Los Angeles needs more housing. Now, more than ever.
The fires that roared through the city in January 2025 were nothing short of devastating, with over 16,000 structures destroyed and an estimated 150,000 people displaced. In the wake of the disaster, victims scoured the still-hot wreckage for scraps of their former lives. The immensity of their loss was only dwarfed by its suddenness.
And then there’s the rent.
The mass destruction of homes exacerbated L.A.’s already pricey housing market. Rents substantially shot up, sometimes more than doubling. As is often the case in the aftermath of disaster, the public demanded that the government freeze prices.
Disasters create the political will necessary to enact sweeping reforms, but rent control is the wrong approach because it discourages construction and causes more harm than good. Fortunately the city has not (yet) gone down this route. The California Coastal Commission is also waiving permit requirements to rebuild lost homes. But that will only return L.A. to the terrible housing market before the fires. The city should instead end single-family zoning so a better, more affordable city can rise out of the ashes.
Supply and Demand Determine the Price of Housing
Most people don’t know how the housing market works. The same people who understand that more cars will cut car prices and more grain will cut grain prices will flatly deny that more housing will cut housing prices. As Michael Munger once wrote, “The mind…boggles.”
It’s not as if landlords suddenly discovered money is good at precisely the same time a bunch of homes were destroyed. As “price gougers” can “take advantage” of people because there are so few options, they would have trouble “getting away” with “jacking up prices” if there were more options. If mass destruction increases the price of housing, mass creation will reduce it.
The question becomes: How can L.A. radically increase its housing stock?
Zoning Laws Choke Off Availability
Even before the fires, Los Angeles was not a cheap place to live, with an average home price of just shy of a million dollars. Most of the price tag came from the land the house was on. This is how homes less than a thousand square feet can go for over half a million dollars.
Multiple households on the same lot assuage the land cost burden. A 20-unit building on land worth half a million means each unit’s price goes up by $25,000. That’s not a trivial amount of money, but it’s far less than the unit’s construction costs.
Unfortunately, in most of the places people want to live, it’s illegal for multiple households to live on the same land. Single-family zoning—one house per lot—means one family has to pay the entire price tag for the land, and the housing price is thus also high. Single-family zoning forces people to waste precious land.
Single-family zoning is dreadfully common. Like in many places in the United States, areas where it’s illegal to build affordable housing dominate—an astonishing 75% of L.A.’s residential land is zoned for single-family homes. Before burnt-out housing drove up rents, unbuilt housing was the culprit.
Single-family zoning isn’t the only reason there are so few places to live—parking requirements, historic districts, permitting processes, minimum lot sizes, and other barriers make it all worse—but ending single-family zoning is a great place to start rethinking the housing market.
Chicago Rebuilt Better
Destruction is terrible, but if you have to rebuild, rebuild thoughtfully. This is exactly what Chicago did after the Great Fire of 1871.
Much like the L.A. fires, extremely dry weather and strong winds transformed a small flame into a city-consuming inferno. Chicago’s fire raged for 30 hours, destroying over 17,000 buildings and leaving a third of the population homeless. As in L.A., it was fueled by a forest of wooden homes.
Chicago was too well-located to abandon, and investment poured in. Under new regulations that we’d consider common sense, the Great Rebuilding remade the Windy City. It’s no coincidence Chicago soon became home to the world’s first skyscraper, with its unburnable metal frame and massive windows (more sunlight meant fewer candles). More followed. The city rose like a phoenix, far surpassing its previous population and earning fame for its cutting-edge architecture.
Los Angeles Can, Too
As Chicago recognized it had too few regulations, L.A. should recognize it has too many. Now is a perfect opportunity to unmoor its residents from a system that drives up housing prices.
Greater density may be a hard pill for Angelenos to swallow, but even the widespread adoption of the humble duplex would drastically increase the number of units without any increase in fire danger. Greater affordability will help combat homelessness and the fires that come with it. Los Angeles doesn’t have to take a radical position to make major progress.
As L.A. residents rebuild and recover, let us hope they don’t miss the lesson: as mass destruction brought rents up, mass construction will bring rents down.
