Maui’s Post-Wildfire Housing Crisis Offers a Warning for Los Angeles 🌴 🔥
After wildfires devastated the island, homelessness spiked.
Climate Solutions // ISSUE # 104 // HOTHOUSE
Hello, dear Hothouse readers,
I’m still digesting the new administration and the devastating L.A. Fires. I imagine I’m not alone.
Given everything January threw at us, I’m working to pull together a dispatch to help us navigate the months ahead.
In the meantime, before current events entirely eclipse recent memory of the L.A. Fires, I wanted to share this critical story by Capital & Main. This reporting previews lessons from the housing crunch unfolding now in Los Angeles County following the fires. Capital & Main is a digital publication investigating power, money, and politics. For more overlooked stories and coverage by them, you can sign up for their newsletter here.
Sincerely,
Cadence Bambenek
Editor-in-Chief
Maui’s Post-Wildfire Housing Crisis Offers a Warning for Los Angeles
After wildfires devastated the island, homelessness spiked. Advocates fear L.A. could face a similar fate without strong renter protections — and enforcement.
By Jack Ross
It wasn’t the images of flames ripping through neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Altadena this month that really triggered Jordan Hocker’s anxiety. It was the flood of social media posts about rent-gouging in nearby Los Angeles County communities that appeared in the days that followed.
Hocker lived on Maui when wildfires destroyed as many as 4,000 housing units in August 2023, leveling the town of Lahaina. But as an organizer with the Maui Housing Hui, a tenant advocacy group, she has been dealing with the ensuing rental crisis ever since.
After the fires, state officials moved swiftly to freeze most rents on the island and issued emergency orders halting evictions. But the measures failed to curb an alarming trend. Maui residents who lived or worked in the burn zone have seen rent increases of roughly 50% in the months following the disaster, according to research from the University of Hawaii. Some landlords took advantage of the crisis, evicting tenants to make way for higher-paying renters. A year later, homelessness in Hawaii had nearly doubled.
Hawaiian housing advocates and researchers say Maui’s experience is a cautionary tale for L.A., highlighting the need to pass — and then enforce — renter protections after a natural disaster disrupts an already tight rental market. How Los Angeles leaders respond is still an open question, and a battle is currently being fought between activists and politicians over strengthening renter protections. L.A. tenant organizers, already skeptical of officials’ ability to enforce the state’s price-gouging law, have also begun cataloging alleged violations themselves in a spreadsheet that now sports more than 1,400 entries.
Hocker said the activists are right to be vigilant. “Unless there are aggressive teeth on price-gouging [laws], it will happen. People will do it,” she said.
The Palisades and Eaton fires, which broke out on Jan. 7, have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, left at least 29 people dead and razed more than 10,000 homes in a county with a severe homelessness crisis. Rents in L.A. County have since increased an average of 20%, the Washington Post found, with rents in some neighborhoods closer to the burned areas more than doubling. For years, Mayor Karen Bass has said L.A. needed a “FEMA-style response” to the homelessness crisis; now it needs two. (Pacific Palisades is part of the city of Los Angeles, though Altadena is not.)
The fires have spurred local leaders to protect L.A.’s renters. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency the morning of the fires, activating a preexisting price-gouging law that imposes a 10% cap on most rent increases. The cap will remain in effect through March 8 unless it is extended. Landlords who break the law face up to a year in jail and fines of up to $10,000. They could also face civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.
Attorney General Rob Bonta has already filed charges against an L.A. County landlord and sent warnings to 500 hotels and landlords accused of price-gouging. District Attorney Nathan Hochman, whose recent election campaign was backed by the real estate industry, has also pledged to prosecute violators and warned gougers that they would be “publicly shamed.”
In Hawaii, officials similarly promised to crack down on rent gougers. And in the wake of the fires, Gov. Josh Green took decisive action, freezing rents and prohibiting landlords from evicting Maui tenants for unpaid rent. Even threatening a renter with an illegal eviction could be a punishable offense, with civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day. (The Maui eviction moratorium is set to expire on Feb. 4.)
But Green’s emergency proclamations contained various loopholes. Tenants could not be evicted for nonpayment of rent, but landlords were not required to renew leases once they expired. Some tenants could also be evicted when an owner or their family member moved in, or if the property was sold. Meanwhile, landlords were free to raise rents as much as they wanted following an eviction. They could also pass “any additional operating expenses” on to tenants as rent increases as long as they were documented, though what an operating expense might be was not specified.
