Evacuees Still Fight For Housing As Recovery Efforts Find Their Way In LA

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It has been over one month since a series of wildfires hit Los Angeles, destroying thousands of properties and displacing thousands more individuals.

Real estate losses are estimated at more than $30 billion from the Palisades and Eaton fires and the government agencies that receive revenue from taxes may lose $61 million or more annually in the time it takes to rebuild, a Los Angeles Times analysis shows. Properties destroyed range from mobile homes to multimillion-dollar ones, about half of which were likely rentals because they did not have a homeowners’ exemption. Several hundred were rent controlled units.

The fires have been contained for some weeks and the city has cleanup efforts now well underway after an outpouring of financial support from donors.

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After evacuating their homes, many people were forced to find an immediate short-term housing solution through friends, family, Airbnbs, hotels or otherwise. Now, some of those short-term solutions have run out and others are continuing to look for housing even as they try to decide how they want their future to shape up, whether it’s rebuilding or buying in a new neighborhood.

“It’s almost like we all have a foot in two worlds,” Teresa Fuller of Compass in Altadena, California, told Inman. “You have kids and friends and a job, but you also have insurance adjusters and you’re living in temporary housing or struggling in a new rental.

The decision-making process is not a simple one. Fuller said she’s seen people grapple with all kinds of what-ifs about the future, and couples learning that decisions to be made regarding the fires are a new source of stress in their relationship.

“A lot of people with really young children are thinking, What kind of air are they going to breathe? Are they going to go to school? Can they ride their bike outside?” Fuller said. “A lot of older people are thinking, Am I going to spend five years, if I have it, doing this, or am I going to move to Santa Fe and try to enjoy myself? So people are on kind of both ends.

“People in the middle seem to want to stay and rebuild, and that’s a whole other thing. Then people with standing structures are really struggling because there are a lot more decisions and a lot more insurance hassles and mountains to climb with companies, and all the companies aren’t being good.”

As homeowners figure out what to do next, the city continues to search for some semblance of organization in the recovery. Agents are caught between trying to do the best they can to help their clients — even while sometimes homeless themselves.

Competition for housing is still heated

The initial chaos of trying to determine where to evacuate to in the immediate future may have died down for LA County residents, but that does not mean that fire victims have it all figured out. On the contrary, many are still unsure about what exactly they want to do. Those who are attempting to navigate the rental market are especially finding it to be a battle.

“I think the market is very fluid,” Timothy Di Prizito of The Di Prizito Group at Christie’s International Real Estate told Inman.

“It’s ever-changing because you have people that locked into a short-term shelter, either Airbnbs or VRBOs that were six weeks, who are now in the market to either buy or rent longer term. There are people who made one-, two-, three-month rental deals that will last six months down the road or six weeks down the road. Those people are going to be back in the rental market or the purchase market.

“So you have a large, displaced consumer base in demand and then you have the normal consumer demand out there that’s missing an entire couple of cities to be able to shop in. So it’s creating a very fast-paced [market]. There is a lot of heat and a lot of desperation.”

Di Prizito praised the city’s efforts to curb price gouging in rentals and elsewhere, saying that he was seeing fewer extremes when it came to renters making outlandish offers to try and get into a property. But other agents said that the competition remains fierce, even if evacuees are being treated fairly by landlords.

Karen Parcell, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices in Palisades, was out and about with her husband and dog when Inman spoke with her, in search of a long-term rental. Her home and her office were both destroyed in the wildfire.

“It just looks like a bomb went off, just destroyed everything,” Parcell said. “Which is brutal — brutal for me, brutal for my whole family and even my work life. I’ve been in my same office for 17 years, and now I don’t even have that to go to anymore, so it’s just hard.”

Parcell will rebuild, but the prospect of having to live in another home temporarily for probably at least three years was difficult to grapple with. Thus far, she had been able to stay with friends and in short-term rentals, but trying to secure a longer term living situation while continuing to work to help her clients had proved to be extremely challenging.

“It’s still happening with 20 people vying for the same house,” Parcell said. “And you know, they can only pick one person. So it all depends on the terms and people are trying to get us to stay for over two years or three years. And if you’re someone like me who’s lived in the same house — I’ve lived in two houses in the last 30 years — it’s kind of hard to figure, like, am I going to be happy here? Am I just signing up with them for two or three years so I get a place to sleep?”

