The Brief

The ash hadn’t yet settled on thousands of destroyed homes when eagle-eyed tenant advocates started noticing the massive rent increases posted on a popular real estate website.

Within days of the historic fires in Los Angeles County, advocates began tracking listings for rental housing on Zillow that raised asking rents far above the 10% limit under California’s law banning post-disaster price gouging.

Now, after weeks of combing through listings (more below on the methodology), a group of volunteer rent gouging investigators has released their analysis, which they say is evidence of widespread illegal activity.

The study’s findings

Calling themselves The Rent Brigade, the group released a study Monday with their findings:

• Between Jan. 7 and Jan. 18, a total of 1,343 listings on Zillow appear to have violated the state’s price gouging ban.
• Those listings appear to have collectively sought to illegally overcharge tenants by $7.7 million per month, or $92.4 million per year.
• Rent hikes outside of legal limits were steeper on the lower end of L.A.’s housing market. The bottom quartile of listings by price saw a 46% median rent increase compared with a 27% increase in the top quartile. [Keep in mind that 10% is the post-disaster cap.]
• ZIP codes in areas including West Hollywood, Malibu and Venice had the most listings that appear to be over legal limits. But lower-income neighborhoods like Koreatown and Vermont Square also had high numbers of listings.
• Of the 1,343 listings analyzed, the study’s authors said Compass had 58 listings that appear to exceed legal increases, the most of any single real estate brokerage.

In her day job, Chelsea Kirk is a policy director with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, an L.A. tenant rights nonprofit. She said she independently started this effort to track rent gouging by launching a crowd-sourced online spreadsheet.

“For lack of a better word, it became viral,” she said.

One alarming conclusion from analyzing all this data, Kirk said, is that more dramatic rent hikes have been happening on traditionally lower-priced housing.

“One of the most surprising things was seeing how widespread this is, not just in affluent areas,” Kirk said.

How the study came about

The Rent Brigade is a new independent collective made up of tenant advocates, web programmers, housing researchers and ordinary Angelenos. Those involved in the effort say they naturally gravitated toward working together after posts about alleged rent gouging flooded social media in the days after the fires.

Lauren Harper said they got involved after seeing an Instagram post by Kirk about her efforts to build a crowd-sourced rent gouging spreadsheet.

“I messaged her and said, ‘Hey, I think we can scrape that data,’” Harper said. “I got very quickly swept into this whole project.”

Initially, the group relied on user submissions to collect data on listings, looking for rentals where rates were increased above legal limits. By Jan. 15, tech savvy volunteers with The Rent Brigade had built a tool to systematically scrape data from Zillow listings in L.A. County.

Kirk said more than 150 volunteers have now contributed to this work.

“I've been fielding a lot of questions about who's responsible for this spreadsheet,” Kirk said. “We're just a group of people. But what connects us is that we're all Angelenos and we're really pissed off about what we're seeing in terms of rent gouging being rampant across the city in the wake of the wildfires. And we're committed to doing something about it.”

How the data was gathered

Monday’s study combines user submissions that have been filtered along with that scraped data to conclude that 1,343 listings appear to have broken the state’s price gouging law in one of two ways.

• Either the listings had increased their pre-fire asking rents by more than 10% in the days after the fires
• Or they newly came on the market after the fires at more than 160% of the area’s Fair Market Rent as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

The study found 442 listings that increased pre-existing rents by more than 10% after the fires. But the majority (901 listings) were new listings that violated the Fair Market Rent threshold.

“There’s a question about all of these empty listings that are suddenly coming onto the market,” Harper said. “We're really interested in using this data set for further questions about vacancy rates in Los Angeles and getting a better picture of what's happening in the rental market.”

The study’s limitations 

The study comes with some important caveats. Without a detailed investigation of each listing, it’s impossible to be certain that they all violated the law. Zillow users can sometimes misclassify or inaccurately input data for their listings, the study’s authors note.

In response to LAist’s questions about the study, Zillow representatives said they have already taken down many listings that appear to have illegally raised rents.

In an emailed statement, a company spokesperson said, “We believe it is essential for housing providers to follow local housing rules, including consumer protections against price gouging during and following a natural disaster, and we are providing resources to help them understand their responsibilities.”

LAist reached out to Compass to ask about the study’s findings, but we have not yet received a response.

Anne Russell, president of the Greater Los Angeles Realtors Association, said in an email to LAist, "Our association fields calls every day from our members with questions about the price gouging law to make sure that they are complying with both the letter and the spirit of the law. Realtors have a duty under the law and the Realtor code of ethics to not partake in rent gouging, and we would encourage anyone who feels that they are encountering price gouging in the market to report it to the Attorney General or the relevant authorities.”

