I’ve been on Zillow a lot since January 7, the day the fires started in Los Angeles. I’m not looking for an apartment, or summoning a future dream home. I’m looking at numbers, watching how quickly the private housing market exploits disaster. The rents have surged—30 percent, 50 percent, even 700 percent in some cases—and it has happened fast.
The last eight months in Southern California were dry and arid, and by early 2025, when the Santa Ana winds blew west from the Great Basin, Los Angeles was set for a climate disaster. The Eaton and Palisades fires burned through canyons, through homes, through whole neighborhoods and multi-generational histories. Thirty people were killed. California declared a state of emergency. And before the embers cooled, landlords had named their price.
By the third day of the fires, five thousand homes had been lost, tens of thousands of people were displaced, and a hundred fifty thousand were under evacuation orders. Sheltering in place in my apartment in Echo Park, caught somewhere between despair, anxiety, and the restless need to act, I found myself looking at housing listings. Within minutes, I found multiple listings with rents that had increased by more than 10 percent since January 7, when Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency and triggered an anti-price gouging law that renders increases of more than 10 percent illegal.
On Zillow, I was half-expecting to find landlords testing the limits of the law. What I found was worse: a frenzied, almost immediate escalation of rents that defied both ethics and emergency protections. I’ve spent nearly a decade organizing alongside tenants in Los Angeles, fighting against eviction threats, buyout offers, and uninhabitable homes. But this was something else entirely. Not the familiar grind of speculative displacement, but a rapid-fire monetization of disaster—one that fed on urgency, disorientation, and loss. In the chaos that followed, I created an open-access Google spreadsheet, titled Tracking Rental Price Gouging in LA, to document the exploitation, with the intention of eventually submitting it to the authorities. I posted it on my Instagram story, where mutual aid efforts and real-time information sharing were unfolding by the minute.
Within hours, dozens of submissions had poured in. A two-bedroom apartment on Montana Avenue was listed for $3,595 on January 7. By the next day, the price had jumped 25 percent to $4,495. By January 9, it climbed another 33 percent, reaching $5,995. In Santa Monica, a house that had been $12,750 surged to $28,000 overnight—a 119.6 percent increase. Another, in Mid-City, doubled in price from $6,600 to $15,000. The numbers were grotesque. By the end of the week, the spreadsheet contained over 500 cases. Within three weeks, that number would triple to 1,500.
Behind each of these skyrocketing numbers was a landlord who’d found a crass opportunity in the devastation. Meanwhile, people who’d lost everything were in search of answers. Were there shelters? Vouchers? Was there anyone on the ground to help? How and who can apply for FEMA? And insurance? The Red Cross, it was rumored, was on the ground handing out vouchers—but where? Some people’s homes were still standing but damaged—what did that mean? Did they still have to pay rent? Others lived in buildings so old that even without direct damage, they could not stay—their defective windows were unable to keep out the thick ashen air. People needed housing first to stabilize, then to begin rebuilding their lives. But the spreadsheet made painfully clear that any promise of affordability was a cruel fiction.
I’d be lying if I said all this had come as a surprise. Eight years of organizing with tenants has made one thing clear: profit is the only language landlords speak. Housing is a necessity, but in Los Angeles, it is first and foremost a commodity, and those two realities are at odds.
Once you see landlord greed, you can’t unsee it. I was 22 when I joined the Los Angeles Tenants Union in 2016, invited to City Hall by someone I met door-knocking for Bernie Sanders, a campaign that promised things that now seem impossibly naive.
What brought us to City Hall that day was a vote on 1850 North Cherokee Avenue—eighteen rent-stabilized apartments built in 1939, tucked into the northern edge of Hollywood—and whether to approve their conversion into a boutique hotel. By then, even a non-expert like me had heard of the “housing crisis.” It had become a constant hum on local radio and a regular headline in the LA Times. A recent report showed that chronic homelessness in Los Angeles had risen 55 percent in just two years—more than anywhere else in the country. And then there was Airbnb—new at the time but already enabling what the media called “rogue hotels.” At the same time, plans to revitalize the LA River were taking shape, and the 6th Street Bridge was being demolished. Everywhere I turned, people were talking about how the city was changing, and rents were reaching new heights as a result. My one-bedroom apartment was $1,100 a month back then. Today, it might rent for over $2,500.
