“In the beginning, it was like, ‘Oh, thank goodness, our house is standing, but this is hard to celebrate because everybody around us lost their house,’” Lambert says. “Then as the time went by, every day you’re realizing there’s more and more unknowns. It’s not as simple as, ‘There was a fire, it’s gone, clean your house, go back.’ It’s so much more complicated.”

L.A. tenants have one advantage that renters in Hawaiʻi did not: a spreadsheet cataloging alleged incidents of price-gouging compiled by tenant activists with The Rent Brigade, a new collective organized by Chelsea Kirk and Philip Meyer.

Of the 17 people who died, all lived west of North Lake Avenue.

When the Eaton fire erupted beneath a Southern California Edison transmission tower just after 6 p.m.,