We Keep Each Other Safe and Housed
Interview With the Rent Brigade's Chelsea Kirk
January 31, 2025
As wildfires ravage Los Angeles, leaving destruction and displacement in their wake, countless landlords have seized the moment to push illegal rent hikes onto tenants struggling to stay housed. In response, a collective of tenant organizers, advocates, web programmers, designers, researchers, and others—now called the Rent Brigade—has created a groundbreaking tool: the “Tracking Rental Price Gouging in LA” spreadsheet, which currently documents over a thousand cases of landlords exploiting the disaster to gouge new tenants with astronomical rent increases.1“Tracking Rental Price Gouging in LA,” GoogleSheets, accessed January 29, 2025, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1RXWxLqTyWvAuq8A0PgaBuWeEn_G6qTLyTZ8lzfNEaNw/htmlview?pli=1; “Homepage,” The Rent Brigade, accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.rentbrigade.org/. This grassroots initiative is exposing the unchecked greed of disaster capitalism while empowering Angelenos with tools and information to fight back.
In this interview with one of Rent Brigade’s organizers, Spectre editor Maga Miranda dives into the origins of “the spreadsheet,” its role as a collective resource, and the broader implications of price gouging in Los Angeles. How does this phenomenon tie into the city’s history of housing inequality and corporate profiteering? What structural changes and policies are needed to rebuild from the fires in a way that foregrounds questions of equity and justice? And how does the burgeoning tenants’ movement envision solutions that challenge the systemic exploitation of renters during crises and beyond? Maga sat down with Chelsea Kirk, one of the founding members of Rent Brigade, to explore these questions, offering a look into the fight for housing justice in Los Angeles at the intersection of climate catastrophe.
Chelsea Kirk is a tenant organizer, researcher, and policy advocate from Southeast Los Angeles. She is a member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, where she has been involved in fights to end renovictions.2“Homepage,” Los Angeles Tenants Union, accessed January 29, 2025, https://latenantsunion.org/en/. She also works on policy at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a community-based organization in South Los Angeles, where she leads campaigns to advance climate justice without fueling green gentrification and tenant displacement.3“About Us,” SAJE.net, accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.saje.net/about/.
Her work is dedicated to shifting power away from landlords and ensuring a just transition to a carbon-free future. Most recently, she helped launch the Rent Brigade, a project that leverages data to fight landlord abuses.
For the Rent Brigades in depth report on their findings from the spreadsheet, click here.4The Rent Brigade, After the LA Fires: Rent-gouging in the Wake of Disaster (Los Angeles: The Rent Brigade, 2025). Available at https://www.rentbrigade.org/report/.
The spreadsheet is a crowdsourced initiative that is documenting, exposing, and reporting illegal rent hikes following the Eaton and Palisades wildfires that broke out on Jan 7. These fires have led to the loss of over five thousand homes. Several thousand people have been utterly displaced.
I have to admit that this spreadsheet started as nothing more than a hunch. I’ve been a tenant organizer and advocate for eight years, and I imagined that landlords were capitalizing on the moment by increasing rents. When I took to Zillow that hunch was confirmed. I found a three-bedroom in my neighborhood going for $12,000 a month. When I scrolled down to the price history I saw that the rent had jumped more than 50 percent since January 7. I proceeded to look some more and found similar instances of illegal rent gouging in plain sight. Creating the “Tracking Rental Price Gouging in LA” spreadsheet was my first response. I wanted to document what I was seeing to ultimately report the wrongdoers and give others the ability to do the same. I posted the spreadsheet on Instagram, and subsequently the LA Tenants Union posted it on Twitter, and in just a few days it was infamous, with over 1,400 manual submissions from people near and far away.5Tweet by L.A. Tenants Union (@LATenantsUnion), X, January 11, 2025, 6:45 p.m., https://x.com/LATenantsUnion/status/1878226832815706246?t=BsKd0JHynHpWAuTLW1BG-Q&s=07.
The reach of the spreadsheet was fully organic. The trickier part has been keeping pace with the number of submissions in terms of reporting and calling landlords. Fortunately, the relevant reporting agencies have acknowledged the spreadsheet so we can focus our energies elsewhere. Now our full-time focus is on scaling research efforts to identify rent gouging more systematically, rather than relying on manual submissions, and proactively reaching out to landlords to tell them to quit it.