Rents have risen on Maui by 10% to 20% since the fires, according to University of Hawaii economist Justin Tyndall. The increases were even higher for people who lived, worked or owned a business in the burn zones, according to a survey conducted by researchers Trey Gordner and Daniela Bond-Smith, also with the University of Hawaii. New, unpublished data they shared with Capital & Main shows those rents rose by more than 50%. Like those who lived in the burn zone, people who worked there also experienced “substantial displacement” from their homes, Bond-Smith explained.
Rent increases were even higher for fire-impacted families renting homes with three bedrooms or more, who saw increases of up to 80% or more, Gordner said. He attributed those increases to the pressure that the loss of so many single-family homes put on the rental market. A lot of single-family homes were also destroyed in the Palisades and Eaton fires, “so I would expect a similar pattern to occur” in Los Angeles, he said.
Natural disasters that destroy homes often lead to increased rents. Researchers with the Brookings Institute surveyed rental trends in major markets following natural disasters and attributed increases of between 4% and 6% directly to the disasters — an effect that “never fully went away,” one of the authors wrote. Other research found permanent rent increases too. Evictions also tend to rise.
Alan Lloyd and Alana Kay, who helped run a tenant complaint hotline after the fires with the Maui Tenants and Workers Association, said they received scores of calls from tenants whose landlords were using loopholes to raise rents or force them out and charge more to the next tenants.
“When renters’ leases would [end,] landlords would say, ‘Well if you want to continue living here, you have to pay me $600 more a month,’” said Hocker of the Maui Housing Hui. “I call it ‘housing by extortion.’”
Some landlords even forced out tenants to instead rent to fire refugees, who could pay more because FEMA was covering the rent — and dramatically overpaying, ProPublica and the Honolulu Civil Beat reported. It was not the first time FEMA has incentivized evictions this way, but it typically does so in rural areas or islands with even more limited rental markets than L.A., said Noah Patton, disaster recovery manager with the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
While advocates raised the alarm about evictions and illegal increases, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez “held property owners accountable in relatively few cases,” ProPublica and the Civil Beat reported. The office still hasn’t issued any penalties for landlords found to have broken the emergency proclamations, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, Toni Schwartz, confirmed in an email. They received 247 complaints and found 35 violations, which were all corrected, she wrote. (Forty-one claims are still being investigated.)
In Los Angeles, tenant advocates were already frustrated before the fires with government agencies tasked with enforcing renter protection laws. Prosecuting hundreds of landlords for price-gouging “would be unprecedented,” said Faizah Malik, a housing attorney with the pro bono firm Public Counsel.
And protections from price-gouging are weaker in Los Angeles than they are in Hawaii. California’s price-gouging law caps rent increases at 10% (with additional restrictions on new listings), while Hawaii officials froze rents. Furthermore, L.A. lawmakers have not halted evictions for nonpayment of rent. While Pacific Palisades and Altadena burned, L.A. County eviction courts stayed open.
Meanwhile, the city’s progressive organizers and politicians are trying to generate momentum for a rent freeze and an eviction moratorium. Last week, the L.A. Tenants Union disrupted a County Board of Supervisors meeting to demand the adoption of such measures. The City Council will vote Wednesday on a motion to freeze rents and halt nonpayment evictions for renters who claim financial or medical hardship from the fires. It’s unclear if the motion has the votes to pass.
L.A. tenants have one advantage that renters in Hawaii did not: a spreadsheet cataloging alleged incidents of price-gouging compiled by tenant activists with The Rent Brigade, a new collective organized by Chelsea Kirk and Philip Meyer.
The document is a tool rarely available to agencies charged with enforcing price-gouging law, according to consumer protection attorney Marissa Roy.
Roy worked on consumer protection lawsuits for the affirmative litigation division of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, which is one of the agencies tasked with enforcing the price-gouging law.
“They’re asking the right questions and compiling extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive information to build these cases in a way that lawyers don’t necessarily have the capacity for,” she said.
For now, activists are operating under the assumption that the government won’t come through. A study by The Rent Brigade found price-gouging across the county, from affluent Malibu to working-class Koreatown.
“Frankly, I have no faith that all the landlords who have committed price-gouging are going to face consequences, because, historically, they never do,” said Kirk. “I hope I’m wrong.”
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Anti gouging laws are misguided. The best solution for high prices is high prices.