Wind-driven wildfires have devastated Los Angeles County in southern California, impacting an area stretching from the Pacific Palisades to Los Angeles’s Altadena neighborhood. At their most intense, the fires led to evacuation orders for nearly 200,000 people, and thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed. At the time of writing, the majority of the fires have been contained, but survivors still have a long journey ahead of them to recover, especially given that the fires have significantly exacerbated a housing crisis that Los Angeles was already facing before they began.
Prior to the fires, California was already experiencing a housing crisis, with a mere 24 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. On top of this, across LA county alone, there were already 75,000 people experiencing homelessness before the wildfires. Now, in the aftermath of the fires, the housing crisis is only expected to get worse, as rents increase and developers capitalize on the destruction caused by the fires.
As a result, LA’s already under-resourced and overworked network of service organizations is becoming stretched even more thinly. “I have families coming up to me and saying, ‘I’m already homeless’,” said Sarah Hoppmeyer, the chief program officer at Union Station Homeless Services, a regional nonprofit organization. “‘Now I’m homeless again?’”
The fires have thus initiated a pattern seen often after disasters. When disasters wreak havoc on vulnerable communities, destroying their existing housing stock, federal programs often fail to provide the assistance needed for the most impacted households to recover. As a result, temporary displacement created by the disaster can become permanent.
A unique aspect of disaster recovery in California is the state’s innovative and forward-thinking anti-price gouging law, Penal Code 396. Enacted in 2021, this law prevents businesses, owners of hotels or motels, and landlords from raising their prices by more than 10% for 30 days following a disaster. The law also prevents contractors from increasing their prices by more than 10% for 180 days after a disaster.
Additionally, the law makes it illegal for landlords to evict their existing tenants for 30 days after an emergency and rent to another person at a rental price greater than the evicted tenant would pay. This is an extremely important provision that would have prevented the housing crisis Maui is now experiencing in the aftermath of its own wildfire disaster.
Despite the successes of these laws, more could still be done. Because of the country’s broken disaster recovery system, it will take years for survivors to repair their lives.
NLIHC and its partners at the National Housing Law Project (NHLP) and members of the NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) have long pushed for greater protections against evictions following disasters. Things are so chaotic after a disaster that pausing evictions “gives folks an opportunity to figure out what the next step is," said Natalie Maxwell, managing attorney at NHLP. “It’s an important legal protection to just kind of maintain the status quo so that government and community resources have a chance to come in, assess the situation, provide assistance to folks, and to reduce the likelihood that people who are currently housed are forced into the already overtaxed housing market that's resulting from the destruction of people's homes.”