As LA Burns, community organizers race to prevent a wave of evictions

In the week since wildfires began spreading through Los Angeles County, rent prices have skyrocketed as the thousands who have lost their homes try to find new places to live.

“We’ve seen businesses and landlords that use increased demand during emergencies to jack up the price,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a January 11 press conference. “It’s called price gouging…It is illegal.”

Under state law, during a declared emergency, rent increases are capped at 10 percent above the advertised price immediately before the disaster. California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on January 7, but some rental asking prices have reportedly spiked well above this limit—sometimes by more than 50 percent.

In response, advocates like the Los Angeles Tenants Union—an organization that says it’s “fighting for the human right to housing for all” by demanding “safe, affordable housing and universal rent control”—have begun to track allegations of rental price gouging and have renewed calls for an emergency eviction moratorium and a rent freeze. 

Earlier this week, I talked to Lupita Limón Corrales, an organizer with the LA Tenants Union. She first got involved with the union as an interpreter and translator at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Limón Corrales was born in Mexico and grew up in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley; she’s lived in the city of Los Angeles for the past decade. Last year, she helped found the union’s Echo Park local.

“We are demanding that the city and the county enact an emergency eviction moratorium and a rent freeze, they enforce price gouging protections that are currently being abused by landlords and realtors, they fill all vacant units instead of displacing and evicting folks from their homes—whether that means instituting aggressive vacancy taxes or seizing the vacant units outright,” she told me on Monday, January 13. “It’s unnecessary to displace anybody and immoral and unjust for anyone to lose their home, when we’ve just seen thousands of our community members going through that.”

The following day, the Los Angeles City Council delayed a vote on proposed restrictions on rent-hikes and evictions for some residents. According to LAist, that proposal aims to prevent landlords from raising rents for one year and to stop evictions for tenants who can’t pay rent due to lost income, illness, or the need to take in additional roommates due to the fires.

“It’s unsurprising,” Limón Corrales told me via email in reaction to the city council’s delay. “But to be clear, today’s motion was insufficient to begin with” because it stopped short of a full eviction moratorium that would protect all residents of the city.

You can read a condensed version of our January 13 conversation—edited for clarity—below. 

How are you doing? Are you safe?

I’m located in Echo Park in Central LA, so we haven’t been as impacted by the fires as folks on the Westside and at the foothills in Palisades and in Altadena. So far, we’re safe and sound, but we’re expecting that tonight the winds are going to pick up. They died down on Friday and the weekend cleared up a little bit, which allowed the firefighters to move forward with containment. But they’re anticipating that tonight, tomorrow, and through Wednesday there will be increased winds. So folks are just hunkering down a little bit and preparing for additional fire risk these next couple of days. 

What were tenant protections like in LA when you got involved with LATU during the Covid pandemic? 

When the pandemic first started—similar to now—it was mostly neighbors that were coming together to give each other information, to make sure that folks knew what was happening, had the supplies that they needed, and had basic necessities. In this past week in LA, a lot of the folks that we were organizing with were not getting reliable news.

There’s some people who didn’t know that the fires were happening until they reached their yard. There’s folks we know in Altadena who evacuated not because they received an order on their phone, but because they saw the flames from their window. And so I would say there are parallels between both the pandemic and these first few days in the sense that it’s a total failure of our local government to act with the urgency needed to save people’s lives, to make sure that they have the information and the resources they need to stay safe, and to not exacerbate ongoing housing and homelessness in LA—which is really a crisis of greed and an unwillingness to protect working people and tenants.

When the Covid pandemic began, there weren’t any protections that the city was automatically extending to folks. Rent was still due on April 1, 2020—a couple weeks into the shelter-in-place order—despite the fact that folks were losing their jobs. There was no infrastructure in place to keep them safe. So the response in 2020 from the LA Tenants Union and many other grassroots organizations was to insist that people take care of each other. 

The Food Not Rent campaign was launched to encourage people to hold on to their rent money, because we didn’t know how long the crisis was going to last. We didn’t know what type of support or aid—if any—the state was going to extend. So a lot of the city stopped paying rent either out of necessity because they just didn’t have the money, or in solidarity with neighbors.

Eventually the city did put protections into place like a moratorium on eviction. But even when the moratorium was in place, it didn’t stop landlords from illegally changing the locks or from suing tenants. It still fell on us as neighbors and as a community to be the ones to protect and enforce it to keep people in their homes. 

