Red-Tape Labyrinth

The volume of GoFundMes coming out of the Los Angeles fires is at turns touching and troubling. We’re witnessing firsthand how crisis bridges the gaps between isolated lives. But we also see what journalist Alissa Quart calls “the dystopian social safety net” — an upswell of solidarity that fills the cracks of a broken system, performing tasks of social stabilization that should be handled by formal democratic institutions and temporarily concealing their dysfunction.

There’s something Darwinian about them too. It’s awkward to watch as some fundraisers perform better than others, even though they all address the same crisis of sudden homelessness. The difference seems to reflect a magnification of preexisting inequalities, with success dependent on tech-savviness, size and wealth of social networks, and language proficiency. Plus, most people don’t have them at all. Many elderly residents aren’t familiar with online fundraising, and some people just have a cultural allergy to asking for help. The result is that the people already best-positioned to ride out a catastrophe are getting the most assistance.

In a well-functioning society, these fundraisers would be redundant. So too would the benevolence of corporations like Hilton and Airbnb, which have donated free short-term stays to fire victims. Over seven thousand people have sought shelter through these and other corporate programs organized by the nonprofit 211 LA. But their stays are too brief for many. Airbnb caps their donation at seven nights, and Hilton donated 20,000 nights total for all 10,000 displaced households.

Meanwhile, the disaster insurance system is a patchwork nightmare. Market consolidation over several decades had left home insurance in the hands of a few major companies; due to concerns about disasters related to climate change, those companies have spent the last few years declining to renew plans in high-risk areas, including dropping more than 100,000 Los Angeles homeowners. The remaining insurance plans were too expensive. As a result, many California residents have gone uninsured or turned to the insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, which saw a 123 percent increase in policyholders from 2020 to 2024 and provides worse payouts.

Insurance is projected to cover only $20 billion of the total $135 billion in fire damages. For the lucky insured few, the payout process is expected to be a long ordeal in which policyholders will have to fight for adequate results. The uninsured will have to make do with a $43,600 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant.

Consequently, the more formal and putatively reliable forms of relief pose problems similar to online fundraising. Accessing public aid is needlessly complex and privileges people already adept at jumping through hoops. While relief centers offer basics like water and cots, longer-term assistance is buried in bureaucracy. FEMA offers $770 to cover immediate necessities for the fire victims. Accessing it requires completing an application process so sensitive that misspellings will be met with rejection. Likewise applicants for the $43,600 grant are often met with denials that only 3 percent of them choose to appeal.

Disaster funds frequently go unclaimed due to convoluted rules, means-testing, and arbitrary deadlines. Governments even budget for this failure rate, a cynical practice I call “austerity by paperwork.” Beyond FEMA, relief often comes in complex packages like reimbursements and loans. The largest such loan is the Small Business Administration (SBA) disaster loan for up to $100,000. The SBA loan program has a high decline rate. The others offer vastly smaller sums. Not only does the process favor those who can navigate red tape, but people can spend years trying to scrape together enough to offset losses and still never come close.

It doesn’t have to be this hard. There are much simpler and more direct ways to furnish aid — but they require taking stock of what people lack and whether a given society has the missing resources at its disposal. This, in turn, requires thinking about society’s resources as collective assets. For example, how many homes do we altogether have to shelter people in right now? We’re not used to thinking this way under capitalism, a system predicated on private property rights uber alles.

A better system would start with a simple premise: we have more than enough homes to shelter everyone displaced by the fires, and it’s entirely feasible to put them to use. The city would first identify eligible properties by focusing on units that have been vacant for six months or longer, particularly those owned by corporate investors. Priority would go to luxury developments with high vacancy rates and units deliberately kept off the market for speculation. Property owners would receive “just compensation” from the government, and tenants would live in the properties rent-free for a designated amount of time as they rebuild their lives.

The qualification process for displaced residents would be straightforward: proof of primary residence in the burn zones and verification of displacement status through FEMA or local fire authorities. Unlike the labyrinthine processes for other forms of aid, this would be a simple matching program: connecting empty units with displaced families based on household size and location preferences, with priority given to elderly residents, families with children, and those lacking insurance coverage.

We don’t have to watch aid money float down a thousand tributaries and evaporate. We don’t have to dismiss straightforward solutions just because they contradict wealthy people’s interests. If the idea sounds radical, it’s only because its simplicity is uncommon in a society accustomed to contorting itself around private property rights.

Keep Calm and Expropriate

Even capitalist societies have, at times, recognized the necessity of redirecting private property toward public use in moments of crisis. The British requisition scheme during World War II stands as a remarkable example, transforming aristocratic country estates into wartime dormitories and relocating hundreds of thousands of urban residents to previously vacant properties.

Under the Defence Regulations of 1939, the British government assumed authority over vacant properties nationwide, ultimately taking control of more than 113,000 buildings for the war effort. The crown jewels of this initiative were the aristocratic country estates — sprawling manors that had long stood as monuments to class inequality. These bastions of private wealth were converted into wartime hospitals, military barracks, and emergency schools.

When the government implemented its voluntary evacuation program for urban youth, many found themselves whisked from Britain’s working-class neighborhoods to its grandest estates. Children from the industrial city of Croydon, for example, were brought to the requisitioned Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, owned by the Rothschild family. Waddesdon was one of the most opulent residences in England, with crystal chandeliers, porcelain finery, ornate tapestries, and exotic curios in every corner. Likewise, the stately and imposing Brocket Hall, long home to royals and prime ministers and, at that precise time, a Nazi sympathizer, was requisitioned as a maternity home for women from the working-class East End of London fleeing the inevitable blitzkrieg.

