L.A.'s wildfires have intensified city's decades-long housing crisis | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on January 30, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: As wildfires continue to erupt across greater Los Angeles, the urgency of the housing crisis is front and center for Angelinos. With thousands of homes gone, the various issues that have plagued the real estate industry since the '80s are just that much more urgent. Where will people live and at what cost? Peter Dreier, an urban and environmental policy professor at Occidental College, joins The Excerpt to discuss the worsening situation and what it means for the people who call L.A. home.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to the Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, January 30th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.
As wildfires continue to rage across Los Angeles, the urgency of the housing crisis is front and center for Angelenos. With thousands of homes gone, the various issues that have plagued the real estate industry for decades now are just that much more urgent. Where will people live and at what cost? Here to help us dig into all of it. Now we're joined by Peter Dreier, an urban and environmental policy professor at Occidental College. Thanks for joining me, Peter.
Peter Dreier:
That's my pleasure.
Dana Taylor:
Los Angeles, like much of the country, was already in the middle of a housing crisis before the fires destroyed so many homes. Can give me a lay of the land here? How dire is the housing issue in LA right now, and how did we get here?
Peter Dreier:
Well, you're right, long before the fires hit Los Angeles, the city and the region had probably the worst housing crisis in the country. And by that I mean that not only were there 75,000 homeless people in the county of LA and about 50,000 homeless people in the city of LA, city of 4 million people, but housing costs were astronomical. The typical rent for a two-bedroom apartment in LA was about $2,500 a month. Very few people in Los Angeles could afford that. According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a renter in Los Angeles had to have an income of about $48 an hour just to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment. And very few renters in LA had anything close to a $48 an hour income.
So the city really had a dire problem. The new mayor, Karen Bass, had a program to try to get people off of the streets into hotels, and then eventually to permanent housing. And that worked a bit. Over the last year, nationally the homeless numbers went up about 18%. In Los Angeles, they came down about 3% or 4%. So progress has been made, but not fast enough and not comprehensive enough to make a big difference. And so in almost any neighborhood in Los Angeles, particularly in the commercial areas where those shops are, you can find lots of homeless people on the streets.
Dana Taylor:
Peter, I know you've written a lot about the LA housing crisis. There are a lot of conflicting interests here and a huge wealth disparity between some of the stakeholders. How has this issue played out on the ground?
Peter Dreier:
Well, it plays out on the ground in a number of ways. One is that there's a dire need for more affordable housing, more rental housing. And the city is under a requirement by the state to add about half a million new units of housing in the next decade, of which about a third or a half should be affordable to low-income people and working-class people. And by that I mean teachers and nurses and hotel workers and hospital workers. And the problem is that in the middle-class homeowner neighborhoods, there's a real NIMBY problem, a not-in-my-backyard problem, which means they don't want rental housing, they don't want working-class people in their neighborhoods. The Pacific Palisades, which is one of the areas that was hit the hardest by the fires, the typical house is worth about $2 million.
And so they and many other neighborhoods, when a developer would propose to build a two-story or a four-story or six-story apartment building with maybe 20 to 50 units, they had organized to get their city council member to try to stop it. And so there's been a real lag in the number of units that the city needs. The city needs to build at least 50,000 units a year just to keep up with the demand. And over the last decade or so, it's only built an average of about 10,000 units a year. So every year, Los Angeles falls further and further behind. And it's partly because wealthy homeowners, and even middle-class homeowners, don't want rental housing.
Now, I think that's changing a bit now after the fires because a lot of the people who were affected by the fires were middle-class people, although lots of poor and working-class people were affected too. And so we've got now a lot of middle-income professionals who can't afford to buy a house. They're going to be renters for a long time, and so they will need more rental housing. And the question is, if we build more rental housing in the city, will it be affordable to the people that need it most? And that's going to require subsidies. That's what the federal government did for much of the 20th century, but has stopped doing for the most part over the last 50 years or so where there hasn't been a significant increase in the federal budget for housing for almost half a century.
Dana Taylor:
You've been involved in urban policy for 30 years. What role do urban planners play in mitigating wildfire risks in high-density areas like LA? Is fire resilience integrated enough here in your view? And what went wrong from a policy perspective, in your opinion?
Peter Dreier:
Well, there's a lot of building and dangerous areas in Los Angeles that are subject to earthquakes, to mudslides, to our floods, hurricanes, and now climate change. And there's a phenomenon called the Santa Ana winds, which come every year. They came earlier this year, 70, 80 miles an hour winds that are unpredictable in terms of where they're going to go. And you add to that global warming and the lack of rain and Los Angeles was a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode in terms of another fire. Nobody would've predicted it would've been as bad as the one that we saw now. And in the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena, which is in an unincorporated area of about 50,000 people just outside of Los Angeles, 150,000 people have lost their homes. Not all of them have been destroyed, but their homes are now filled with toxics, with soot, with smoke, with ash.