What’s next for anti-rent gouging efforts

Prosecutors have started enforcement of the state’s price gouging laws.

Last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed criminal charges against an L.A.-area real estate agent over alleged rent gouging for a La Cañada Flintridge home, allegations the agent strongly denied. The listing at the center of that case was on The Rent Brigade’s spreadsheet. Bonta has said more investigations are in the works.

Kirk said it’s not clear that threats of enforcement are deterring landlords and agents. Even after prosecutors pledged to crack down, the study finds that listings appearing to break the law grew, with the most of any single day posted on Jan. 16 — more than a week after the fires broke out.

“I kind of expected that it would be curbed — that we would see it kind of taper off,” Kirk said. “But I'm actually feeling like people are learning, oh, I can do this.”

The mayor of Arcadia has agreed to plead guilty to a charge she acted as an agent for China, federal prosecutors announced Monday. She has resigned from her position with the city.

Eileen Wang, 58, faces one count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison.

What we know about the criminal case

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wang and Yaoning “Mike” Sun of Chino Hills worked at the direction of the Chinese government and with individuals based in the U.S. to promote pro-People’s Republic of China propaganda in the United States. Those actions occurred between 2020 and 2022, prosecutors said.

According to federal prosecutors, Wang and Sun operated a website — known as U.S. News Center — billed as a news source for the local Chinese American community in Los Angeles County. They posted content on the site, described as "pre-written articles," based on directives from Chinese government officials.

Sun, 65, pleaded guilty in October 2025 in federal court to acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. He is serving a four-year federal prison sentence.

Prosecutors also said Wang communicated with John Chen, whom they described as “a high-level member of the [Chinese government] intelligence apparatus,” in November 2021, and asked him to post an article from her website.

In a group chat, Wang referenced the article and wrote: “This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Chen pleaded guilty in New York to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China and conspiracy to bribe a public official. In 2024, he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison.

What's next

Wang, who was elected to the City Council in November 2022, was expected to make her first appearance in U.S. District Court Monday afternoon.

Citing a plea agreement, prosecutors said she's expected to enter the guilty plea within the next few weeks.

Arcadia's mayor is selected from the elected council members. A post on the city's website announced that Wang had resigned her position as of Monday and that a new mayor would be picked from the remaining council members at the next meeting.

The Supreme Court on Monday gave itself more time to consider a national ban on telemedicine access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

Justice Samuel Alito extended an earlier order he issued by three more days, so rules for prescribing mifepristone online or through the mail remain in effect through Thursday at a minimum.

The case at issue

The tumult over the future of telemedicine access to mifipristone started on May 1 with a ruling from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling re-instituted prescribing rules from before the pandemic that required patients to receive mifepristone in person in a doctor's office or clinic.

The Food and Drug Administration determined that the rule was medically unnecessary in 2021. The state of Louisiana sued last fall, arguing that telemedicine access undermines the state's abortion ban.

What is telemedicine abortion?

The telemedicine abortion process starts with a patient connecting with a healthcare provider on the phone or online. If the patient is eligible, that provider can prescribe two medications — mifepristone and another pill called misoprostol. Patients can pick up the medicine at a local pharmacy, or providers can mail the drugs to a patient's home.

That access is a big part of the reason why the number of abortions nationally has actually increased since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Now, most abortions in the U.S. use this combination of medications, and one quarter happen via telemedicine.

After the 5th Circuit ruling, some providers said they would continue offering telemedicine access to abortion medication using a different protocol that involves higher doses of misoprostol and no mifepristone.

Researchers say that method is just as safe and effective, but tends to cause more pain for patients and more side effects, like nausea and diarrhea. Misoprostol has other medical uses, such as treating gastric ulcers and hemorrhage, and has been on the market longer than mifepristone. It is likely to remain fully accessible, even if mifepristone is restricted.

Since the FDA's prescribing rules for medications apply to the whole country, a change to the rules about how mifepristone can be accessed has national impact. That means it affects states with constitutionally-protected access to abortion, states with criminal bans, like Louisiana, and all states in between.

States' rights

Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states submitted an amicus brief in this case, writing that the appeals court decision put the policy choices of states with bans above the choices of states "that have made the different but equally sovereign determinations to promote access to abortion care."

There are also stakes related to the power of FDA and other expert agencies to set rules. While the Trump administration's FDA did not respond to the Supreme Court's request for briefs, a group of former leaders of the agency, who served under mainly Democratic and some Republican presidents, wrote about this in an amicus brief.

They defended the FDA's process in approving the medication and modifying the rules for prescribing it, and say the appeals court decision "would upend FDA's gold-standard, science-based drug approval system."

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