Rent gouging is the predatory practice of landlords exploiting tenants by demanding inflated rent prices. Legally, it occurs when landlords raise rents beyond the allowed limit during a declared State of Emergency. Since January 7, 2025, LA County has been under such a declaration, meaning landlords are prohibited from increasing rents by more than 10 percent of their prelisted price as of one year before—Jan 7, 2024. New listings or relistings cannot be increased beyond 160 percent of Fair Market Rent, per Zip Code, as defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Despite these laws, rent gouging has been rampant since the fires started. We have been able to document over 1,300 instances of rent gouging. By just looking at our data, we see that rent gouging isn’t slowing down—the problem is getting cumulatively worse day by day despite more and more (seemingly performative) warnings from government officials that landlords will be penalized.
We are seeing instances of rents being increased by up to 300 percent in some cases. We are seeing rent gouging happen all across the county, in wealthier neighborhoods like Malibu, Beverly Hills, and Venice, but also in historically working class neighborhoods like Koreatown and Vermont Square. We are seeing certain real estate brokers and landlords commiting repeat offenses. We are seeing Zillow do nothing meaningful to stop it, nor Airbnb.
Rent gouging as a predatory practice is not new, it just means something specific at this very moment. For decades, landlord greed has defined Los Angeles, relentlessly driving rents higher. The wildfire crisis is just laying bare the extent of landlord exploitation to a wider audience. And the community response is made possible through the movement work that organizers and tenants have been doing for years—really, decades—to fight against a vicious private housing system.
Everyone keeps asking what the goal of the spreadsheet is. When I created it, I didn’t have one. Now myself and the people involved have a lot of ideas. Already, we are in conversation with attorneys to sue a couple dozen people on this list. We have also directly contacted each landlord or real estate agent and will continue to do so to remind them they are breaking the law. I am eager to map the listings and see where rent gouging is occurring in low- and middle-income neighborhoods. I know there are instances in Westlake, Koreatown, and South Los Angeles—which all present opportunities to organize the community. And of course, the spreadsheet is a huge resource in advocating for various demands—namely, a rent freeze, an eviction moratorium, and a recognition that antigouging laws are in effect until Jan 7, 2026, which would be momentous as it would mean Los Angeles has a form of vacancy control despite the Costa-Hawkins Act.6The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act is a California state law enacted in 1995 that restricts municipal rent control ordinances. “Repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act,” Tenants Together, accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.tenantstogether.org/campaigns/repeal-costa-hawkins-rental-housing-act/.
What excites me most about this spreadsheet is its function as a proactive form of enforcement. It’s the community coming together to say “no” to price gouging instead of waiting for officials to do something about it. Officials have done nothing substantial to date. For example, the City is still trying to figure out how to get an online complaint form on their website, and only one real estate agent has been charged. But, we are doing something about it. We are calling landlords and putting them on notice, we are naming and shaming them, and we are exposing their greed. And that seems to be working. Rents are coming down. Landlords are reaching out asking how they can get off the list. The answer: they can’t.
The spreadsheet has received a lot of widespread attention, but so have the words of the Attorney General, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and the District Attorney, as well as their vague plans to enforce the emergency antigouging measure. And that’s the part that’s concerning to me. Officials are using strong language right now and it’s giving people confidence that they are actually going to do something about the issue of rent gouging, when I really feel like they won’t because, historically, they haven’t. I wish the media would interrogate their claims more and not let them give off the impression they are doing something. If people feel like something is being done about an issue, they are less likely to get organized to do something about it. Right now you ask officials what they’re doing and the answer is actually quite vague. This is a pattern, and waiting around for officials to make change is demobilizing. For example, we’ve waited years for officials to prosecute landlords for harassment against tenants and the LA Tenants Union has been organizing around this issue since at least 2017! Still landlords have suffered no substantial consequences. The spreadsheet allows us to take matters into our own hands.
