CALIFORNIA FIRES

NY Times -  A new brush fire rapidly exploded on Wednesday near Castaic Lake, a reservoir about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, forcing nearby schools and thousands of residents to evacuate. The blaze brought new terror to Southern California more than two weeks after fires first tore through parts of Los Angeles County.The new threat, named the Hughes fire, ignited just before 11 a.m. local time and consumed more than 5,000 acres in a little more than two hours, according to Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency. About 19,000 residents were under evacuation orders, and another 15,000 were under evacuation warnings.

The Guardian - LA before the fires was a city where rental properties were available but often out of range for lower-income families. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment was just under $4,000, affordable only to households with an annual income of more than $160,000, roughly twice as much as the average household actually earns.

Now, with more than 15,000 structures estimated to have burned to the ground, most of them residential buildings, the pressure is on to find alternative housing for tens of thousands of people who either lost everything or cannot go back to their homes because the communities where they lived have been reduced to temporary toxic wastelands.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has issued an executive order making it illegal for landlords to hike up their rents, but evidence collected by housing activists suggests hundreds of property owners are taking advantage of the increased demand anyway, especially in areas adjacent to the biggest fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

One five-bedroom house in Santa Monica identified by activists saw its list price jump from $12,750 per month before the fires to $28,000 after; the listing was withdrawn after two days following its exposure. Another house in Bel Air spotted by a local news outlet was listed for $29,500 a month where previously it had been offered for $15,900; that listing disappeared in less than a day.