Heroes and villains of the LA wildfires: Jason Oppenheimer from Selling Sunset stands up for renters
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As wildfires continue to ravage Los Angeles, a new threat has emerged to the 100,000 people who have been forced to flee their homes: landlords. With some 12,000 structures burnt to the ground and many more too smoke damaged or imperiled to return to, desperate families looking for temporary homes are facing rocketing rents from unscrupulous agents and property owners. Asking rents have been put up by as much as 64 per cent since the disaster, per a report in the New York Times. But an unlikely folk hero has emerged: Jason Oppenheim, star of Selling Sunset.
Price gouging, where the cost of basic necessities are artificially raised following a natural disaster, is both morally repugnant and illegal in the state of California. But that hasn’t stopped avaricious property owners hiking up the prices to take advantage of desperate people. As the co-owner of the luxury real estate business at the heart of a glossy reality TV show, you might assume that Oppenheim would be on the side of the chancing landlords. But you’d be wrong. Oppenheim has come out swinging at those who would try to profit from the devastation.
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“We’re having landlords take advantage of the situation,” Oppenheim told Laura Kuenssberg on BBC News. The real estate agent reported that he had sent a client to a rental home advertised at $13,000 a month (£10,600), only for the landlord to demand $23,000 (£18,700) a month.
Los Angeles was already in the grips of a terrible housing crisis before this apocalyptic natural disaster, and the opportunity to take advantage is clearly too tempting for people to resist. “There are price gouging laws in California that are just being ignored right now,” Oppenheim pointed out (under Californian state law, prices should not be raised more than 10 per cent above their pre-disaster levels). “This isn’t the time to be taking advantage of the situation.”.
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