Jo Mojica, 23, her father, and their 7-year-old cat Boots arrived at the Pasadena Convention Center evacuation shelter hours after their Altadena apartment was destroyed on January 8.
The neighborhood is gone now, Mojica says, and she doesn’t know where they’ll go once they move out of a family friend’s home in Long Beach.
“My life has kind of stopped, to an abrupt halt,” she tells KCRW. “I don't really know how I can get that started because of the housing crisis. I don't really know where we're going to go.”
She continues, “Where we were staying, our rent was so cheap because my dad knew the guy, and that helped us out immensely. So, yeah, I don't really know what we're going to do.”
MORE: Are you a renter impacted by wildfires? Here are some housing resources.
Mojica’s family lost their home once before, during the 2008 financial crisis. Now, her family is eyeing surrounding cities like Alhambra, Rosemead, and El Monte. They hope to find a 2-bedroom apartment under $2300, which is already pushing their budget.
“But it’s hard to find apartments that are close to $2000,” Mojica says via text message, noting that her birthplace of Pasadena is completely unaffordable for low-income families like hers.
A tight market
A big concern facing displaced renters — or anyone who is looking to rent right now — is price-gouging.
Jacking up prices during a state of emergency is illegal under California Penal Code 396, which prohibits landlords and property managers from raising rents by more than 10%. Many of these protections have also been extended until January 7, 2026 under an executive order signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom has also extended renter-specific price gouging protections outlined in the penal code for LA County to March 8, 2025.
For their part, Zillow provided KCRW with a statement saying they encourage app users “to flag potential violations so we can assess and take action.” The company says they are “providing resources” to landlords “to help them understand their responsibilities.”
Chelsea Kirk with the LA Tenants Union has created a spreadsheet that contains hundreds of submissions from the general public of housing units with rent increases since the Eaton and Palisades wildfires broke out. It also includes properties that have been re-listed at prices higher than before.
She says she created the spreadsheet after noticing a three-bedroom apartment in her Echo Park neighborhood listed for $12,000 a month: “I was like, this is illegal. This is disgusting. These people should be profoundly ashamed of what they're doing.”
Kirk is now working with volunteers who are reviewing submissions and reporting them to local, county, and state officials, including Calif. Attorney General Rob Bonta. The Calif. Department of Justice told KCRW in a statement that they are “working with our law enforcement partners to investigate all leads stemming from the Southern California fires,” and encouraged people to report violations at oag.ca.gov/report.
Kirk says she didn’t expect the spreadsheet – which has gone viral and now has hundreds of entries – to be shared so widely.
“People who aren't associated with this kind of advocacy work, who are just like ordinary Angelenos are like, ‘Whoa.’ They're seeing plain and clearly landlord greed,” she says. “I think they're making the connection between landlord greed contributing to displacement and our housing affordability crisis and housing instability.”
In a statement to KCRW, Daniel Yukelson, the head of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles (AAGLA), says that many of the claims of price gouging are “unfounded, trumped up (no put intended) claims by tenant groups who are looking for another rent freeze. The one group of people we need to look to for assisting with this emergency crisis, housing providers, are once again being attacked with false accusations. This will not help solve the housing crisis coming out of the loss of some 15,000 structures, it will just make property owners pull back.”
Yukelson also says AAGLA has asked housing providers to give “discounts in the form of reduced or no security deposits or other incentives, and several have done so.”
Moving forward
Now, tenants’ rights advocates are asking local government officials to enact stronger protections, including a rent freeze and an eviction moratorium, to protect all Angelenos.
“We need to ensure that the people who currently have roofs over their heads are not pushed out by landlords who are looking to get higher rents,” says Larry Gross, the executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival.
He says these protections are not outside of the realm of possibility, pointing to pandemic-era restrictions on rent and evictions.
“Los Angeles has been facing one of the most severe housing, particularly affordable housing, crises in the nation and this is going to exacerbate that crisis to no end,” Gross says.