A few days prior, Parcell and her husband had visited a rental that was only open for a three-hour window for showings, and immediately completed and submitted a rental application for the property afterwards. Unfortunately, someone else got the property, Parcell said, likely because they didn’t have a dog (although the rental advertised that it accepted pets) and because they wanted to lease for a longer period.

Robert Radcliffe of the Radcliffe Group at Sotheby’s International Realty said it was impossible to really get a pulse on the market at this point because it’s changing by the day.

“We went from scrambled mode of helping our clients just find, out of survival mode, housing to put roofs over their heads fast,” Radcliffe told Inman. “And now that that panic is gone, it’s more like now we’re looking at the long road of recovery, and what does the market look like? Who’s buying in what neighborhoods and what’s happening? So it’s constantly changing.”

Many residents who had to evacuate Altadena, where Young Ahn of Century 21 operates, are still staying in shelters like the Los Angeles Convention Center or with friends and family, she told Inman. And the heavy rains that hit the city last week, prompting mudslides in some burn scar areas, weren’t making things any easier.

“They are looking for housing, but there are not enough inventories,” Ahn said. “Hotels are fully booked. With all this chaos, children who need to go to school, [families] are panicking because their temporary housing is not something that they are really comfortable with.”

With everyone in almost the same situation and competing for the same properties, the only consolation when her clients don’t win a rental is that there will be one fewer family to compete with on the next one, she said.

“As a Realtor, you have to just work ethically,” Ahn added.

Too many cooks in the kitchen?

More than $650 million has been donated to wildfire relief efforts and a number of individuals and groups have stepped up to help. But keeping them all organized and working in a productive manner is proving to be an added challenge.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week began phase two of cleanup, which includes the removal of hazardous debris, like chimneys, and hazardous trees and ash, and up to six inches of soil, when necessary.

Meanwhile, the Illinois-based Hagerty Consulting, a firm that specializes in disaster response, was also tapped by Mayor Karen Bass to manage the recovery of the Palisades fire and will report to former Emergency Management Department head Jim Featherstone (from 2007-2016), who returned to the city’s workforce to help with the fire cleanup.

There is also longtime civic leader Steve Soboroff, who Bass named as recovery czar to develop a strategy for rebuilding. Initially, Soboroff was set to receive $500,000 in payment over three months to be paid out by philanthropic groups for his efforts, but after public backlash, he said he would forgo any payment for his services.

Beyond that, developer Rick Caruso has launched a foundation led by several business leaders to focus on recovery, Gov. Gavin Newsom has gathered his own group of leaders to advise on rebuilding (he proposed on Wednesday a $125 million mortgage relief program to aid homeowners at risk of foreclosure as a result of declared emergencies since the beginning of 2023), and California Community Foundation head Miguel Santana and Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel have teamed up to create a rebuilding team called Department of Angels.

Councilmember Traci Park is also leading a five-member ad hoc city council committee on recovery, and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has said he plans to create his own leadership council for recovery as well.

Bass has maintained that she is the one at the helm of the ship, but it almost seems like there may be too many different groups involved to keep track of.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, a member of the ad hoc wildfire recovery committee, told the LA Times that the many parties involved made responsibilities cloudy, noting that she herself was unclear about whether Hagerty Consulting would be directing city employees or following directions from them, for instance.

“I don’t understand functionally how it’s going to operate,” Rodriguez said.

Anthony Marguleas of Amalfi Estates, who also lost his home in the Palisades fire, told Inman, “There are a lot of overlapping and sometimes conflicting groups,” which is one reason why he and some other community leaders recently started their own group to try and organize the Palisades community.

“There was so much overlap with different grassroots groups and different WhatsApp groups and different Slack channels, and there was a lot of chatter and it wasn’t being organized,” Marguleas said.

Marguleas, alongside Pacific Palisades Community Council board member Lou Kamer and Head of Strategy at Ocean State Job Lot Ben Perlman, founded 1Pali to organize all the grassroots organizations and create a central resource for residents as they rebuild.

The group has been hosting weekly Zoom webinars since the beginning of February to share information, organize the community and provide a forum for questions. Councilmember Traci Park spoke at their first meeting.

