The Phantom Housing Crisis - Spencer Pratt

Spencer Pratt

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The Phantom Housing Crisis<br>LA is Losing Population. Does it Really Need More Housing?

Spencer Pratt<br>Apr 01, 2026

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Los Angeles is a city of misdiagnosed ills. Tent cities are romanticized as “diverse street life”, preventable routine wildfires are dubbed “climate emergencies”, the drug zombie epidemic is euphemized as merely “individuals experiencing homelessness”. It should come as no surprise, then, that the housing affordability woes in Los Angeles have been misdiagnosed, badly, and in a way that obscures the solution behind a cacophony of YIMBY twitter crash-outs.<br>For years, we’ve been misled that the housing issue is a supply & demand problem. Activists, legislators, commie journalists, and pandering political candidates universally scream “WE NEED TO BUILD MORE HOUSING”. It has taken on the form of a mindless religious cult mantra, with the expected unconscious fervor and zeal in tow.

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I had a front-row seat to this BUILD MORE HOUSING crusade when my home and my whole town burned to moondust last January. Before the flames had even finished consuming all my life’s belongings, Sacramento politicians were frothing at the mouth, circling the smoking corpse of my hometown like vultures, eager to pave over the historic singe-family neighborhood with high-density housing. Even as the bodies of the 12 fatalities were still smoldering behind him, Gavin Newsom infamously wiggled with an alacritous shimmy as he described his plan to auction off our birthright to developers. Only a Sacramento politician could look at the chaotic evacuation logjam on the Palisades Fire and think “you know what would make this mess even better? 50,000 more people.”<br>Nonetheless, the rent IS too damn high, and I actually agree we need to build more housing, just not in all caps. Critically, however, it is important to note that more housing is not the panacea they want you to believe it is. It’s actually a myth to say we have a supply problem in Los Angeles (well, it’s true in the Palisades). Recent reporting has showed that residents are fleeing LA County in hordes. Last year, we saw the largest population decline in the country, losing 54,000 residents, and that’s a continuation of an ongoing trend, not an anomaly. We all see what’s been happening. No matter how many beach pics we post on twitter, we all know that people are fed up with this city and they are leaving. But the more important detail that got lost in the headline is…if people are fleeing LA, that means we have thousands of vacancies, and they’re not being filled.<br>So why is the rent still so damn high, and how do we fix it? Can we? Before we default to the lazy answer and simply blame the “greedy landlords”, we must address ALL of the line items on property owners’ balance sheets if we want to lower housing prices. We cannot simultaneously mandate that owners provide housing for below-market prices, while also forcing them to shoulder the financial risk of intractable squatters who can quickly become a $100K legal albatross, due to the city and state’s absurd “squatter’s rights” policies.

Take South LA property owner, Jose Casares. In 3 years, he evicted squatters from 3 units. One family broke in, stayed nearly a year, and walked away only after sheriff lockout. Damages and lost rent? 6 figures. Another building owner in Huntington Park dropped $100,000 fixing fires, stripped AC units, and trashed property while the city shrugged. Just a few weeks ago, squatters burned down their home while cooking meth. The fire also burned down the neighbor’s home, with their pets trapped inside. The neighbors had been repeatedly pleading for the LAPD and the city to do something about the squatters, but Karen Basura did nothing, and the poor couple had to watch 3 of their beloved dogs burn alive.

These aren’t outliers. After 30 days in California, squatters gain full tenant rights, and they can hold your apartment hostage for a ransom. Professional squatters now demand $15K–$35K “cash for keys” just to leave. This is theft.<br>When a tenant decides to steal an apartment, the property owner is not only losing money on lost rent payments, but they are forced to rack up legal expenses as they navigate an onerous eviction process that is fundamentally stacked against them. The result of this broken system is that many housing providers would rather lose money by leaving an apartment entirely vacant, than risk the costs of dealing with a delinquent and unscrupulous tenant.<br>This creates an artificial scarcity of housing, and an intractable financial burden for the landlord. If every housing provider must factor in a $100K legal “squatter removal” fund with every unit, no amount of housing construction can remove that financial pressure on the supply side, and these costs will be passed down to the tenants, in perpetuity. We cannot expect property...