“When you are called up to speak, make sure that you say your name and that you live in Council District 13 and that you are addressing Councilmember O’Farrell and the full council regarding 1850 Cherokee,” wrote an organizer in an email titled “Talking points for public comment at city council today.”
By the time I arrived at City Hall, the fight was already over. The tenants, many who had lived on Cherokee Avenue for decades, had been evicted, given only three months to move out under a law called the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to withdraw units from the rental market to pursue other uses. Two became unhoused and one moved more than ninety miles away to Victorville. At the lectern, with less than a minute to speak, I argued that preventing eviction should be the councilmember’s only priority. He didn’t hear me. Instead, he voted to turn the eighteen homes into the Prospect Hotel, where today a room costs up to $681 a night.
People like to talk about the housing crisis in abstraction. Supply and demand. Markets finding equilibrium. But the forces driving high rents and displacement are not just economic theories. They have names. They issue eviction notices. They raise rents. They hold fundraisers and shake hands and speak about property values and development. They give donations. They make deals.
Landlords take as much as they can get away with—legally or not. Even if their mortgage is long paid off. Even if they inherited the building, put nothing into it, let the plumbing rot and the roof leak for years. Even if raising the rents means evicting seniors and veterans on fixed incomes––like the tenants at 1850 N Cherokee. None of it matters.
“Had a great conversation about capitalism with a realtor who was trying to defend her actions. She keeps asking me ‘How do I get off this list? I don’t want to be on any lists,’” Rick, an Angeleno whom I met via Instagram, told me. “I told her to lower the price.”
The wildfires had been raging for several days. Rick and others who contributed to the spreadsheet were picking up the phones, calling the names on the list—owners and real estate agents—to tell them to stop rent gouging.
Callers were met with various excuses. The owners blamed the agents. The agents said the owner insisted. Both parties blamed Zillow, alleging an algorithm sets the rents. Some refused to talk unless the caller is an insurance broker, the legality of which remains an open question.
Emails from landlords and real estate agents started to pour in, too. A lot began with an acknowledgment of the work as “commendable” and “needed” before pivoting to “however.” There were some cease and desists, some apologies, some claims there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. Others plainly don’t know the law, or don’t care to. A man emailed me insisting he wasn’t price gouging—he had simply furnished the home “to help the displaced,” which, in his mind, justified the 47.8 percent rent increase. Legally, it does not.
Everyone wanted to get off the spreadsheet. Landlords raise rents, evict, harass, all without hesitation. Were they finally feeling a consequence for their actions?
Over the 101 freeway in Echo Park, near the Alvarado exit, someone’s hung a banner that says Protect Renters. Stop Price Gouging! The first time I saw it, ten days after the fires started, I wondered who hung it there. Now, I imagine it may have been one of the hundreds of people contributing to the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet went viral, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how. It started on Instagram—people were sharing it in their stories, posting it to their grids, even making reels about it. It quickly racked up thousands of shares. Soon, it spread to Reddit, where one thread read: “One thing is for sure—LA now has Google Sheets for everything. Here’s one collecting landlords who are price gouging.” Within two weeks, more than thirty media outlets had linked to or referenced the spreadsheet.
A day after creating the spreadsheet, I was added to a Signal group called “LA Fire Aid.” In the signal group dozens of people, each managing their own mutual-aid-related spreadsheet, introduced themselves and their projects. The goal was to consolidate into a master list, managed by Mutual Aid LA Network. There were spreadsheets called Artist and Creative Workers Mutual Aid, Los Angeles Disaster Support Masterlist, Shelters & Distro Hubs (Inventory Sheet), California Fire Lawyers and Other Service Providers, LB MA Donation Drop-Off List as of 1/11/2025, and The Kindness Hub: LA Resource Aid Tracker, January 2025. Each attempted to fill the widening gaps left by the state, scrambling to meet urgent needs in a crisis where official responses were slow, fragmented, or absent.
