As wildfires raged through Los Angeles early this year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. The Jan. 7 declaration also triggered a state law enacting price controls on consumer goods in Los Angeles County for 30 days, which have since been extended to July 1.

The law, meant to protect displaced Angelenos against price gouging and disaster profiteering, also regulates rental housing costs. This means landlords can’t legally raise rents by more than 10% either for current tenants or for prospective tenants if the unit was advertised in the past year, and can charge no more than 160% of the fair market rent for units that had not been rented or offered for rent in the past year. In practice, however, landlords almost immediately began raising rents far beyond those amounts, and most have faced little enforcement from elected officials over it.

A group of volunteers affiliated with local tenant unions began documenting the price-gouging in a Google spreadsheet last January. The collective calls itself Rent Brigade and has since released two reports on rent gouging. The latest, released in April, is a startling look at the owners of local properties committing rent-gouging — and their donations to elected officials in charge of prosecuting the practice.

“From boutique landlords with a few dozen properties to corporate giants managing tens of thousands of units, landlords across the board are exploiting a moment of collective trauma to pad their profits,” the researchers write. “They are not only flouting the law, but doing so with impunity, shielded by LLCs, distant mailing addresses, and the structural failures of enforcement agencies unwilling or unable to act.”

Using data from Zillow, the Rent Brigade estimates that there were more than 5,000 likely cases of rent gouging between Jan. 7 and March 16. While calculating the exact number of landlords involved in those cases is difficult because of LLCs and ownership structure, they found 3,553 unique addresses associated with the rent-gouged listings.

Volunteers cross-referenced existing registries and ownership data to track down the owners of these listings, which are often nested in LLCs with nondescript titles. What the group found was a combination of corporate mega-landlords and real estate tycoons who had in many cases lobbied against tenant protections in Los Angeles and California. Some had also paid thousands to help elect the very officials tasked with enforcing anti-price-gouging laws.

Only nine landlords had been charged with rent gouging at the time the report was released, all by either the California attorney general or the LA City attorney. In a statement to Next City/Shelterforce, LA County attorney Nathan Hochman’s office, which has so far brought no rent gouging charges, said that the Rent Brigade report “provided a potential starting point to investigations, which then had to be diligently investigated in order to determine whether a criminal offense occurred.” The statement said those investigations were ongoing.

Following the money

The list of most frequent offenders includes billionaire real estate tycoon and Trump associate Steven Witkoff, a former Real Estate Board of New York member who has recently been brokering nuclear deals with Iran and a ceasefire in Gaza as Trump’s Middle East envoy — and who endorsed the president’s plan for ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Witkoff’s firm was linked to 13 listings in the dataset, even more than corporate behemoths like AvalonBay and Greystar. One apartment owned by the Witkoff Group was listed 164% above the legally allowed limit, according to the report.

The Witkoff Group and AvalonBay did not return requests for comment. A Greystar spokesperson wrote, “I am still determining if Greystar will have comment on this, but in the meantime, I would point you to the article posted on the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles that does a full analysis of the report you cited.”

The spokesperson linked to a report by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles that does not dispute that any of the individual listings in the Rent Brigade report exceeded the threshold for price gouging, but says that, overall, rents decreased.

More damning, the Rent Brigade’s report found that the enforcers meant to be regulating rent gouging in the county — L.A. District Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman and California Attorney General Rob Bonta — received at least $302,000 in donations from the alleged rent gougers identified in the report. That’s according to public data researchers compiled from the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, the Los Angeles County Campaign Finance Portal and the California Secretary of State’s Power Search database.

Feldstein Soto alone received more than $150,000 in donations from landlords in the report, most of which came from Kilroy Realty Corporation. Kilroy, a multibillion-dollar real estate investment trust, is the second-worst offender on the list, owning three buildings in Los Angeles County that comprise more than 1,000 units in total, according to the report. The organization sent $150,000 to a political action committee to elect Feldstein Soto in 2022. Feldstein Soto did not return a request for comment on the donations or whether she would take action against Kilroy Realty.

Kilroy Realty also spent over $25,200 on the campaign of Los Angeles County district attorney Nathan Hochman and $1.5 million on a political action committee that attempted to repeal Measure ULA, a tax on real estate transactions that funds housing and homeless services.

When asked whether he would return the donations or take action against Kilroy, Hochman’s office said, “The donations you referenced came from individuals and companies that are legally permitted to contribute to political campaigns. In no way do such donations compromise the integrity of this office; any decisions on the culpability of individuals or corporations will be based strictly on the facts and the law.”

