Capitalists have never met a natural disaster they didn’t try to exploit
Los Angeles Rents Are Going Up By The Hour
https://www.curbed.com/article/los-angeles-fires-rent-gouging-bidding-wars.html"Realtors Gita Vasseghi and Melea Avrach started hearing from clients looking for temporary housing as early as January 7, the day the Los Angeles fires began. Based on the East Side of the city, they quickly began helping friends, friends of friends, and desperate cold callers displaced from the massive Eaton fire in Altadena. But just as soon as they mobilized, something else started happening: Prices started going up. By the 8th, when tens of thousands of people had already been evacuated, a client sent them a Zillow listing for a little two-bedroom house priced at $3,800 a month, on the market unrented for 60 days before the fires, in a part of Altadena that did not burn. Within the hour, and by the time the agents were able to check it out for themselves, the price had almost doubled to $6,500. Vasseghi and Avrach were sure they could negotiate the original rate when they told the listing agent it was for clients who had just lost everything they owned. But when they called him, it became clear the price had gone up because of people like their clients. He said, simply, “Too many people want this house. You’ll have to be competitive.”
Within the week since Los Angeles’s worst-ever disaster began, rent gouging has become a crisis on top of the crisis. It’s against the law to increase a rental price by more than 10 percent once a state of emergency has been declared; this fact doesn’t seem to be worrying the agents jacking up the numbers on open listings to desperate Angelenos. That behavior can result in a fine or even jail time. But according to sites like Zillow, the gouging is rampant anyway. “People smell blood in the water,” Jeffrey Saad, another Compass agent, told me. No tax bracket is being spared. A two-bed lower-level apartment in Brentwood Heights went up 19 percent to $3,100 on January 12; a five-bed, five-bath nearby went from $12,000 to $15,000 on January 10. Jason Oppenheim, the Selling Sunset star, told BBC News on January 12 that even his clients were getting scalped. Some of the listings have gone up more than once, as the fires got worse, like a three-bed in Beverly Glen with a terrace that went from $12,000 on the 8th to $15,000 on the 13th. Saad has noticed the same: “I saw some agents increasing prices by the hour on Tuesday and Wednesday, as the fires got worse,” he says."
#LAFires #GavinNewsom #California #DemExit #SMARTLA2028 #USPolitics #ConspiracyTheories #InsuranceFraud #StateFarm #SMARTLA2028Theory #PredatoryInsuranceCompanies #ArsonLandGrab #Capitialism #GreatReset #Transhumanism