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.…