The scope of the program was vast: all told, the government requisitioned nearly 15 million acres of land. In the first years of the British scheme, property owners engaged in obstructionist behavior, abruptly selling property and even faking tenancies in order to get out of requisition. The government responded by tightening regulations. Rather than simple seizure, the government established a compensation framework — similar to the “just compensation” provision of eminent domain in the United States. Property owners naturally complained that they were paid too little, but the government ensured the public that the exchanges had been fair, given the circumstances.

A memo from Winston Churchill’s office read:

The Prime Minister’s attention has been drawn to complaints that requisitioning powers are often exercised harshly. He regards it as of the utmost importance that the national war effort should not be impaired by any suspicion that the wide powers necessarily entrusted to Government Departments are exercised without due consideration, or in any way inflict unnecessary hardship.

This history even offers a direct parallel to postfire Los Angeles. Vacant homes in London and other major cities were requisitioned specifically to house victims of urban bombing campaigns such as the London Blitz. During the war, 71,493 empty residential buildings were requisitioned and allocated to “people made homeless by enemy action.” An additional 51,941 were added in the years after the war, during which widespread bombing-related homelessness persisted; emergency shelter continued to be necessary as the return of servicemen intensified the housing shortage. The units were equipped with unclaimed furniture and appliances found in damaged and empty buildings, along with any other furnishings the government could get its hands on.

All in all, the United Kingdom’s urban requisition program was responsible for rehousing roughly 100,000 families, an estimated 325,000 individuals.

The 1950s and ’60s saw a process of derequisition, which was complex and had multiple possible outcomes. A common result was statutory tenancy, arrived at through negotiation between tenants, owners, and the government. Under this arrangement, the government would release the property back into the care of the original owners, who would collect rent from tenants, who had special protections in place to guard their rights to stay in place. Other outcomes included property takeovers by local authorities, which often resulted in tenants staying in place, or in some cases eviction, which was typically accomplished by owners moving into the property themselves. Likewise, whenever tenants left of their own accord, the government usually released the properties to the original owners.

The British program was predicated on the idea, accepted as common sense, that it’s sometimes fair to subordinate private-property interests to public needs. The requisitioning plan would never have been attempted if the government had been unwilling to acknowledge that leaving hundreds of thousands homeless while habitable buildings sat empty was both morally indefensible and socially destructive. Nor would it have been undertaken if the government were too afraid of complaints from property owners to take decisive action.

When we dare to challenge the sanctity of private property ownership, practical solutions to collective problems can become not merely possible but self-evident. If it seems hard to imagine such events transpiring in the United States, be advised that they already have, albeit on a smaller scale. To give only one example, during World War I, 141 vacant properties were requisitioned in Washington, DC, to house workers aiding the war effort. According to an official report, these properties included houses sitting empty for sale and “dwellings used only occasionally by wealthy persons.”

War, of course, is not the only occasion on which a society might decide to pool its resources for a common purpose.

Requisition Los Angeles

In modern-day, postfire Los Angeles, the city can and should use eminent domain to requisition vacant units for the public good. The fires are as devastating to their victims as the London Blitz was to its victims, and the solution should be commensurate in kind and scale.

Officials could choose the 10,000 most reasonable units to take over. It could cover the fire victims with units kept in nonmarket vacancy. Corporate investors — not mom-and-pop landlords experiencing tenant turnover — control 67 percent of all residential units in the city and are responsible for virtually all of the city’s speculative vacancy. These investors use homes that should be sheltering people as simple instruments to build wealth, gaming the housing market at everyone else’s expense. Eminent domain requires “just compensation,” so the owners of those properties would be paid. For the government, this would be a more direct way of allocating relief funds.

If we don’t act, the consequences will extend far beyond the fire victims themselves. Some thirty thousand displaced people are about to enter a housing market that just lost ten thousand units, while investors continue to keep tens of thousands more deliberately empty. This sudden spike in demand will drive rents even higher across the city, intensifying a housing crisis that was already crushing average Angelenos.

The math is simple and brutal: More people competing for fewer homes means escalating costs for everyone. Meanwhile, corporate landlords will likely see this as an opportunity to raise rents even further, using the disaster to justify price hikes that will long outlast the emergency. They’ve already shown their hand — as the fires still smoldered in the Palisades and Altadena, illegal price gouging spread through the city. The effects of whatever real estate interests do next will be felt by every renter and homebuyer in Los Angeles for years to come.

Real estate interests would no doubt protest a requisition plan. Property owners might resist it through various strategic maneuvers, which could include creating shell companies to obscure ownership, fabricating claims of property use, challenging regulations in court, and transferring properties between associates to frustrate enforcement efforts. They would also probably flex their political muscle, threatening to withdraw campaign funding and bankroll opposition candidates. But power doesn’t make them right, and their interests aren’t synonymous with those of Los Angeles.

Wartime Britain didn’t have online fundraising. Even if they had, it would have been no substitute for a massive requisitioning program that used the legitimacy of government to confront the power of private property and compel emergency redistribution. We can’t rely on crowdfunding to address a crisis of this magnitude. We need to harness this collective solidaristic energy and direct it through our public institutions — the only entities with enough reach and authority to ensure aid reaches everyone equitably.

Los Angeles faces a choice between guarding empty units or serving the people who live here. The fires have made this choice starker and more urgent, but it was always there. We have the legal precedent, the moral imperative, and the collective power. All we lack now is the courage to act on the axiom that homes should house people, not sit empty as speculative assets.