A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes. <\/p>\n
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn\u2019t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels. <\/p>\n
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors\u2019 May 19 meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,\u201d the motion said. \u201cFamilies which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country. <\/p>\n
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor\u2019s state of emergency. <\/p>\n
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it. <\/p>\n
\u201cI abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,\u201d Hahn said. <\/p>\n
Barger\u2019s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarket data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,\u201d Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. \u201cThe Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. <\/p>\n
There haven\u2019t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company. <\/p>\n
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena<\/a>, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period. <\/p>\n In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.<\/p>\n A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county\u2019s rent-gouging rules have \u201clong outlived the emergency they were intended to address\u201d and are now being \u201cwrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,\u201d Rojas said. <\/p>\n Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool. <\/p>\n L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low<\/a>, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades<\/a>. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February \u2014 the worst start to the year since 2005.<\/p>\n Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,\u201d he said in February 2025. \u201cThe state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.\u201d<\/p>\n The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs <\/a> said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.<\/p>\n \u201cClose to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,\u201d Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and \u201cregular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade<\/a>, which analyzed L.A. County\u2019s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported<\/a> 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.<\/p>\n Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys\u2019 fees. <\/p>\n The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be \u201clocked into illegal rents\u201d that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":841254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,3534,246,198968,2961,9103,224,6080,2444,5337,21191,17254,3546,344493,8148,181134,36700,290,1628],"class_list":["post-841253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-emergency","tag-family","tag-fire-victim","tag-la","tag-landlord","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-county","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-losangeles","tag-motion","tag-palisades-fire","tag-people","tag-price-protection","tag-protection","tag-rent-increase","tag-rule","tag-state","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116685680699045635","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/841254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}