How Will L.A. House Everyone Now?

The wildfires that struck Los Angeles last month devastated a city that was already in the grips of a worsening housing crisis. Officials estimate that around 16,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires, including at least 11,000 homes, according to the Los Angeles Times. Those are substantial setbacks for a region that was, by some estimates, short by more than a quarter-million affordable homes even before the fires started.

The housing shortage, made worse by the fires, will make it harder for L.A. communities to manage short-term needs and long-term recovery. Disaster recovery in the U.S. is a process that tends to be haphazard even under the simplest conditions. To keep people sheltered temporarily and restore lost housing infrastructure, communities lean on a hodgepodge of federal, state, local, nonprofit and private efforts. Groups like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provide temporary housing assistance to individuals in many cases. Private insurers help covered homeowners recover financially. But the process of recovery at the community scale takes years, and some people fall through the cracks in the interim.

This may especially be the case in a place like L.A., which is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. The average home price is around $1 million. The rate of evictions has ticked back up since the end of the moratoriums imposed during the pandemic, and has outpaced pre-pandemic levels. L.A. County had annual increases in homelessness for the last six years, before seeing a small reduction in this year’s count. That context will make it harder to find affordable shelter for people who lost their homes.

“[The cost of] everything is going to go up and the housing availability is going to go down,” says Bruce Yerman, chief of operations for the Camp Fire Collaborative, a consortium of charities, social service providers and faith-based organizations that formed after California’s 2018 fire season. “At first that affects everybody, and then it seems to hit renters especially hard.”

Yerman has personal experience with the difficulties of rebuilding post-disaster — he himself is a survivor of the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. The blaze killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures in and around the town of Paradise. In the years since, Paradise has been working to rebuild housing and other infrastructure. But only a fraction of the town’s population of about 25,000 people has been able to return. Multifamily rental housing has been particularly challenging to rebuild there, Yerman says. The town also lost about 30 mobile home parks and a hospital, which aren’t likely to return.

“Our entire post-disaster housing model relies on market forces, including insurance coverage and the availability of affordable housing,” says Alka Sapat, director of the School of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University. “If you are in an area where you already have a housing crisis, then it becomes that much more difficult in terms of rehousing people.”

The Camp Fire Collaborative has provided more than 100 disaster case managers to help thousands of survivors navigate housing and financial assistance programs, says Yerman. It’s still working through about 1,500 requests for case management, down from about 8,000.

Louisiana faced a disaster of even greater magnitude in 2005, when thousands of homes were lost in the New Orleans metro area and in surrounding states during Hurricane Katrina. More than 180,000 rental units were damaged in Louisiana alone, according to a congressional report from 2009. The city’s population shrank drastically after the storm, and has grown but not recovered in the two decades since, with especially steep losses among its Black population. FEMA provided trailers to thousands of residents who’d lost their homes, a temporary solution that ended up being long term for many people.

“In most cases, temporary housing is not temporary,” says N. Emel Ganapati, a professor of public administration at Florida International University. “It’s not just for a few months. A lot of people end up living in these places for years.”

But disaster recovery has matured since 2005, says Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who worked on post-Katrina housing recovery in New Orleans. The Community Development Block Grant — Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, a major source of post-disaster funding, has grown. The U.S. Small Business Administration administers more housing aid as well. And more communities have learned, from the cascade of disasters over the last few decades, how to assemble collaboratives of nonprofits that can provide temporary aid and long-term case management to affected people.

“The tools are in place in a way that they weren’t after Katrina,” Rumbach says.

Still, federal funding often takes years to filter out. A group of California communities affected by wildfires in 2018 received $40 million in CDBG-DR funds last fall, for example. And it’s unclear whether Congress will approve additional funds to help Los Angeles, as California still has access to some funding approved last year.

Early indications suggest that renters will have the hardest time re-establishing themselves in the neighborhoods hit by L.A.’s wildfires, and to some extent in the rest of the city. Despite laws preventing rent gouging in California, landlords have raised prices on apartments throughout Los Angeles in the last few weeks. The fires have wiped out some of the hard-won progress toward adding new housing supply in recent years. One of the most fruitful housing policies in California during the last decade was the 2016 law that made it easier to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs). That law has resulted in a surge of ADUs in Los Angeles. Some 7,000 of those units were permitted in Los Angeles in 2022, a drastic increase over previous years but still fewer homes than were lost in the fires last month. Any multifamily housing that gets rebuilt in the damaged neighborhoods will be more costly than before.

“Many of these places that were lost that were being rented, there’s no way to rebuild them at the same price,” Rumbach says. “The affordability is gone.”

Public officials in L.A. are now weighing competing impulses between rebuilding communities quickly and rebuilding them to be safer from future fires and extreme weather. Both Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have promised to ease the permitting process for homeowners who want to rebuild houses to their previous specifications. The state Legislature has also sent billions in recovery money to local communities as it considers measures to make cities more resilient in future disasters. It’s considering rules that would suspend cities or counties from changing building standards for six years, with the intention of allowing homeowners to rebuild to current-day standards. The City Council is also considering emergency measures like a rent freeze.

“It is a balance … These folks who have lost everything they own — all the equity in their homes — deserve the right to build back,” says state Assemblymember Nick Schultz, a Democrat who represents parts of Los Angeles County. “We want, to the extent we can, to freeze in time the costs so they know how much money they need [to rebuild]. We don’t want that cost shifting up exponentially underneath their feet.”

Ideally, communities would have a post-disaster recovery plan in place before disaster strikes, says Carlos Martín, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. But for many communities that have taken centuries to establish, including big cities like Los Angeles, “the vision is to stay the course,” Martín says. He says state and local officials should balance the desire to restore normalcy with a more flexible vision of what the future could look like, incorporating concerns about climate resilience and affordability into their recovery plans.

“It’s an odd time, policy-wise. We’re having questions even about FEMA’s existence,” Martín says. Whether the federal government provides additional resources or not, “At the end of the day, it’s still the state and local government that make the decisions.”