Los Angeles Already Had a Housing Shortage. Wildfires Will Make It Worse.
With so many people displaced and looking for rentals, the region’s housing options could grow even scarcer and more expensive.
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.
