About a week after the Los Angeles wildfires began, it seemed safe to sleep without a go bag packed. The smoke had dissipated, and even though everyone knew the air-quality sensors couldn’t detect chunks of ash containing asbestos and arsenic, breathing felt easier. In an attempt at normalcy, I crept out to the gym. Donation boxes overflowed onto the lobby floor. The QR code to a fundraiser for a front-desk employee who lost her home in Altadena was taped on every surface — one of hundreds of GoFundMes I would see over the coming weeks.

Over the bridge in fashionable Silver Lake and Los Feliz, I saw the lights climbing up the hills and wondered how many of those apartments sat empty. I thought of the displaced gym employee, who was staying with a friend. My sister-in-law was hosting her ninety-year-old grandparents, whose Altadena house had burned down. My wife’s coworker was driving around looking for “For Rent” signs with his one- and three-year-olds in the backseat. I didn’t know where the artist I’d met at a wedding was staying, but his Instagram said he’d lost nearly all his life’s work. As I looked up at the sparkling lights, I pictured all of these people sheltered in immaculate luxury apartments, breathing clean filtered air while the ash of their lives blanketed the city.

Los Angeles has 93,000 empty units. A large percentage of them are kept empty on purpose through speculative vacancy, investors deliberately keeping units empty while waiting for property values to rise. Over 46,000 of those units are held in a state of nonmarket vacancy, meaning not listed for rent or sale at all, while many more are listed at out-of-reach prices for the same essential purpose. Of units on the market, the highest vacancy rates are concentrated in luxury buildings charging unaffordable rents. The most affordable units, on the other hand, have near-zero vacancy. The contrast reveals the brokenness of a system of financialized housing, where homes are put in the service of wealth accumulation rather than sheltering people.