As fires continue to rage in and around Los Angeles, burning more than 40,000 acres since last week, destroying more than 12,000 homes and other buildings, and killing at least 25 people, two things are becoming clear: California must rebuild quickly, and it must rebuild differently.

Housing affordability and availability in Los Angeles, and California more broadly, were already at a crisis point even before the fires broke out.

Since January 7, tens of thousands of families have been forced to evacuate and are now rushing to find places to live. Many were stunned to realize there are virtually no rental options available to them, even when they’d be willing to pay large sums of money to stay in the area.

The region’s rental market was already strained before the fires. An analysis by CoStar Group Inc. found that vacancy rates — meaning the percentage of rental homes sitting empty and available — bottomed out at 2.1 percent in western Los Angeles County — now affected by the Palisades Fire — and 3.8 percent in Pasadena, where the Eaton Fire burns. Los Angeles as a whole had vacancy rates of about 5 percent.

For larger apartments with three or four bedrooms, the rental options are even worse. Almost all new housing developed over the last decade has been studios or one- and two-bedroom apartments, built with singles, childless couples, and adult roommates in mind.

“I think the real wakeup call this is giving is it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you live in a city that has never allowed housing to be built for families,” said Matt Lewis, the communications director for California YIMBY. “The presumption all along has been that fires happen to someone else.”

But the housing impact extends well beyond the immediate needs of evacuees. Facing mounting losses from increasingly severe climate disasters, insurance companies have hiked rates statewide over the last few years and declined to renew coverage for nearly 3 million homeowners in vulnerable regions. (The state updates its regulations to force more insurance companies to cover homes in fire-prone areas, but those changes took effect just before the recent fires broke out.)

As a result of losing their coverage many of the newly uninsured........

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