Ideally, tenants report violations and enforcement agencies prosecute the landlords. But it rarely works that way. Landlords often know no consequence for their actions. And this is because of a few factors, one being the bureaucracy of the government rendering them slow to respond, and another is the lack of resources to respond quickly and robustly. But the primary reason is that the landlord lobby has a stranglehold on elected officials at all levels of government across the state of California. The California Apartment Association (CAA) has a firm grip on Governor Newsom, who decides how Penal Code 396 is interpreted—there is already a disagreement between him and movement lawyers about when the gouging caps expire: we say Jan 7, 2026 and he says March 8, 2025. Which timeline favors landlords more?
The City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, who will be the primary agent enforcing cases in Los Angeles, has stock in Blackstone (the largest landlord in history) and is a landlord herself. The landlord’s lobby has paid for its power through campaign donations. In short, landlords have to be really unlucky to get caught. Even when they are caught, the penalty is usually a small fine that’s easily recouped in a month or two.
Not to mention, I have now heard from multiple people that the Los Angeles Housing Department is telling people that single family homes are excluded from the rent gouging measures, which is flat-out incorrect.
So the biggest barriers—beyond the headache of interpreting and figuring out how to report an inaccessible law—is that once you go through the trouble of reporting, nothing happens. Flouting the law is common landlord practice precisely because landlords know they can get away with it.
I should mention that the Attorney General did charge one real estate agent, named Mike Kobeissi, on Jan 22—a case that was documented on the spreadsheet, along with the property in question (line 1273).7Liam Dillon, “California attorney general charges L.A.-area real estate agent with price gouging in the wake of wildfires,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2025, https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2025-01-22/california-attorney-general-charges-l-a-landlord-with-alleged-price-gouging-in-wake-of-wildfires. While this is a step forward, it represents just one out of at least 1,300 documented violations of the law. The action feels more like a symbolic gesture than a meaningful crackdown on the issue.
The most effective solution right now, in my view—and what others have affirmed—is the spreadsheet itself. It’s public, it includes landlords’ names and contact information, and it’s being seen by thousands of people who are actively using it to call out and confront rent gouging. Many are directly putting landlords on notice and shaming them for their actions, and it’s working according to officials and media reports. Our own findings show at least one hundred instances where landlords have reduced their prices to comply with the legal limit.
What sets this approach apart is that it doesn’t rely on the status quo—waiting on government bodies to take action or implement changes. Instead, we’re picking up the phone, confronting landlords, and exposing their secretive, exploitative practices. Their dirty business is no longer hidden, and they’re ashamed. That public accountability is making a difference.
Los Angeles has long suffered from a housing crisis, which working-class tenants have borne the brunt of. COVID-19 made a bad situation worse as several thousands lost their jobs and were unable to pay rent. Just as it seemed like some stability was returning, the fires broke out and, overnight, thousands of people were forced into an already tight housing market.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the Palisades—a wealthy area with multimillion-dollar homes—was one of the hardest-hit communities. Many of these displaced homeowners now have the means to enter the rental market temporarily, driving up demand, and making it possible for landlords to charge exorbitantly high and often illegal rents. This dynamic pushes rents higher for everyone.
The greatest harm will invariably fall on those with the least resources. Displaced residents from areas like Altadena, who lack affordable options, are now being forced out of Los Angeles entirely. Meanwhile, the working-class communities we organize with at the LA Tenants Union—communities that have called Los Angeles home for generations—are under constant attack from landlords exploiting rising land values. The rent gouging we’re seeing in the aftermath of the fires is a stark and rapid example of this predatory dynamic, laying bare the systemic greed that continues to displace and harm the most vulnerable.
The positive attention Airbnb is receiving in the aftermath of the fires irks me deeply. Yes, they’ve stepped up to offer thousands of rentals to displaced families at no or low cost—but the irony is glaring. Of course Airbnb can mobilize housing in a crisis; they’ve facilitated the removal of thousands of long-term rentals from the market, making them unavailable to tenants in the first place! Airbnb has actively worsened the housing crisis since they emerged around 2014. Their business model incentivizes landlords to hoard housing for short-term rentals, often prioritizing tourist dollars over long-term stability for residents. This is why families are struggling to find places to stay in the aftermath of these fires: the housing that should be available has been siphoned into short-term profits.
