If You're Looking For What Happens Next In LA, Look To Maui; Think Rent Gouging And Rising Homelessness

It wasn’t the images of flames ripping through neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Altadena this month that really triggered Jordan Hocker’s anxiety. It was the flood of social media posts about rent-gouging in nearby Los Angeles County communities that appeared in the days that followed. Hocker lived on Maui when wildfires destroyed as many as 4,000 housing units in August 2023, leveling the town of Lahaina. But as an organizer with the Maui Housing Hui, a tenant advocacy group, she has been dealing with the ensuing rental crisis ever since.

After the fires, state officials moved swiftly to freeze most rents on the island and issued emergency orders halting evictions. But the measures failed to curb an alarming trend. Maui residents who lived or worked in the burn zone have seen rent increases of roughly 50 percent in the months following the disaster, according to research from the University of Hawaii. Some landlords took advantage of the crisis, evicting tenants to make way for higher-paying renters. A year later, homelessness in Hawaiʻi had nearly doubled.

Hawaiian housing advocates and researchers say Maui’s experience is a cautionary tale for L.A., highlighting the need to pass — and then enforce — renter protections after a natural disaster disrupts an already tight rental market. How Los Angeles leaders respond is still an open question, and a battle is currently being fought between activists and politicians over strengthening renter protections. L.A. tenant organizers, already skeptical of officials’ ability to enforce the state’s price-gouging law, have also begun cataloguing alleged violations themselves in a spreadsheet that now sports more than 1,400 entries.

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In Hawaiʻi, officials similarly promised to crack down on rent gougers. And in the wake of the fires, Gov. Josh Green took decisive action, freezing rents and prohibiting landlords from evicting Maui tenants for unpaid rent. Even threatening a renter with an illegal eviction could be a punishable offense, with civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day. (The Maui eviction moratorium is set to expire on Feb. 4.) But Green’s emergency proclamations contained various loopholes. Tenants could not be evicted for nonpayment of rent, but landlords were not required to renew leases once they expired. Some tenants could also be evicted when an owner or their family member moved in, or if the property was sold. Meanwhile, landlords were free to raise rents as much as they wanted following an eviction. They could also pass “any additional operating expenses” on to tenants as rent increases as long as they were documented, though what an operating expense might be was not specified.

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https://grist.org/wildfires/mauis-post-wildfire-housing-crisis-offers-a-warning-for-los-angeles/