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los angeles fires
Landlord Doublespeak and the Rise of the 'Housing Provider'
What drives the preference of landlords to call themselves “housing providers” is a desire to euphemize the landlord-tenant relationship and to obscure some of its basic and most important features.
Jul 30, 2025
Landlords want to be called “housing providers.” Industry organizations in California, Washington, Rhode Island, and elsewhere are proudly claiming the label. Equal to this craving to be called “housing providers,” it seems, is the wish among landlords to no longer be called landlords. The term is antiquated, they say, and has a negative stigma that doesn’t reflect reality. The industry is not particularly secretive about these desires or the reasons behind them, which have to do with image and narrative.
The dictionary definition of landlord is precise enough, however, and, in fact, couldn’t be plainer: “The owner of property (such as land, houses, or apartments) that is leased or rented to another,” according to Merriam-Webster.com. The definition identifies the essential feature of any residential landlord—that they engage in a financial transaction to lease living space. This seems straightforward enough and noncontroversial. The motivation of the industry is thus not related to any mismatch between our common understanding of the word and its most essential attribute.
Instead, what drives the preference of landlords to call themselves “housing providers” is a type of Orwellian doublespeak intended to euphemize the landlord-tenant relationship and to obscure some of its basic and most important features. What does the phrase obscure? For one, it elides the basic extractive nature of landlording, the fact that landlords expect, in fact, rely upon the relationship to be monetarily profitable to them. This is the critical fact of landlording, that it is done in the main to make a profit.
Granted there are some instances of landlords renting to family members or others without expectations of profit, but these exceptions are merely that—exceptions. The English language routinely makes distinctions between services rendered for a fee and those provided on other bases. The difference between “housing provider” and landlord is the difference between a date and a paid escort or sex worker, it is the difference between the volunteer and the mercenary, between a financial gift and an interest-bearing loan. The English language is not unique in containing words that make clear the monetary exchange and profit that define some relationships. We use these words because the information they contain is consequential.
If the landlord industry truly wants to do something to burnish its public image, it might consider publicly rejecting or sanctioning members of its community who hiked rents in Los Angeles County by 20% in the aftermath of the fires of January 2025.
This attempt to obscure the profit motive in landlording is all the more problematic because those who would call themselves “housing providers” in one breath, will, in the next, argue against rent stabilization, tenant protections, and other regulations on the basis that these policies make their business unprofitable, or less profitable than they would prefer. This is wanting it both ways—attempting to hide the profit motive while simultaneously insisting on it.
“Housing provider” is also meant to conceal the power dynamics of the landlord-tenant relationship, one in which landlords hold the privileges associated with property ownership, the ability to define the terms of acceptable behavior and limits of property use available to tenants, and the ultimate power of eviction. Moreover, at a time when corporate landlords are extending their reach into the market, and we see the spread of price-fixing algorithms to maximize rents and profit, AI-driven tenant screening algorithms to perform background checks, and greater concentration and market power at the industry scale, the insistence on the phrase “housing provider” is an obvious attempt at happy-faced distraction.
Just as important as the attempt to disguise profit motive and landlord power is the effort to dodge whatever negative connotations attach to the term landlord. “Housing provider” is meant to avoid images of rapaciousness and greed, or to conjure images of benevolence and even charity, or to do both. The use of the phrase is, in other words, an attempt, acknowledged by the industry, to control a narrative. As such it is a political act, an effort to persuade and to establish a particular understanding of who landlords are and what they do, all in the service of influencing public debate and public policy. This is not to argue that tenants don’t also try to influence the public narrative; of course they do. It is merely to note that this phrase, “housing provider,” is a calculated bid to construct meaning in a highly contested policy area and it needs to be recognized as such. Those who choose to adopt the phrase choose to adopt the narrative.
If the landlord industry truly wants to do something to burnish its public image, it might consider publicly rejecting or sanctioning members of its community who hiked rents in Los Angeles County by 20% in the aftermath of the fires of January 2025. It might help to police property owners who evicted tenants during the pandemic in violation of federal and local laws. It might take action to address sexual harassment of low-income women by landlords, or address any of a number of discriminatory or exploitative practices that haunt the industry. Those wishing to hide behind the “housing provider” label will argue that not all landlords are bad, which is of course true. They will say only a portion of landlords engage in the practices that give landlord its stigma. But, if the only response by the industry is to stop using the word landlord, it betrays a self-serving concern that does little to improve negative public perceptions and, in fact, largely confirms them.
We don’t call Exxon an “oil provider,” nor do we call GM an “automobile provider.” We don’t even call the corner mom-and-pop store a “grocery provider.” There is no reason to accept the kind of politically motivated doublespeak behind the rise of “housing provider.”
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Wildfire Survivors 'Deserve Better,' Advocates Say as California Approves State Farm Rate Hike
Regulators like California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara "need to hold insurance giants like State Farm accountable to paying out what they owe, not reward them with rate hikes," said one watchdog.