State District Attorney Rob Bonta, a Democrat who has fashioned himself as a champion for tenants and formed a “housing strike force” to address tenant issues, received $5,000 from corporate landlord Equity Residential, which is included in Rent Brigade’s list of likely offenders. In response to an inquiry about whether he plans to return the donation from Equity and whether Equity will be investigated for rent gouging, Bonta’s office responded with the following: “We share the public’s strong concerns regarding price gouging in the wake of the Los Angeles fires. We welcome tips and information from all sources — particularly existing or prospective tenants — and review listing information as part of our investigations. To protect their integrity, we’re unable to comment on, even to confirm or deny, any potential or ongoing investigations.”

When asked about the allegations of the report, a spokesperson for Equity Residential said, “Like others, we question the methodology used to compile the data. Equity Residential owns and manages more than 14,000 units in the Los Angeles market. In the first quarter of 2025, which would cover the period in which the anti-gouging legislation was enacted, our rents were up less than 2%.”

Toothless enforcement

Since Jan. 9, prosecutors have only charged nine landlords with rent gouging, which Rent Brigade calculated is less than 1% of the examples they found.

In April, Feldstein Soto filed a $62 million lawsuit against a group of landlords that her office accused of using multiple false identities to price gouge and violate the city’s short-term rental restrictions. Her office also filed a lawsuit against a venture capital–funded startup it accused of price gouging, with potential penalties of $100,000. Bonta’s office, in collaboration with Feldstein Soto’s office, filed charges against two real estate agents for rent gouging. Bonta’s office says it has sent over 700 warning letters to landlords and hotels engaged in price gouging.

L.A. County Attorney Hochman appeared at a press conference with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass in January at which he issued a fiery warning to rent gougers. “If you’ve taken no steps to remedy the violation that you’ve enacted, we will go ahead and prosecute you to the full extent of the law,” Hochman said in front of reporters as Mayor Bass nodded her head. “Not only will you be looking at criminal penalties, you will be looking at civil penalties, and as importantly, your name will get out there. Your company’s name will get out there. You will be publicly shamed.”

Yet Hochman’s office has not announced a single charge against rent gougers. (He has, however, charged people with looting and impersonating a firefighter during the fires.)

In a statement sent to Next City/Shelterforce, Hochman’s office said, “The Office’s clear and unequivocal message to price gougers is that they will not get away with taking advantage of wildfire victims and they will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.” Hochman’s office blamed the police department for the lack of charges, saying, “To date, while there are many pending investigations, law enforcement has not presented a case to our office to charge under California’s price gouging law (Penal Code [PC] § 396). Accordingly, our office has not filed any cases under PC § 396.” His office also said it only has jurisdiction over unincorporated areas of LA County or in cities without their own prosecutors.

Researcher Denton Cohen, who co-authored the report, says that prosecutors are missing a political opportunity by not going after some of the prolific rent gougers, which include Trump donors and even associates like Witkoff.

“Frankly, self-respecting elected officials in L.A. would be jumping at the opportunity to go after these guys,” Cohen says. “There would be a massive political reward for taking on these frankly cartoonishly greedy characters in the L.A. rental market. I can’t stress to you how low-hanging the fruit is for the city attorney and the district attorney.”

Policy protections

Newsom’s state of emergency will be in effect for one year. But the law states that rent gouging protections lapse 30 days after the emergency is declared. (Rents were, however, included in the extension of price controls to July 1.)

The Rent Brigade and tenant advocates object to this interpretation, saying that the protections should be in place for the entirety of the state of emergency. Bills have been introduced in the legislature that would do just that, as well as increase penalties for rent gouging. Assembly Bill 380 would establish that price gouging in all sectors is illegal during an emergency declaration and increases the penalty from a $10,000 fine to $25,000. It has 16 co-sponsors in the state assembly and the senate.

Another bill, SB368, was introduced May 5 and would require local prosecutors to partner with the California Department of Justice to fight price gouging, with the state reimbursing local costs. But it only has one sponsor, Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas.

Cohen said Rent Brigade is also working with the L.A. City Council to introduce a bill that would require the city attorney to share what they’re doing to enforce rent gouging laws.

There have been some policy protections for renters since the fires, including a temporary eviction moratorium. But that moratorium, which lapses in July, only applies to people whose income was directly impacted by the fires and who have documentation to prove it. And it only applies to people making less than 150% of the area median income who are enrolled in an income assistance program.

Cohen said that the moratorium is not widely invoked by renters because it puts a large administrative burden on them.

The state appears to have been caught off guard by the wildfires and prosecutors have been hesitant to enforce the price gouging regulations that are on the books. But Cohen feels the state should strengthen its enforcement now, as climate change will lead to more wildfires and more rent gouging.

“These sort of shocks to the rental market are not going to stop happening,” he says. “They’re only going to get more frequent.”

This post was originally published on Next City.