Similar to 2020, we’re calling for an eviction moratorium and a rent freeze. We were told that the safe thing to do was to shelter in place. There was an acknowledgement that home was the safest place to be, and yet, home wasn’t guaranteed for people. It’s the same thing now where homes are being burned down, the air quality outside is terrible, and people who are elderly, who are disabled, and who live outside are the ones that are bearing the brunt of it. We’re expecting that there’s going to be—as history has shown us—a big scramble and that landlords will take advantage of this opening to try to force folks out.

A lot of media coverage seems to be focused on landlords engaging in price gouging. What should people understand about what’s happening in LA?

Rent gouging is just the basis of how landlords operate in this city, and this crisis will exacerbate it. A lot of the people who have lost their homes in these fires were homeowners and are now without a home, so we’ll see how that plays out in the coming weeks and months. If emergency measures aren’t passed immediately, vulnerable tenants in the city are also going to be impacted. We’re seeing some houses listed at over $20,000 a month, where so many people in LA live off of $20,000 a year. 

The immediate rent gouging isn’t the only thing that we need to be afraid of. A lot of people in our locals and in our neighborhoods have already lost work because they’re caretakers, they’re gardeners, they worked in the neighborhoods that are impacted by the fire, or because schools are closed and they don’t have child care, so they need to stay home. A lot of people are going to lose income for months or years. People are going to have to choose between food and rent and other necessities. Folks are already being harassed and receiving eviction notices just in the last few days because there’s an opening for landlords to harass, to displace, to empty units, and to increase the rent. So rent-gouging on vacant units isn’t even the most disastrous way that tenants will be impacted.

There’s also a lot of coverage on cracking down on looting, Newsom speeding up construction by suspending environmental regulations, and a Marshall Plan to build “LA 2.0.” What does all of this mean to you?

I’ve been seeing glimpses of some of this online, but I feel like cognitive levels are clouded. There’s smoke in the air and adrenaline is rushing. Each day has been a little bit different: driving around to drop off masks, to source air purifiers, to distribute meals, to pack our go bags. It’s just been an insane pace for people—some folks are going to work every day like it’s normal. A lot of my family are gardeners and landscapers and work in Pasadena, so they’re still going to work every day. 

So those responses at that level are not tuned-in. Folks haven’t received masks, and folks haven’t received protections for their housing. Despite the fact that emergencies are becoming more common, there’s nothing in place. There’s a lot of conversation about where our funding goes and the fact that we don’t invest in the public good but rather in policing, in development, and what will come next—it just feels so far removed. 

Seventy-five thousand people in the county are living outside and are being abandoned en masse, while people are thinking about building new homes that none of us are going to be able to live in. 

What is the LA Tenants Union doing in response? How do we best help people who have lost their homes or are vulnerable to losing their homes?

The LA Tenants Union—just like folks all across the city—is responding with immediate mutual aid and letting people know in their languages about accurate, life-saving information because it’s not coming from anywhere else. We’ve even received emergency notices to our phones telling the entire city to evacuate that…minutes later, were corrected as errors. 

Another is distributing supplies. In my local, we dropped off air purifiers to folks that we know have respiratory issues, have children with asthma in the house, or have windows that don’t close. 

In the coming weeks and months, as the emergency mutual aid gives way to the longer, less acute crisis, what we’ll need to do is mobilize around what we have been building over the last few years toward demands for a total eviction moratorium and a rent freeze—to direct ourselves toward our city council and be organized enough to be willing to hold on to rent and to stop evictions ourselves if it’s something the city doesn’t grant as protection. 

What can people do to help if we don’t have an effective government response to emergencies?

It has been super-inspiring to see folks create webs of mutual aid and care overnight. It’s easy to buy supplies and it’s easy to drop them off. It’s harder to know who needs them and how to get them to those folks. For a lot of us, it’s been merging our established networks with emerging mutual aid groups—it’s about reaching out to all of the folks in our local and calling the elders, the folks with asthma, and the people we know are going to go work outdoors all day. It’s cool to be able to ask what someone needs and see that the whole community has come together to put those supplies there.

But it requires establishing connectivity ahead of the crisis, so in these coming weeks and months, it’s about connecting with the people who live in your building if you live in an apartment building. It’s about talking to the folks that live on your street, and if there’s an encampment near you, it’s about the people that you know that live outside. And it’s about pacing yourself, too, because there’s this immediate need but we’re going to need to sustain this energy for probably years—or probably for the rest of our lives—because this isn’t going to be the last crisis. 

This is a moment where we need to make stronger demands. But it’s also a moment where we’re seeing a historically Black neighborhood completely wiped out, where so many of our childhood friends have lost their homes, and where places we had beautiful memories we’ll never see again. So there’s a lot that we’re losing. But I would say it’s about the work in between the crises, in addition to this inspiring outpouring of energy.