottom end, it is likely to push more people out of housing altogether, at a time when the numbers of those living on the streets have been modestly declining. In other words: the fact that the La Vias have to spend a fortune to live in a luxury apartment for the next year or two ends up being bad news for everyone regardless of income level.
And it does not just stop at housing prices. As homeowners and communities get ready to rebuild on an enormous scale, contractors and building materials are going to become scarcer and more expensive across the city – even before factoring in the possibility that undocumented construction workers could be rounded up and deported by the freshly installed Trump administration. Insurance costs are projected to increase, perhaps dramatically.
After most disasters, the most effective counter to these pressures is federal government aid, but this too is in doubt as Donald Trump and his allies suggest that help for Los Angeles might come with strings attached – if it comes at all.
Winter, who worked two stints with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that under past administrations federal aid – usually in the form of block grants administered at the local level – would most likely be directed not at the affluent fire survivors from Pacific Palisades but at lower-income communities elsewhere in Los Angeles likely to suffer longer-term affordability and housing security problems.
Now, Trump-era gamesmanship and name-calling threatens to throw all of that into doubt. LA’s best shot, Winter, said, was if Congress ended up considering funding in several disaster-stricken areas at once. “In a world where a lot of disasters have happened in multiple geographies that span the political spectrum, that’s beneficial to us,” he said. “If it’s LA by itself, 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 ease environmental and other planning regulations to speed up the process. But that, too, is easier to wish for than to enact, because LA’s city planning offices are backlogged and understaffed and could barely keep up even before the fires.
One independent study published in 2023 said planning permission for multi-family buildings in Los Angeles took 549 days on average to be approved – and the buildings themselves close to five years to be completed, if they were completed at all.
In another part of the world, an unprecedented disaster that wiped out entire neighbourhoods might deter survivors from returning to their former homes. But that, historically, has not been the Californian way and it is unlikely to occur now. Since 1990, close to half of all new housing in California has been in at-risk areas – some of them desirable hillside locations with easy access to nature and ocean views, like Pacific Palisades, and some of them more affordable exurbs at the foot of inland mountains.
When disaster strikes – wildfire or mudslides, most commonly – there can be a pause before people move back but it rarely lasts long. In Montecito, the hillside community best known as home to Prince Harry and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, a devastating mudslide in 2018 that buried 23 people alive prompted authorities to impose modestly stricter rules about where to build on certain lots, but they declared no part of the community to be off limits.
Home sales dropped 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 and moved back in.
It was a similar story in La Conchita, a tiny coastal community 15 miles south of Montecito, which was deluged in mud both in 1995 and in 2005. A government geologist concluded that future mudslides were inevitable and there were calls to buy up the town and deem it uninhabitable.
According to Mike Bell, the unofficial mayor of La Conchita, houses went on sale for as little as $5,800. Most people, though, had no intention of going anywhere, the calls to abandon the town faded, and houses now go for more than $1m.
Even the risks don’t worry locals the way they used to.
“What risk?” Bell asked provocatively. “It’s tough to be in California and be in a place that is totally safe.”