As for my own spreadsheet’s contributors, I did not know who they were. Submissions were anonymous by design. People could leave an email if they wanted, but I was so busy I never checked. Still, I got a flood of DMs—on Instagram, on X—from people I’d never met. Some wanted to tell their stories, others asked how they could help, or sent leads on listings they found to be exorbitantly priced. There wasn’t one type of person contributing. Some were comrades in the tenant movement. Some were realtors, attempting to distance themselves from their industry’s worst (natural?) impulses. Some were homeowners—millionaires even—suddenly confronted with the reality of housing as something that could be taken away. Most appeared to be ordinary Angelenos, furious at what they saw, people I’d never met.
I had promised that every submission would be reported to the appropriate agencies. I hadn’t thought through the scale of that promise—until January 13, three days after the fires began, when the spreadsheet hit 412 listings. That day, I posted a screenshot on my Instagram story and asked, “Who has time today to make calls to 311 and report?” Kendra, someone I knew through mutual friends, replied, “I do.” They said they’d start at the top and make their way down the list. Later, they told me it took the better part of an hour to report ten listings. I posted again, dividing up the spreadsheet’s rows into groups: “Seeking volunteers to report listings via 311 in rows 51–60, 61–70, 71–80 . . . takes approx. 40 mins for 10 listings.” The response was immediate. I asked Kendra if they’d be willing to coordinate the reporting effort. They said yes. For the next two days, everyone who DMed me got funneled to Kendra. On January 15, Kendra coordinated thirty-eight people to call 311 all day, doing nothing else.
At some point the spreadsheet became too cumbersome to report manually, even with all the help. I submitted a PDF of the list to the Public Inquiry Unit of the California Department of Justice. But who was supposed to prosecute? The city? The county? The state? The maximum fine for price gouging was $10,000––nothing in comparison to the massive profits these landlords rake in. They all said it was being enforced, but no one could answer how. On January 16, someone in the City Attorney’s office said to me in an email that they’d accept the spreadsheet. “There is no need for you to send it via 311.”
On other fronts, help continued to roll in. Harper, someone I knew, but not well, through tenant advocacy, texted me: “Trying to see if I can build a Zillow scraper to get price gouging in bulk—would that be useful? (No promises if I can actually make it work).” I texted back: “GREAT IDEA.”
Later that day, I posted a solicitation on X and Instagram: “Folks wanting to help who know how to scrape web data please DM me.” I invited anyone who responded to a Zoom the next evening. Twelve people showed up. It was a cross-section of tenant organizers, full-stack developers, urban planners, coders, and people who just wanted to help. There was Harper, of course; and Philip, a musical instrument maker and product manager; Max, an artist and web developer; Iris, a corporate landlord researcher at a nonprofit; Ankur, a self-taught data analyst who joined after his girlfriend saw my tweet. Audrey, a land use attorney. Peishi, a tenant organizer in Austin with experience managing a scraped eviction database and got looped in by a member of the LA Tenants Union. John, a hobbyist web developer; Nicole, a QA specialist; Nicholas, a UCLA grad student and UAW member with programming chops; and Lillian, a UCLA urban planning alum with past experience in computer engineering. Max arrived at the meeting having already built a prototype Zillow scraper.
The vibe was scrappy and skill-diverse. Some folks had years of experience in data systems; others were there to observe, learn, or relay information to future collaborators. By the end of the call, we had the beginnings of a plan—and two Signal groups: a developer team focused on building the tool to extract rent-gouging listings from Zillow, and aresearch team ready to analyze the data once it came in.