So a lot of people lost their homes. And other people, including myself, had to evacuate. It'll take a month or two or three before our homes are cleaned. But for the thousands of people that actually lost their homes, it's going to take three or maybe two and a half, three years to clear out all the toxic debris and to decide whether the families want to rebuild their homes the way it was. Now, think about a neighborhood that had, let's say 30 homes on the block. And of those homeowners, half of them want to come back. The other half say, "It's not worth it. I'm going to move somewhere else. I'm going to collect the insurance and get another house or a condo or downsize somewhere else." What is the city going to do about that block that's like a comb where half of the lots are now empty or vacant?
So that takes city planning, that takes the city having to make some hard choices about what they want to do with these two major neighborhoods, Altadena and Pacific Palisades, in the future. And there's a lot of conflicting interests about whether or not they should rebuild them the way they were, whether they should require more fire protective materials if they rebuild, whether or not they should allow as many people to have cars and whether they can build rental housing on some of that property. There'd be affordable to people of all different kinds of incomes. So there's a lot of planning that has to get done, but there's a problem politically with that, which is that people, they want to get back into their homes as quickly as possible.
Dana Taylor:
You brought this up earlier, and I want to circle back because we can't talk about housing in LA without also acknowledging the still growing homeless population. What's their fate following the fires?
Peter Dreier:
We had about 45,000 or 50,000 homeless people in Los Angeles two months ago before the fires. Now we probably have, in terms of people who don't have permanent shelter at all, we probably have closer to 100,000. So maybe it's doubled. But think about all the people who were the nannies, the housekeepers, the gardeners. They don't have jobs anymore, and they've got to pay rent if they want to find an apartment. They don't have a job. And they don't have many choices because the vacancy rate for rental housing in Los Angeles before the fire was about 3%, meaning it was almost invisible. There was hardly any place to go. And now it's probably even much smaller than that. And to make matters worse, a lot of landlords are rent gouging.
Dana Taylor:
I'd like to shift to some solutions here. How do we incentivize developers to build more affordable housing in the region? And LA specifically, how do we quickly get more available housing for some of the people who've lost their homes?
Peter Dreier:
Yeah, that's absolutely the right question. So one city on its own cannot solve the housing crisis. Los Angeles doesn't have enough money to subsidize the number of units that are needed to help. So we really need the state, and particularly the federal government to do that. I don't expect that to happen under President Trump. So that's a dilemma.
As I said earlier, what the city could do is to redesign some of the neighborhoods so the people that want to move back into those neighborhoods when their homes are burned down, can move back, but not necessarily in the exact location where they were before. So that the city could assemble development parcels that are big enough to build apartment buildings of four units or 10 units or 50 units, depending on where it is. The city really has to rezone itself so that it doesn't prohibit people from building two and three and four unit buildings where there are single-family homes now.
But ultimately, we have to make a decision as a society, whether housing is a human right or it's a privilege for those who can afford it. But there ought to be a portion of the housing stock in LA and every other city that is immune from market forces, from speculators, from Wall Street, from banks, from greedy landlords, and allow people to live in these homes at an affordable rent or an affordable mortgage without the fear that they will be foreclosed on or that they will be evicted if they don't have a job, or if their job doesn't keep pace with the rate of inflation. Lots of other countries have done this, so there's no reason why the United States can't do it, except we have to have the political will to make it happen.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, as you know, across the country, we've been experiencing a severe housing shortage for years. What do you think is the most important focus area for the people who want to fix this issue?
Peter Dreier:
Under Jimmy Carter, the president in the 1970s, there was a co-op bank, which lent money to co-operatives, consumer co-operatives, employee co-operatives, and tenant co-operatives. We need that again, except at a much bigger level. So the federal government could both create the ability to circulate more money into the housing market, but under regulations to avoid speculation. It could impose new zoning laws on states and cities. It could expand the amount of housing vouchers in the country so that renters can afford to rent homes. And importantly, if it wanted to, it could make it harder for Wall Street and corporate landlords to gobble up the existing rental housing stock by using its antitrust policies. I don't expect any of that to happen under Donald Trump, but those are the kinds of solutions that could get us out of this incredible housing mess. We have one of the worst housing crises in the world.
We're not a Third World country. People don't live in the kind of shacks that most people live in lots of big cities in Asia and in Africa, and in parts of Latin America. But we do have almost a million people every night living on the streets, are living in shelters. That's bigger than some countries. And there's no excuse for a country as wealthy as United States to have 900,000 or a million homeless people on the streets or in shelters every night. It's a violation of all the human rights that we pretend to believe in, and that's true in every city in America.
Dana Taylor:
Peter, I know that you and your family have been affected by the fires in LA. I really appreciate you taking time out to join us on The Excerpt today.
Peter Dreier:
Sure, my pleasure.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaylee Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producers Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to Podcasts@USAToday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.