The displacement caused by the recent Los Angeles–area fires has renewed attention on price gouging in rental housing. Some landlords were accused of increasing their rents by more than 300 percent — spikes that appeared to violate California law, which like many other states prohibits setting unconscionable prices on necessities.

Or, as we more commonly know it, price gouging.

Notable examples of price gouging include big increases in the cost of bottled water, gasoline, or generators during natural disasters, as well as essential medical devices like the EpiPen or medications like insulin being priced many times higher than the cost of production and distribution. Even in our unabashedly capitalist society, public opinion polls show that price gouging is strongly opposed by the American people.

Which got me thinking about what we see each week in eviction court, where my students and I represent tenants. There, people line up before a judge who tells them the date they will be ordered to move out of their homes. Often they are destined for the streets, or to sleep in their cars or shelters. Why? Because profit-maximizing landlords have set rent rents above what they can afford.

Aren’t they victims of price gouging too?

Defining price gouging is often a “I know it when I see it” exercise. The Harvard Business Review says “price gouging occurs when companies raise prices to unfair levels. There’s no rule for what qualifies as price gouging. . . . It can be hard to tell the difference between supply and demand and price gouging.”

Some state laws try to quantify “unfair” price increases by capping them at a percentage above the seller’s cost — as high as 50 percent in some cases. Others rely on more subjective bans against “unconscionably excessive” prices. But all share a focus on essential goods and services and the need to ensure the public’s access to those goods in a time of emergency.

Now consider how housing fits into this framework.

There is nothing more essential to humans than shelter, and for our clients, the looming prospect of homelessness is unquestionably an emergency. Yet their suffering is baked into a system that allows profiteering corporations and individuals to control access to a core human need.

In 2025, this reality is all too common in the United States, with record numbers of people living unhoused and millions more on the verge of eviction. But that doesn’t mean it is not price gouging.

Some economists make no apology for this, happily saying the quiet part out loud. In November, John H. Cochrane, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wrote an article for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business bluntly titled “In Praise of Price Gouging.”

“Price gouging is wonderful for all the reasons that letting supply equal demand is wonderful,” Cochrane argued. “How else but higher prices are we going to decide who gets the short supply?”

Cochrane goes on to claim that “price gouging directs scarce resources to the people who really need them.” But when it comes to rental housing, this is patently untrue. Our clients — along with all those who are homeless or being evicted — need housing just as much as those who can afford profit-inflated rents.

And housing scarcity isn’t the problem in the United States. The lack of access to shelter is the inevitable outcome of a system that exploits desperation to maximize profits. We have 15 million vacant units in our nation, many of them owned by wealthy investors intentionally keeping them empty. Meanwhile, corporate landlords manipulate rents through a shared pricing algorithm and planned vacancies to drive up profits.

Corporate landlord lobbyists like the National Apartment Association try to argue that the cost of rent is largely a reflection of the landlord’s costs to buy and maintain the property. The numbers say otherwise. Overall, rents exceed costs so dramatically that being a landlord is a notoriously great way to become a billionaire. Renting out housing is widely promoted as a passive income “wealth-building powerhouse.” Or, as one landlord put it, “Bank buys me the house. Tenants pay off the loan. Property manager handles everything. I collect cash every month. Inflation builds me massive wealth.”

Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

All of this makes up a powerful argument for rent control — laws that, like price gouging statutes, limit profits on a basic human need. But there is no federal rent control law, and landlord lobbying and political campaign spending has made rent control illegal in thirty-three states. That needs to change, especially given that the public’s strong distaste for price gouging pairs nicely with the wide popularity of rent control.

But rent control alone isn’t enough. Even capped rents allow landlords to prey on a fundamental human need for profit and often push the cost of survival beyond what many of our clients — and millions of others — can afford. That is why more and better public housing and other nonmarket subsidies are a moral imperative.

Housing, like other life essentials, must be available to all. When keeping a roof over a family’s head comes at a price that funds a landlord’s vacation home or sports car, that is price gouging.