Three days after the Zoom call, I invited everyone over to my apartment, including those who had helped with 311 reporting. Harper invited people too. That Wednesday night, eighteen people showed up. Everyone self-organized into different nooks of the apartment based on their skills and interests: the web developers and data researchers from the call, but also Danielle and Mai with backgrounds in design and social media, Jon, a web designer, Laura, a tenant attorney, Jay, an environmental legal fellow, and several others who wanted to help with one-off tasks or think about the bigger direction of the project. By the end of the night, we had formed even more Signal groups.
We got to work on emerging needs that had piled up. We needed FAQs on rent-gouging––people were getting the definition wrong or wanted to know what to do if a unit was furnished, for example. Landlords were sending me cease-and-desist letters—we needed legal disclaimers. We needed a volunteer intake form, an email, a P.O. Box. We needed a policy report to legitimize our findings. We needed LA County Assessor data, a website, a web map.
We also needed a name. With media requests pouring in and misattributions stacking up, we had to call this whole thing something. Alissa Walker, in her newsletter Torched, had called us the Spreadsheet Brigade. We’re now The Rent Brigade.
A week after the fires began, the LA Tenants Union staged a disruption of the Board of Supervisors meeting, demanding a rent freeze and an eviction moratorium. They bypassed the public comment period and read their demands directly to the room. No speaker cards, no polite waiting for their turn. The moment was too urgent for decorum. Tenants were being displaced—some by the immediate destruction of their homes by fire, but others by landlords who had lost their own homes and now wanted to reclaim their rental properties. Tenants would be given just 60 to 120 days to move out: no insurance, no FEMA relief, no opportunity to rebuild. Measly relocation funds, if any at all.
The Board of Supervisors had emergency powers to act that day. They could have frozen the rent or blocked evictions altogether. Instead, they passed a resolution to deregulate Airbnb.
Back in 2012, Airbnb had offered landlords a new equation: Why rent to a long-term tenant for $3,000 a month when you could charge a tourist $250 a night and make $7,500 instead? The platform siphoned thousands of homes off the rental market. Now, in the wake of the fires, Airbnb was lobbying the city, the county, and the state to weaken the very few short-term rental regulations that did exist. And they succeeded. On January 27, Governor Newsom signed Executive Order N-14-25, declaring that anyone who lost their home to the fires and was now staying in an Airbnb would not be considered a tenant—even if they stayed longer than 30 days.
The fear was that Airbnb hosts were withholding much-needed vacant homes from the market, worried that longer stays might trigger tenant protections. By removing any legal recognition that these guests could be considered tenants, Newsom hoped to reassure landlords and coax more short-term rentals into circulation.
But by reclassifying wildfire victims as temporary rather than tenants, Newsom guaranteed they could be displaced when profit demanded—perhaps next year, when the World Cup draws 180,000 visitors to Los Angeles, or in 2028, when the Olympics turns the city into a playground for global tourism. Airbnb hosts wanted assurances they could cash in on disaster without long-term obligations. Newsom gave them exactly that.
One month after the fires began, on February 7, the Rent Brigade gathered at Bernie’s Cafe in Mid-City—a well-known organizing hub that was doubling as a distribution center by day in the wake of the fires, giving out essentials like toilet paper, diapers, clothing, tampons, and hard-to-find masks. The lights were dim, pizza was passed around, and boxes of supplies were tucked aside to make space for us.
Kendra, who now oversees all our volunteers, communicated the plan for the evening. Some would make calls to landlords, pressing them on their rent hikes. Others would write, fold, seal, and stamp letters to send to tenants we believed had been rent gouged. A few would paint a banner bearing our unofficial slogan: STOP THE GOUGE. The data and research team would keep troubleshooting issues. The design team would brainstorm graphics for a post on Airbnb’s rent gouging. It was a work night, but also an occasion to meet each other. Kendra had told me a few nights prior that we needed to make sure everyone feels welcome and like it’s a community.
Before we fired up the auto-dialers filled with real estate agents and landlord contacts, I shared updates on our progress: The City, County, and State had recognized our spreadsheet as an official submission, and investigations were underway. No more cumbersome 311 reporting—the work was cutting through.
