Five Ways the LA Fires are Impacting Housing Security
Blog Post

Ringo Chiu / Shutterstock.com
Jan. 23, 2025
The Los Angeles fires this month have destroyed more than 12,000 homes and displaced nearly 100,000 residents. Thousands of Californian families are effectively rendered homeless, but the housing impacts of the wildfires reach well beyond physical destruction and affect residents far past the fires’ perimeter.
We know that natural disasters like the LA fires pose unprecedented and multi-dimensional risks to housing security, and not only in the immediately affected areas, but nationwide. These risks compound over time, and deepen the housing security fissures that already exist across racial, socioeconomic, and geographic lines.
At the same time, housing-related disaster relief remains inadequate, home insurers continue to flee California and other disaster-prone markets, and we don’t have a way to measure how many people are displaced after disasters, let alone how many manage to come back.
The dual crises of climate change and housing insecurity elevate several pressing challenges for recovery and adaptation, in LA and beyond. Here are five salient housing security challenges that the FLH team is tracking around the LA fires:
The urgent need for tenant protections in the wake of disasters: Amidst the uncertainty and devastation following the wildfires, LA tenants are facing another kind of disaster: rental price gouging and eviction. In the days following the start of the fires, opportunistic landlords began raising rental prices, often by as much as 30 percent, despite anti-price gouging laws prohibiting rent increases over 10 percent.
What’s happening in LA isn’t unique. Research finds that rent prices spike and evictions jump—even double—in the aftermath of U.S. disasters. Tenants across much of the US lack basic protections even outside of disasters. But in the wake of disasters, when housing stability is already under threat, the need for automatic rent freezes and eviction moratoriums are critical.
Unprecedented, yet unsurprising challenges for homeowners insurance: It’s well-known that California’s homeowners insurance market is buckling under the impacts of climate change. More frequent and intense wildfires are increasing the vulnerability of homes throughout the state, but tight regulation means that insurance providers can’t update the cost of premiums to reflect true risk. Many of the country’s largest insurers have had enough, and are simply leaving California markets. Last year, for example, State Farm dropped nearly 70 percent of its policies in Pacific Palisades, which was devastated by the fires earlier this month. Meanwhile, the California FAIR Plan, the state’s “insurer of last resort” that covers riskier homes, is estimated to possess $377 million to pay out claims. Yet total insured losses are estimated to exceed $30 billion, and there’s already talk of a bailout.
These financial strains raise questions around recovery, equity, and resilience. Who gets a payout for their damaged or destroyed home following perhaps the most destructive fire in U.S. history—is it wealthier homeowners in the Santa Monica Hills, or middle-class households in Altadena? Grist reporter Jake Bittle shared an interesting thread on X: based on experience from the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, middle-class families might rebuild their homes faster than wealthier homeowners, due to larger payouts relative to home values, as well as cheaper and more streamlined construction processes. Beyond rebuilding, it might also be time for buyouts of the LA properties most at risk of burning again.
Considerations for receiving cities as Californians move away from fire-vulnerable areas: Approximately 11.2 million people—over one-quarter of California’s population—live in areas of catastrophic wildfire risk. A growing subset of these residents is considering relocation, and in fact many have already moved.
Research shows that when Americans move, they typically don’t go far. That means most of California’s climate migrants will likely relocate to other cities and towns in the Golden State, including the Inland Empire’s Riverside and the Central Valley’s Fresno, Sacramento, and Stockton.
How will population inflows impact housing security in these “receiving cities,” which are already struggling with acute housing supply and affordability challenges? While significant attention is paid to the cities and towns being struck by wildfires—and rightly so—we must also start thinking about the nearby places to which fire refugees will flock, in the short and long term. The policy and program decisions these communities make today can better ensure equitable economic growth and just and sustainable development patterns, even amidst an influx of new residents.
Unknowns around how many households and individuals are impacted: As the fires continue to burn, we don’t actually know how many people are impacted. Accurate counts of individuals and households displaced by natural disasters frequently elude disaster recovery groups, policymakers, and researchers. Currently, surveys like the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey and the American Housing Survey are the most comprehensive source of information on disaster-driven displacement at the national level.
Apart from surveys, administrative data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the next most reliable source of information on the number of disaster-impacted households. However, the number of buildings approved for FEMA repair aid doesn’t indicate how many individuals are actually impacted. Family size, particularly where multigenerational living is common, can vary widely. FEMA aid data is also likely to leave out or undercount certain vulnerable groups like undocumented people and renters.
Even if we knew how many people were displaced by the fires in LA, we won’t know when they will return, if at all. Why is it important for disaster recovery and preparedness leaders, policymakers, and researchers to have an accurate count of people who lost their home or apartment? Among other reasons, to understand the impacts of intensifying disasters on housing security in the U.S. and work towards resilience, preparedness, and recovery strategies that fit the size of the problem.
The loss of generational wealth, especially among Black communities: Homeownership has long been promoted as a wealth-building instrument in the U.S., one that provides families that are able to attain it with a source of economic security that can be passed down to future generations. But in neighborhoods across the country, Black families were historically excluded from homeownership through state-sanctioned redlining and the use of racial covenants. Altadena, a neighboring suburb of Pasadena, where many homes were destroyed by the fires, had become a place where Black homeownership thrived.
Before the fires, Altadena’s Black homeownership rate was nearly twice the national average, with generations of families owning homes within blocks of one another. One Black family, with 20 relatives living in Altadena for over 50 years, lost a total of 8 homes in the fires. In a country where owning property has been a tool of racial exclusion, and where home prices, especially in California, are largely unaffordable, the devastating loss of these Altadena homes cannot simply be recouped and rebuilt. It represents a loss of families’ ability to remain in close proximity to one another in the thriving communities they have built.
Ultimately, the broad-ranging and interconnected housing challenges that follow natural disasters require more than band aid solutions. Even if LA succeeds in enacting an eviction moratorium, the next city to experience a disaster, perhaps one with a stronger landlord lobby, will not. Even if California manages to strike a bargain with home insurers to remain in state, another state may not be able to.
Disasters hit both the coasts and the heartland, and they know no party lines. The politics of a city shouldn’t determine whether its residents get a fair shot at rebuilding and recovering after disaster strikes. For all those reasons, we need comprehensive, federal policy that recognizes the acute and interconnected housing security risks that threaten residents of disaster-prone parts of the country, and puts forward fair and meaningful solutions to protect their homes.