Securing any rental in Southern California’s notoriously tight housing market is a feat in the best of times. Staying in that housing long enough to create years of memories, as many families displaced by the Eaton and Palisades fires did, is rare.
In the wake of the fires, only memories remain of a family home where three generations were raised, or of a daycare center that served countless children. Those are just two of the thousands of structures destroyed in the fires.
For many in Los Angeles County, recovery will require a new home lease, a new landlord, new schools and possibly a new state. People who started January with a rent payment were forced to evacuate burning neighborhoods and now face an uncertain future.
For the nine members of the Ramirez-Mejia family, the four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Altadena was home for 12 years.
The master bedroom was split in two, with Emily Ramirez, 16, and her younger brother on one side and her parents on the other. Each of the three older brothers had their own room; one brother was eventually joined by his wife and nine-month-old baby.
“All of this was our home,” Ramirez said on Jan. 21 while looking at the pile of debris left by the Eaton Fire. “It was perfect, and we loved it.”
Now the family and their two dogs are sharing a room in a family member’s house in Pacoima, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley about 20 miles northwest of Altadena. The family was renting the home on Glenrose Avenue, and where they will go next is unclear.
There is little flexibility for renters such as the Ramirez family, who are dealing with the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton fires. They have little control over whether their homes will be rebuilt or how they return to their communities. Instead, they find themselves at the mercy of landlords and an unforgiving rental market – a precarious existence made worse by the disaster.
More than half of Los Angeles County residents are renters, and the majority of those renters are “cost-burdened” by housing. This means that they spend more than 30% of their household income on rent, leaving less room for other expenses.
Together, the fires destroyed more than 14,000 structures, which doesn’t account for structures that contained multiple units. Finding housing in Los Angeles County is now more difficult than ever Even before the fires, the county faced a shortage of nearly 500,000 affordable housing units. In 2022, there were roughly four times as many families likely looking for a home as there were homes available for rent or sale in the Los Angeles area, according to Zillow.
Neighborhood trees in Altadena damaged by fire.
Zaydee Sanchez/High Country News
Some are taking advantage of people’s displacement in Los Angeles.
One crowd-sourced spreadsheet tracking instances of price-gouging lists more than 1,400 examples of property owners who have been accused of raising the price of their rentals by more than 10% since the fires. Across Los Angeles County, rental units are quickly getting snapped up off the market, and some fire victims are filing into open houses in search of a new place to buy. Meanwhile, most renters who spent a significant proportion of their income on housing are not financially able consider buying a new home.
That’s the case for the Ramirez-Mejia family, who paid their $3,000 monthly rent on Sunday, Jan. 5, just two days before the Eaton Fire started. Before the fire, the family pieced together rent each month between income from Emily’s father, Rene, and her three older brothers, all of whom work in construction. Now they’re stuck. They’re trying to get some of that rent money back from their landlord, in addition to the security deposit, to pay for a new place.
When a rental unit is destroyed, landlords are supposed to return “any prepaid rent and refund the security deposit,” according to Los Angeles County. In practice, getting that money back is often a challenge. Getting a security deposit back from a landlord even in normal circumstances can require tenants to repeatedly follow-up, bring the matter to a tenants’ rights organization, or file in small claims court.
“There’s no homes right now in Pasadena, and if there are, they’re over our budget,” said Emily Ramirez, who has taken to scrolling Zillow listings in search of a place big enough for the family to stay together. That might mean moving to the San Fernando Valley area, about 30 minutes from her high school.
“To lose our home, it sucks, and then it’s like, we can’t go back, because it’s not our home, it’s the owner’s home,” said Ramirez.
“To lose our home, it sucks, and then it’s like, we can’t go back, because it’s not our home, it’s the owner’s home.”
This pattern has played out before in the aftermath of destructive wildfires: some homeowners decide to rebuild and return, while renters are more likely to be displaced. Roughly a year after the Marshall Fire in Colorado in 2021, renters had moved out of Boulder County at about twice the rate of homeowners, according to research from the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.
For 70-year-old Edna Allen, whose rental home burned in the Eaton Fire, the disaster meant the loss of both her home and her income. Allen operated a 24-hour day care from her home, serving about 18 families, including children with parents who worked graveyard shifts. Since the fire started on Jan. 7, she has been alternating between hotels and staying with family. She recently received a seven-day hotel voucher via the county. After that, Allen isn’t sure where she will go, or how she will figure out both income and housing at the same time. She needs income to find new housing, but she also needs a new place before she can start up her day care business again.
“Everything is so high right now, and I don’t have a job, I don’t have any income coming in,” said Allen. “I could do my Social Security, but even if I got that, it wouldn’t be enough to pay rent.”
Allen is hoping to combine her day care with another in the area run by her daughter, who also lost her rental home in the fire. Allen has already heard from one client who lost their job because they couldn’t secure childcare, and another who moved to Texas. As for her own options, Allen’s brother offered her a place to stay in Victorville, nearly 80 miles away.
“It’s just so far away, it’s like a two-hour drive. I don’t want to do a two-hour drive every day trying to come down, but I do want to continue to work,” said Allen.
Similar stories of lost income — and an inability to pay for housing — are playing out across the region. When a nonprofit called Inclusive Action for the City started an emergency fund to provide $500 to outdoor workers who lost income due to the fires, the group received over 11,000 applications in a week.
“Many people in our communities live paycheck to paycheck, so if they lose one day of work, they are likely not going to have enough to pay their rent and pay their bills,” said Rudy Espinoza, Inclusive Action for the City’s executive director.
Studies have shown that these cascading impacts of wildfires — lost income, housing shortages and higher rents — often disproportionately impact low-income residents, even those not directly impacted by the disaster. In Los Angeles County, groups like the Los Angeles Tenants Union are calling for a moratorium on all evictions and a rent freeze, similar to protections enacted during the height of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Emily Ramirez is preparing for the possibility of starting at a new school.
“It’s going to be hard for me, because I have friends since kindergarten at my school and teachers I like,” said Ramirez. She is trying to think of it as “a new opportunity.”
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