It’s unclear how neighborhoods may change

The for-sale market is also seeing competition in key neighborhoods, Radcliffe said. Last week he listed a property in Brentwood that received seven offers (five of which were from wildfire victims) and the property quickly went under contract for several hundreds of thousands above asking.

In general, Radcliffe said he was seeing more homeowners who had been thinking about selling for some time get off the fence because of how many people need housing now, or simply because of growing environmental risks in the area.

“My client in Brentwood, he surfs,” Radcliffe said. “He’s a surfer, and that’s how I know him … He’s like, ‘I’m thinking about moving to Solana Beach [in San Diego].’ For him, it’s that potentially unhealthy water right now from the wastewater. He’s like, ‘I really think now I want to move because the Pacific Coast Highway is closed, I can’t get to my surf break. And I’ve been thinking about moving to Solana Beach — this might be the time to do it.’”

Agents are seeing many, but not all, older residents who had to evacuate fire areas deciding not to rebuild, but instead moving to existing homes or senior living communities in other neighborhoods.

“So those are the people that are really ready to exit the Palisades,” Di Prizito said. “But if there’s an older couple with children or grandchildren, three generations, and they have longevity and want to see the house go back up there, either for emotional reasons because that’s where the parents and grandparents live, they will rebuild. You have a very resolute percentage of the population out there that they will rebuild.”

Parcell said one of the most difficult things to witness was her roughly 90-year-old neighbor of more than 20 years, after bouncing around hotels for a bit, decide to move into a senior living facility.

“She said — and I started to cry — ‘[It’s] where I’m going to spend the rest of my days.’ So that was really hard, but she’s alive, and she’s safe.”

And others simply won’t be able to afford to rebuild with the cost of construction continuing to rise and with many former residents being underinsured, agents said.

What the data says so far

Since the wildfires broke out there have already been significant shifts in where renters are moving, according to data shared with Inman from LA-based rental software provider RentSpree.

Before the fires, more than half of LA County residents were renters, with the majority of those considered cost-burdened (spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent), RentSpree noted. Now, with thousands of displaced persons competing for rentals, the market is becoming even more challenging for the everyday renter.

RentSpree found that renters have started to flock to strategic neighborhoods surrounding areas that were hit hardest by the Palisades and Eaton fires.

Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Manhattan Beach and Malibu — all comparable neighborhoods where someone displaced by the Palisades fire might look to move — saw rental applications spike about six times higher from Jan. 7 through Jan. 27 than in the three weeks beforehand.

Meanwhile, Sierra Madre, South Pasadena, La Cañada Flintridge and San Marino also all saw surges in rental applications during the same time period, likely due to evacuees who previously lived in Altadena looking at these neighborhoods close in proximity and likeness to Altadena.

Sierra Madre saw an extraordinary 400 percent increase in rental applications per property from Jan. 7 through Jan. 27 compared to the three weeks prior, RentSpree said.

“The data paints a clear picture of the unprecedented amount of people searching for housing,” RentSpree CEO Michael Lucarelli said in a statement. “With demand skyrocketing and affordability stretched, those looking for housing need more support than ever.”

A respectful way forward

As developers, investors and others continue to eye vacant, burned-down lots with growing interest, Fuller said she’d like to see a bit more respect in how those lots are treated — by listing agents and developers alike. After all, they were once someone’s home.

“It’s so friggin’ disrespectful to take a place that still has its hardscape, you can still see where people sat in a side porch and enjoyed the mountains, you can see all of the valuable features that the natural world and natural setting provides, you can see that there’s still three Spanish-style homes across the street — and some guy lists it and just says, ‘Land Value Only.’”

“I think that’s doing everybody a disservice,” Fuller said. “That just really pushes my buttons.”

Radcliffe said he has been approached by developers from outside of LA who clearly just found him through Google as a Palisades real estate expert and were looking for deals on lots. But he’s been encouraged by others who seem more motivated by a desire to rebuild the community.

“This one guy doesn’t live in the Palisades anymore, but he grew up in the Palisades, all his friends are in the Palisades, and he’s like, ‘Rob, I want to help rebuild the community. So I’m not looking to steal anything, I’m looking to, obviously, not overpay, but I want to buy … I want to help build the Palisades back up and be a part of the rebuild of the Palisades.’ So I found that to be very beautiful.”

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Email Lillian Dickerson