Editorial: Fires aggravated L.A.’s housing crisis. We need to build homes much faster

There was a housing crisis in Los Angeles County long before fire swept across the Pacific Palisades, Altadena and parts of the San Fernando Valley, turning thousands into newly homeless people.

Now, it’s an even bigger, more challenging housing crisis that requires city and county officials and developers to figure out how to rebuild more fire-resistant housing in the burn areas as well as continue to focus on building desperately needed housing.

Los Angeles County already had a shortage of 500,000 units, and more than half of tenants spend more than a third of their income in rent. There have been reports of price gouging, in violation of a state law that bars raising rent on available units by more than 10% during a state of emergency.

Now more than ever, the city and county must fast-track affordable housing projects in the works, bring other projects into development as quickly as possible and aggressively shut down price gouging.

Rebuilding in the burn zone will be its own unique challenge. The process should be streamlined — as Mayor Karen Bass has said it will be — but there must be some thoughtful analysis of how to rebuild more safely in a high-fire zone before people start rebuilding.

Meanwhile, the people who may be truly at risk of becoming homeless are the people who worked as housekeepers and gardeners and in other low-paying jobs that were lost when the people who employed them lost their homes. They may need financial assistance. “There’s no insurance payout coming for someone washing dishes at a restaurant that burned down,” said Tommy Newman, vice president of public affairs at United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

The organization has raised roughly $8 million to date to distribute to lower-income people whose incomes have been disrupted by the fires or who have lost homes in the fires. It will also be offering assistance to staff who work for homeless service providers who lost their homes or got displaced by the fires, mainly in Altadena. And the organization is exploring how to prevent the displacement of longtime residents.

Not everyone who lost a home will need financial help beyond an insurance payout. However there will be people who lost homes but probably can’t afford to rebuild or buy anew — at least not in the Los Angeles area. Do we simply lose these homeowners to another city or state? What help, if any, should the city or county or state offer them?

The nonprofit housing advocacy group Abundant Housing LA has made a number of recommendations for speeding up housing development. Among them, the group has called on city and county leaders to expedite and waive discretionary review for all multiunit housing not in areas identified as zones of severe fire risk. (Bass has already, by executive order, waived discretionary review for burned areas of the city.) This is definitely an idea that should be considered. We have long needed more multiunit housing, particularly near transit lines and along commercial corridors.

This post-disaster period should be an inflection point for government officials to take a hard look at how to speed up much-needed housing everywhere across the city and county.