The data team had finished their tool, which was now scraping Zillow and integrating it with our crowdsourced spreadsheet. The findings, so far, were grim: the lowest-priced rentals––what we considered “affordable”––saw an average 46 percent increase, compared to 27 percent for the highest-priced listings. This meant the rent hikes in luxury listings were having a ripple effect. Landlords in Beverly Hills who pushed rents to new heights were resetting expectations across the market. Landlords elsewhere followed suit, adjusting their own rents upward. Rent gouging has spread, and everyone is paying the price.
The issue was also escalating, not slowing down—as of January 31, cases of rent gouging had jumped to 2,864, a 113 percent increase in just days—but what we’d done, I reminded everyone, was having an impact. The spreadsheet had turned unnoticed acts of rent gouging into a collective record. LA County just raised the fine for price gouging from $10,000 to $50,000, and LA City added civil penalties for $30,000 per violation.
But—I paused—the fact remains that four weeks into the crisis, only four individuals have been charged with rent gouging, less than one percent of those named on the spreadsheet. What do these new penalties even mean if the law is not enforced? That’s why we continue the work of taking matters into our own hands, the work of enforcement. We make landlords’ names public. We call them. We call them again. And again and again and again––telling them we won’t stop until they bring the rent down. That night we called over a thousand landlords, mailed 450 letters, and made one big defiant banner.
The landlord lobby is paying attention. They’re trying to discredit our work. A blog post by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles titled “Debunking the Myth: Los Angeles Wildfires and Rent Gouging Claims Lack Evidence” accuses us of cherry-picking listings, using flawed methodologies, failing to account for justifications like renovations and hot tubs—despite the law making clear that amenities do not excuse gouging. They say landlords aren’t criminals, just misinformed, that if only these small-time landlords understood the emergency ordinance, they would have followed the law. The implication is that this is all an accident. An innocent misunderstanding. The same tired excuse they use to illegally raise rents, harass elderly tenants, and evict without cause.
It’s not jail time they fear. That was never on the table, and they know it, despite what the law claims. What scares them is something else: the realization spreading across Los Angeles that the private housing market isn’t just failing wildfire victims—it’s failing by design. That the inability to meet this moment isn’t the result of a few bad landlords, it’s a feature of a system built to extract. What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords.
Resistance needs many entry points. Not everyone is cut out to be a tenant organizer. It’s relentless work—demanding patience, strategy, and a willingness to keep showing up, week after week, often for years. It means knocking on doors in working-class neighborhoods, standing in a parking lot on a cold night, turning strangers into a community just moments after they’ve learned they’re losing the homes they’ve lived in for decades. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone will.
The spreadsheet taps into the anger of people who may never set foot in a tenant union meeting, but who still feel the urgency of this crisis. That night at Bernie’s, most of the people I met had never been active in the tenant movement. This crisis is reaching people who haven’t been part of the fight before.
For years, the burden of the housing crisis has fallen squarely on the working class—it still does. But this moment feels different. It’s touching the middle class, even the wealthy. The movement has spent years exposing landlord greed, only to have its demands dismissed as alarmist and overblown. Now, suddenly, displaced millionaires, first-time renters—they’re using our language. They’re here, echoing our demands for a total rent freeze.
The rent gouging crisis continues. Every week, hundreds of new listings surface, advertising illegal rents, pushing the total past 6,000. The Rent Brigade is tracking every single one in real time. Yet enforcement is virtually nonexistent: only fourteen violators have been charged, less than 1 percent of those caught in the act. The officials responsible for holding landlords accountable have done almost nothing, while some of the worst offenders happen to be major donors to their campaigns.
As a collective, the Rent Brigade is still figuring out what’s next for us. For now, we focus on rent gouging. If the Rent Brigade has a future, it will need to find new leverage, new tactics, something that strengthens the broader tenant movement while still asking the same essential question: What does it take to shift power?
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