Airbnb is lobbying all levels of government right now to relax regulations on short-term rentals. At the county level, a resolution was passed on Tuesday (January 21) to suspend certain restrictions and there’s now a proposed state bill that would strip tenant protections from occupants staying longer than thirty days. This would allow Airbnb to host displaced families without granting them essential rights like rent stabilization or just-cause eviction protections. In effect, Airbnb wants to profit off people displaced by disaster while retaining the power to evict them at will—all while pretending to be saviors in a time of need.
They claim this is about helping displaced residents find temporary housing, but the reality is far darker. Lifting caps on short-term rentals will further destabilize the housing market, exacerbating the very crisis they claim to address. This is disaster capitalism in its purest form: corporations exploiting crises to push profit-driven policies that deepen structural inequalities and harm working-class communities in the long run.
The stories I am thinking about the most are the ones that haven’t received a lot of mainstream media attention. I’m thinking of the tenants facing imminent eviction. Just three days after the fires broke out, a tenant in Pasadena reached out to me after receiving an email from her landlords notifying her that her lease is being terminated because the landlord’s home had been destroyed in the Eaton Fire. Another tenant reached out a few days later asking for support after also receiving an email from his landlord asking him to vacate so he could house his grandmother, who had lost her home in the Eaton Fire. The tenant, already struggling with long-term unemployment, an inoperable car, and mounting financial stress, now faces the threat of losing his home and his community in Los Angeles. He admits he can’t afford to stay in Los Angeles.
Another immediately messaged me when they learned their landlord’s house burned down, anticipating the landlord would want to recover the rental property, and wanted to know if this was a valid reason for eviction. The unfortunate answer is that, in all of these cases, the landlord can evict. Known as an “owner move-in,” this type of eviction is a just-cause reason under local and state tenant protection laws.
Both homeowners and tenants are being impacted by the crisis brought on by the wildfires. Yet, while homeowners face profound losses, including the destruction of their homes and (in some cases) their lives, they often have more opportunities to restore stability through access to insurance, FEMA assistance, and owning land—which gives them a slight edge, even in the face of disaster. Ironically, while tenants’ evictions can be indirectly connected to the fires, they are left to navigate their displacement with almost no safety net and, in most cases, just 120 days to move out. They are not entitled to FEMA relief or covered by insurance policies when they are displaced by these ripple effects.
Rebuilding after the fires in Los Angeles offers an opportunity to correct systemic failures caused by a market-driven private housing system and environmental neglect. A just response demands immediate action: the government should purchase land from those who lost their homes, shifting ownership from private landlords to a public model. This would pave the way for long-term solutions that prioritize people and the environment over profit.
Instead of repeating past mistakes by incentivizing risky private development, the focus should be on rebuilding in a socially and environmentally responsible way. Land acquired could be transferred to community land trusts to expand social housing, or to conservancies to preserve open green spaces. This approach would address housing instability and environmental degradation while moving toward a system where housing is a right, not a commodity.
By embracing social housing—permanently affordable, publicly owned, and community-centered—we can ensure displaced tenants are housed without fear of exploitation or displacement. This model also allows for energy-efficient and climate-resilient design, addressing both the housing and climate crises in tandem. Rebuilding must aim to break the destructive cycles of capitalism and create a future where housing serves communities and protects the planet.
The aftermath of the fires has been a profound learning moment for the broader public, who are witnessing landlord greed laid bare.
For organizers, it has reinforced the importance of building strong community networks and mutual aid systems that allow us to support one another during crises. When evacuation orders come, it’s these networks that ensure people have transportation to safety, access to masks for elderly or immobile members, and other essential resources. This moment shows that we cannot rely on government systems that repeatedly fail to disseminate critical information or provide the necessary support in times of need. It’s a call to continue organizing in ways that grow collective power while fostering connections that make our communities stronger and more self-reliant.
The fires also spotlight housing as the most exploitative commodity in a crisis, reinforcing the urgency of moving away from a profit-driven housing model. The work of developing a movement capable of undermining capitalism and transforming private housing markets has never been more critical.
The work is more important than ever, and it’s a reminder that we keep each other safe and housed, even when the systems around us fail. Los Angeles, with its unique vulnerabilities to wildfires, extreme heat, and other climate disasters, shows us how deeply intertwined housing justice and climate justice are. As we face these growing impacts, our role expands—not just to fight for tenant power but to build mutual resiliency that can ensure that communities most affected by these crises are supported and empowered.