Los Angeles Wildfires Will Make a Serious Housing Shortage Worse

Each of the homes burned in the Los Angeles fires is its own individual calamity.Collectively, the losses — whether in the hundreds or, as is far more likely, in the thousands — will weigh on the city’s already urgent housing shortage.Fires are still raging, and with 180,000 people under evacuation orders as of Thursday morning, the degree of displacement in the city and its surrounding areas will take time to assess.For the time being, evacuees are holing up in public shelters in Los Angeles County, with friends or family members or in hotels.But in the coming weeks and months, people whose homes are gone will have to find more stable accommodations while they rebuild.

That will not be easy in a metro area that, as of 2022, already had a shortage of about 337,000 homes, according to data from Zillow.The number of homes on the market in Los Angeles was 26 percent below prepandemic norms as of December, according to Zillow.“One of the biggest challenges ahead will be getting people who lost their homes into permanent, long-term housing,” Victor M.

Gordo, the mayor of Pasadena, said on Wednesday.Pasadena, which is battling the Eaton fire, has already lost hundreds of homes.The area’s tight rental market is likely to become further strained as many of the thousands of displaced residents turn to rental units, while figuring out their next move.

The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, as of Jan.7, was more than $2,000, according to Zillow.“You’re going to have a positive shock in demand, and a negative shock in supply, so this automatically means prices go up in the rental markets,” said Carles Vergara-Alert, a professor of finance at IESE Business School in Barcelona, who has studied the effects of wildfires on housing markets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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