May 14, 2025
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Tuesday adopted a judge's ruling allowing State Farm General, the state's largest home insurer, the ability to temporarily hike insurance rates following devastating fires that ravaged the Los Angeles area in January. The decision drew rebuke from watchdog groups, with one organization calling the hike "unjustified."
In February, State Farm sought a rate increase of 22% for homeowners and 15% for renters after the Los Angeles-area fires, citing the need to protect the "fragile California insurance market."
After conducting a hearing in April, an administrative law judge issued a proposed order on Monday, approving an emergency rate increase of 17% for homeowners line, down from the 22% the company had requested, and a 15% increase for renters. The emergency rate increase will go into effect June 1, according to the commissioner's office.
Carmen Balber, executive director of the group Consumer Watchdog, which has been active in opposing the State Farm rate hikes, said Tuesday that the decision "is a great disappointment" that forces "consumers to pay now" but allows "State Farm to wait months before having to show its math."
Consumer Watchdog argued before the administrative law judge that State Farm had failed to put forward adequate justification for the rate increases, and that the issue should go before a full rate hearing.
Lara said on Tuesday that State Farm will still need to justify its financial condition at a full hearing. According to Consumer Watchdog, that hearing is tentatively scheduled for October.
"State Farm policyholders, many of whom are struggling to get their claims paid by the company after the Los Angeles fires, are now facing double-digit rate hikes," Balber also said.
Lara gave sign off on the rate hikes despite calls for his office to probe complaints around the insurance giant's handling of claims made by survivors of the Los Angeles area fires, according to CalMatters. Fire victims have accused State Farm of denying or delaying claims, and had advocated for Lara to reject the rate hike request.
"The survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires deserve better. Their stories of financial and emotional devastation after fighting with State Farm are heartbreaking and are an indictment of the state of the insurance industry," said Rick Morris, insurance campaigner with the watchdog group Public Citizen's climate program, on Tuesday.
"Regulators like Commissioner Lara need to hold insurance giants like State Farm accountable to paying out what they owe, not reward them with rate hikes," he added.
Public Citizen also highlighted accusations leveled by Consumer Watchdog in October of 2024 that State Farm had boosted profits for its parent company, State Farm Mutual, at the expense of policyholders.
As part of the ruling, according to the commissioner's office, State Farm will obtain $400 million from its parent company to boost its solvency and will also refrain from implementing some nonrenewals through the end of 2025.
State Farm stopped writing any new policies in May 2023, and last spring the company announced it would not renew plans for tens of thousands of homeowners—though it paused nonrenewals in Los Angeles County following the January wildfires.
Approval for the interim hike comes after State Farm General last summer asked for a 30% rate increase for its homeowners, a 52% rate increase for renters, and a 36% rate increase for condominium owners. Separately, in December 2023 it was approved for a 20% increase for homeowners and condominium owners.
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Trump's NOAA Will Stop Tracking Costliest Climate Disasters
"Their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem," said one meteorologist.
May 08, 2025
On the heels of the news that higher-than-average temperatures continued globally in April, one of the United States' top science agencies announced Thursday that it will no longer update a database that tracks climate disasters that cause billions of dollars in damage.
As of Thursday, the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) website was replaced with a message saying there have been no such events in 2025 through April 8.
That flies in the face of an analysis by the National Centers for Environmental Information, which has maintained the database and said before it was taken down that six to eight billion-dollar climate disasters have happened so far this year, including the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January and caused an estimated $150 billion in damage.
The World Weather Attribution said in late January that planetary heating, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, caused weather conditions in Southern California that made the fires 35% more likely.
Hundreds of people have been laid off from NOAA in recent weeks as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, has pushed to slash government spending, and those who have lost their jobs include scientists who helped maintain the database.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster told The Washington Post that in addition to staff changes, "evolving priorities" were also partially behind the retiring of the database, which will now show disasters that occurred only between 1980-2024.
Between 2020-24, the number of billion-dollar disasters averaged 23 per year, compared to just a few per year in the 1980s.
"This Trump administration move is the dumbest magic trick possible: covering their eyes and pretending the problem will go away if they just stop counting the costs. Households across the country already have to count these costs at their kitchen table as they budget for higher insurance costs and home repairs. Families and retirees dipping into their savings or going bankrupt to recover from wildfires and hurricanes know what disasters cost," said Carly Fabian, senior insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen's Climate Program. "Hiding the national tallies will only undermine our ability to prepare and respond to the climate crisis. Deleting the data will exacerbate the devastating delays in acting to slow climate change, and the impacts it is having on property insurance and housing costs."
NOAA's "evolving priorities" have also included decommissioning other datasets, including one tracking marine environments and one tracking ocean currents.
Without NOAA's Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, Jeremy Porter, co-founder of the climate risk financial modeling firm First Street, told CNN that "replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."
"What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and nonpublic data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," he said.
Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist who resigned from an Iowa news station after receiving threats for his frank, science-based coverage of climate disasters, said the retiring of the database suggests the Trump administration is "okay with spending billions of dollars on disasters."
"Every dollar that we spend on mitigation or adaptation saves $13 in recovery costs," said Gloninger. "But their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem."
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