What happens when the California fires go out? More gentrification.

It is often said that climate disasters are great equalizers. They rip through neighborhoods, rich and poor, devastating communities and upending lives without discriminating between them.

But it is, of course, not that simple. 

As the wildfires blaze through Southern California, class divides are as evident as ever. It is true that even the rich and famous could not spare their homes from burning to the ground. But it is also true that while most residents have to wait for public assistance, the wealthy have more resources to come to their rescue. Private firefighters, for example, have been in high demand​​ — in some cases, even protecting individual mansions to prevent the fires from touching them. 

One real estate investor pleaded for help on social media, asking if anyone has access to private firefighters that could save his home. “Will pay any amount,” he wrote on X.

No matter how much money you have, natural disasters can still be unforgiving, and losing a home is always a tragedy.

But once the fires finally go out, inequality will almost certainly rise because of the class divides that are already entrenched in Los Angeles. Rich people will be able to rebuild their homes and neighborhoods, while middle- and low-income families might be permanently displaced. 

Studies of past California wildfires have shown that they drove gentrification — something that Hawaii residents have been dealing with since deadly wildfires ravaged through residential areas on Maui. Already, there have been reports of landlords hiking rents in and around Los Angeles, despite the fact that dramatically increasing rents during a state of emergency is illegal in California. 

The ongoing wildfires have already destroyed more than 12,000 structures, including homes, schools, and houses of worship. The question for some of these communities — especially those in middle- and low-income areas — is whether they’ll ever come back, or whether the post-disaster gentrification will render them unrecognizable.

How wildfires fuel gentrification

When a natural disaster strikes a community, housing prices almost always rise. In the short term, the reason is obvious: Apartments and houses have been damaged or destroyed, so there are fewer of them, and that decline in supply causes rents to spike. 

But as rebuilding efforts drag on, many middle- and low-income people never return to their neighborhoods because they can’t afford to. 

“One of the reasons gentrification happens is that everything just becomes more expensive,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities prepare for and recover from wildfires. One reason is the high cost of building, but there are others, including landlords taking advantage of high demand to raise rents and real-estate investors buying up properties to convert to short-term rentals.

Rebuilding can be a slow and arduous process. In late 2018, a wildfire effectively leveled the town of Paradise, California, burning through 95 percent of its buildings. Five years after the fire, only about a third of the town’s pre-fire population of 27,000 had returned, and the median home price skyrocketed from $236,000 to $440,000. As a result, many victims of the fire have been permanently priced out, and the town has started to draw people in from wealthier regions like the Bay Area. 

“In Paradise … they are a little over six years post-disaster — they are about 30 percent rebuilt — and their population has changed dramatically because a lot of their population was elderly and not well resourced at all,” Thompson said. “You’re almost always going to have a massive change of demographics.”

Nicole Lambrou, a professor of urban and regional planning at California State Polytechnic University Pomona, has found similar patterns. Lambrou has studied wildfires and the displacement that happens in their wake, and while she notes that there’s no single, concrete measure of gentrification, she and her colleagues found many signs of deepening inequality after the disasters. 

“We looked at American Community Survey data [in communities affected by wildfires], and we have found that disabilities decreased, education rates increased, renter occupied housing decreased, and median age also decreased because there is a vulnerability in wildfires that’s associated with age,” Lambrou said — all markers of gentrification, with more vulnerable populations leaving impacted areas for good.

“Disaster” or “climate gentrification” — that is, a neighborhood drawing in wealthier newcomers while pricing out longtime residents after a natural disaster like a wildfire or hurricane — is not exactly new. Many communities destroyed by various storms have struggled to bring back their lower-income residents. And while it generally has the same contours as non-disaster-related gentrification, it tends to accelerate the process because natural disasters immediately displace a sizable population and open up a lot of land for speculators to cash in on. That’s why in Lahaina, Hawaii, where wildfires killed over 100 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings in 2023, residents have been trying to raise money for a community land trust — buying up plots of land before speculators do, and renting or selling homes at more affordable rates. 

One striking trend that contributes to making post-disaster communities less affordable is that people looking to buy a second home swoop in. When Lambrou and her colleagues were doing their fieldwork in Paradise to study the impacts of the fire, housing agents told them that they noticed a trend of Bay Area residents, who only live a couple of hours away, buying second homes. 

“We did in fact find that that’s the case if you look at the data,” Lambrou said. “Secondary home ownership goes up substantially in these areas.”

What can California do to prevent more gentrification

While wildfires undoubtedly displace many people, it doesn’t mean that all communities follow the same pattern of gentrification in the ashes. For starters, Paradise was almost entirely burned down, while current fires are devastating a much smaller portion of the greater Los Angeles area by comparison. The LA metropolitan area might also fare better than places like Paradise in part because the city’s strong, diverse economy means that people who lose their jobs to the fire can more easily find employment and are more likely to stick around. 

“If you have a place like Santa Rosa, which is part of a larger metropolitan region or even a place like Ventura, which is so close to the greater LA area, you can find alternative employment, you can find alternatives for your children,” Lambrou said, adding that those areas tended to have quicker recoveries after previous wildfires and keep a larger portion of the pre-fire population. “Conversely, in Paradise, they lost a lot of their schools, their major employer was the Adventist hospital, which burned down and they decided to not rebuild, and so they lost a lot.”

Still, recovery efforts can be designed to minimize the potential for disaster-related gentrification, and the state has already taken some steps to do just that. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, issued an executive order that cuts red tape by suspending environmental reviews, which will help communities affected by the fires to rebuild at a faster pace. The executive order also ensures that homeowners won’t see their property taxes soar after they rebuild their homes by maintaining their pre-fire tax assessments.

The state also needs to make sure that it administers funds in an equitable manner. In the past, research has shown that wealthier and whiter communities are more likely to receive government support after a fire.

But ultimately, California was already home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The state has not been able to keep up with its housing production goals, and the ongoing housing shortage — which is only exacerbated by the fires — has been the main driver of gentrification. Doubling down on building more housing and increasing population density is key to bringing home prices down in the long run. 

Victims of the wildfires, however, aren’t going to be able to wait that long to see housing prices come down. So what the state does next, and how it directs its resources, will be critical in allowing communities to rebuild. After all, the reason natural disasters aren’t great equalizers comes down to how a government responds.