How much does it cost to rent a furnished home in Bel Air?

It depends when you’re asking. One such home was listed in the fall for $15,900 a month. That’s already a brain-melting amount of money to spend on rent. It works out to nearly $200,000 a year. If you want to rent it now, though, it’s $29,500 — an 86 percent increase.

Trey White is a real estate agent from Pacific Palisades. He told the New York Times he’s seen an “unfathomable amount of illegal price gouging” since the Los Angeles fires started.

California law prevents landlords from raising rent during an emergency by more than 10 percent. Another agent, Samira Tapia, is trying to find a new home for a family whose house burned to the ground in Altadena. She found that “out of more than 400 listings in the Central Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley areas” on the listing service she uses, “about 100” have raised their rent beyond what the law allows.

Tenants have the option of reporting the gouging to the California attorney general’s office and then pursuing the case, but most won’t. Landlords are presumably counting on families desperate to find new housing simply paying up without making a fuss. The slim threat of enforcement just isn’t enough to overwhelm landlords’ basic economic incentives.

Disaster price gouging is just one of the ways that the basic dynamics of capitalist housing markets are making a bad situation worse in Los Angeles. As Katya Schwenk wrote, one of the reasons the disaster was so severe in the first place is that real estate developers have “pushed to build ever more homes in zones designated as ‘very high risk’ for wildfires.” As with rent-gouging landlords, the basic market incentives of these developers have overwhelmed every other consideration. The result has been urban sprawl “encroaching further and further into fire-prone wildlands.”

Meanwhile, as wildfire risk increases, for-profit fire insurers are increasingly cutting their losses. In the now largely destroyed neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades, for example, State Farm canceled 1,600 policies last July. It dropped a couple thousand more elsewhere in Los Angeles. Some homeowners and renters have opted to pay as much as four times more for less coverage from California’s fire insurer of last resort, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, but many homes that have burned down since January 7 were probably uninsured.

Writing at the libertarian magazine Reason, Christian Britschgi argues that the core problem is that state regulation doesn’t give insurers “the flexibility to charge higher premiums to offset their risk.” In other words, they might stick around if they were allowed to bleed consumers by jacking up premiums ever higher and higher as wildfire risk increases.

Perhaps so. But this is itself a pretty terrible option for the people left footing the bill. The more basic problem in all of these cases is with the basic dynamics of private housing markets where developers, landlords, and insurers have every incentive to ruthlessly pursue interests that often clash hard with the interests of the people who actually live in these homes. That’s bad enough in normal times. And it makes emergency situations like this one far worse than they need to be.

Any society needs to find ways to provide housing — but there’s no law of nature dictating that this function has to be assigned to profit-seeking market actors. The socially necessary function of minimizing the risk that people whose homes are vulnerable to being wiped out in natural disasters has to be carried out. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be carried out by the likes of State Farm.

What would housing look like in a socialist future where there was no such thing as a “real estate lobby,” housing density could be managed in a far more careful and deliberate way, and we didn’t have a class of landlords inserting themselves as literally rent-seeking middlemen between people who build homes and people who live in them?

It would be foolish to claim to have all the details about what a system could look like worked out in advance. Certainly, the history of Soviet-style state socialism, where urban housing was regularly in short supply and multiple families often had to share apartments, isn’t inspiring. Western social democracies provide better (albeit less radical) models. In Sweden, for example, half of renters live in municipally owned housing. In Vienna, Austria, that number is 62 percent, owing to the leadership of socialists in the interwar period. (As one Viennese social housing resident put it, “We have an old idea here that not only rich people should live in good conditions.”)

In the United States, we’re used to thinking of public housing as economically segregated housing for the very poor (and thus as centers for the social ills that accompany extreme poverty), but examples like Sweden and Vienna usefully show that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can and should build public housing open to everyone. Nor should such social democratic models be seen as the outermost limit of what’s possible. Surely it is not beyond the capacity of the human race to figure out how to do without landlords.

Meanwhile, what’s clear is that the basic pathologies of privatized housing markets have grim consequences at a time of heightened need. To return to the first example, regulatory fixes like capping rent increases in an emergency simply don’t get the job done when the incentives are this strong to break the law and the chances of getting caught are so slim.

A far better approach would be for the city of Los Angeles to buy up buildings itself, using its power of eminent domain if necessary, and start offering a public option in housing to as many Angelenos as possible. It would be a sharp change in course. But with thousands of people freshly thrown into the streets by the fires and private landlords and realtors ready to take them for everything they’ve got, there’s never been a better time for the city to try something new.