Eighteen months after the Eaton Fire tore through the hills above Pasadena, Gil Barel still hasn’t been able to move back into the apartment she has called home for nearly a decade.
Her building didn’t burn, but thick smoke settled into it for days during the January 2025 firestorm. Before bringing her two children — one in college, one 12 years old — back inside, Barel wanted assurance the unit was truly safe. An independent test she paid for turned up toxic residue. Now she’s waiting on additional testing her landlord must conduct under a new California law.
Her landlord did have the apartment cleaned back in March, but Barel says the job was surface-level at best. She later found personal belongings tucked behind furniture and under the sofa — evidence, she said, that floors and walls were never properly scrubbed.
“The issue is that I have no control,” Barel said. “It really depends on the conversation between my landlord and their insurance company. If the landlord does the minimum, or if they don’t feel the need to fight or be insistent on certain things, then it’s not going to happen.”
Barel’s situation reflects a broader truth about California’s property insurance market: its stability — or lack thereof — doesn’t just affect homeowners. Renters, who make up roughly 44% of the state’s population, feel the ripple effects too, whether through rent hikes, housing shortages, or delays in rebuilding after disaster strikes.
This November, Californians will choose a new insurance commissioner, a position expected to play a significant role in both the recovery from last year’s devastating Los Angeles County fires and the broader health of the state’s insurance market.
Barel carries her own renters policy, which costs her $114 a year thanks to a multi-policy discount. So far, her insurer has paid out $6,000 in loss-of-use coverage — money meant to cover extra living expenses for displaced tenants — along with $2,100 toward damaged personal property. She recently completed a full inventory of her belongings, which she plans to submit toward her policy’s $35,000 cap for personal items.
“I was stuck for a long time,” she said. “It’s extremely overwhelming. There are a lot of personal things. These are our stories. This is our life.”
Her renters policy didn’t cover the cost of hiring an industrial hygienist to test her unit — a step she took on her own. That testing found elevated levels of lithium, chromium and other heavy metals, likely tied to smoke and ash from the fire. Because the blaze burned through the wildland-urban interface, the report noted, smoke in such fires often carries a more toxic mix of chemicals and particulates than typical structure fires. The hygienist recommended further testing and a deeper cleaning.
After enlisting help from the city of Pasadena to pressure her landlord, Barel is hopeful she’ll soon be able to leave the rental unit in Lincoln Heights where she’s been staying since the fire. FEMA has been covering that temporary housing, but that assistance is scheduled to run out in October, adding urgency to her situation. Throughout it all, she has continued paying rent on her original apartment.
“It’s not a possibility for me to move elsewhere,” she said. “We have rent control. It was perfect for the kids when we moved in. It had a courtyard; it was near the schools; everything.”
In nearby Altadena, which absorbed the worst of the Eaton Fire’s destruction, tenants made up 22% of households, and more than a third of the rental market operated under rent control, according to research from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute. Researchers found that renter households in Altadena generally earned far less than homeowner households before the fire — and were more vulnerable to seeing what should have been temporary displacement turn into long-term housing instability.
Renters insurance
California doesn’t mandate renters insurance, though many landlords require tenants to carry their own policies.
Emily Rogan, senior program officer with the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, urges renters to get coverage precisely because of situations like Barel’s.
“Renters insurance buys you a deep breath as you think about where to go next,” Rogan said, noting how many difficult decisions displaced renters face after a disaster.
She also pointed to a shifting political landscape around disaster aid. “In the current political climate, there’s a trend where FEMA declarations are not as frequent as they used to be,” she said — meaning less federal assistance may be available when disaster strikes.
With inflation driving up the cost of replacing nearly everything, Rogan said renters insurance remains valuable “even if you fall under the camp of ‘Oh, my stuff’s not worth much.'”
Insurance’s ripple effects on rent and housing supply
Interviews with an insurance broker, an affordable-housing operator and several landlords revealed a mixed and often frustrating picture of California’s insurance market, which continues to strain under wildfire risk, rising litigation costs and insurers pulling back from writing new commercial policies.
Robert Guerrero, an insurance broker based in Madera County, said Mercury Insurance has resumed offering new policies in several counties — though not in the areas where his clients are located. Some property owners are turning to non-admitted carriers, insurers not licensed or backed by the state, which means policyholders bear more risk if the company fails. The California Department of Insurance maintains a public list of these so-called surplus-line insurers, and customers who choose to buy from one must sign a disclosure acknowledging the added risk.
“It’s still very dicey out there,” said Guerrero, whose firm handles homeowner, auto, commercial and life insurance policies.
Mike Placido, who owns four rental units in San Gabriel and a duplex in Alhambra, spoke with CalMatters two years ago about how rising insurance costs were squeezing landlords and tenants alike. Since then, he said, premium increases have slowed to a more manageable pace.
“It’s not causing me to raise rents as dramatically as I did before,” Placido said. “I guess the market has stabilized.”
He still carries a couple of policies through State Farm, but relies on non-admitted carriers for the rest — a situation that leaves him uneasy.
“There’s some aspect of safety when you’re going with a big company,” he said. “You don’t know if a smaller insurance company will be around long term.”
Uwe Karbenk, co-owner of a 33-unit apartment complex in San Bernardino, said his outlook hasn’t improved much. His premiums dipped slightly last year but have since climbed back to where they were two years ago. He raised rents in 2024, held them steady in 2025, and plans another increase this year.
Karbenk said he’s invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in electrical upgrades and a new roof for the building — improvements that, so far, haven’t translated into lower premiums.
For fire coverage specifically, he said insurers are scrutinizing properties far more closely. “They really check the building and they will write you up for stuff they don’t like. They call it recommendations, but it’s a stipulation. You need to do it, otherwise you risk cancellation of insurance.”
His takeaway: “Repairs are so much more expensive and replacement costs are so much higher. There’s no way around paying much more for insurance.”
Affordable housing developers are feeling similar pressure. Little Tokyo Service Center, a Los Angeles-based community development nonprofit that manages more than 1,000 affordable housing units across the region, has watched its insurance costs balloon in recent years.
Between 2023 and 2024, the organization’s annual insurance bill jumped from roughly $800,000 to $2.7 million, according to Erich Nakano, the group’s former executive director and current director of special projects. Deductibles that once ranged from $10,000 to $50,000 climbed past $100,000.
To cope, the organization has had to dip into its financial reserves, since raising rents significantly isn’t an option for affordable housing tenants. Last year, Little Tokyo Service Center joined an insurance captive — a self-insurance pool made up of roughly 40 organizations nationwide, including for-profit real estate firms, banding together to share risk.
“It’s an existential crisis,” Nakano said. “We can’t sustain these levels of insurance premiums.”
For the record: Barel currently resides in Lincoln Heights, not Altadena.
Original source: CalMatters
