Imperfect Paradise: How the Rent Brigade took on LA’s landlords

Norco 80

LAist Studios

True Crime

4.2 • 887 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the days after LA’s early-January wildfires, tenant advocate Chelsea Kirk noticed a trend: rent gouging. Rents were shooting up past their legal limit. In the wake of the fires, as natural disaster collided with LA’s severe housing shortage, we trace how a collective of volunteers organized themselves to bring rent gouging to light in LA County. What did they find? And where do we stand on rent gouged listings and charges, four months later?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Jacob Margolis. I'd like you to stop what you're doing and ask yourself, where is my emergency kit?
0:05.9	If you don't have a good answer, then I highly recommend visiting preppy.com slash LAist for a free emergency kit with any purchase over $100.
0:15.7	That's preppy, P-R-E-P-P-I dot com slash LAist.
0:20.9	Support comes from Siklavia, catalyzing and celebrating car-free streets.
0:25.1	As pop-up parks for the day, sick-L-A-Sundays are free and open to all.
0:29.3	Details at C-I-C-L-A-V-I-A.
0:32.9	On January 10th, three days into LA's historic wildfires, Chelsea Kirk was curled up on her
0:39.9	couch in her Echo Park apartment. By then, we were starting to get a sense of the devastation.
0:46.1	Ten people had been reported killed and over 12,000 structures damaged. And while I and most people I know
0:53.3	were glued to the news, doom-scrolling Instagram,
0:57.0	Chelsea was engrossed in a different corner of the internet. I immediately went to Zillow,
1:03.2	and one of my first thoughts was, the rent's going to go up. And it was probably the first listing I looked at, the $12,000
1:12.9	house in my neighborhood of Echo Park, three bedrooms, but it wasn't new construction, $12,000 a
1:19.5	month. I knew rents were expensive here, but $12,000 didn't seem reasonable to me. So I scrolled down
1:27.0	the listing, came across the description,
1:30.1	which said this could be available short-term if needed, furnished if needed. It was very clearly
1:36.7	being advertised to displaced victims of the LA wildfires. Scroll down some more to the very
1:42.3	bottom of the listing, where you can actually see the price history.
1:45.8	And what do you know?
1:46.9	The price increased over 50% after January 7th.
1:50.6	And I think I actually gasped, and I started clicking around some more.
1:55.2	And truly, without putting much time or effort into it, I came across several of these listings,
	...

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