Dear Readers,
Welcome to the first edition of the State of Los Angeles County Housing and Neighborhoods! This new production of Neighborhood Data for Social Change, a project of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, provides a comprehensive review of housing and neighborhood conditions within Los Angeles County.
These are fraught times for housing, as the most important Federal housing assistance program, Section 8, will be cut, and the Pacific Palisades and Altadena are only slowly recovering from the devastating fires of January. Work characterizing housing in Los Angeles County thus has special significance at this moment.
We have relied on a large number of high-quality data sources that have been carefully tabulated and interpreted by the inspired team of Jared Schachner, Cameron Yap, Devyani Ramamoorthy, Justin Culetu, Jiaqi Dong, Jorge De la Roca, and Wesley Miller. We are especially grateful to our colleagues at other research institutions, whose partnership and insight have been invaluable throughout this effort. I am particularly grateful to Benjamin Henwood, Faculty Director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute, for embracing the vision of this report and generously offering his time and team’s expertise. He, along with Randall Kuhn, Amanda Landrian Gonzalez, Jessie Chien and Patricia St. Clair, authored the Houseless Angelenos chapter using the homeless count data they steward—an asset that has been crucial to our region’s understanding of the homelessness crisis. We are also grateful to Evan Sandlin and Kyla Thomas at LABarometer for contributing their panel survey data, which enriched our analysis and, in particular, informed this year’s focus chapter. I want to give special recognition to Caroline Bhalla, the visionary behind the project, and Elly Schoen, whose organizational skills and intellectual contributions were crucial to the delivery of what you will see here. It has long been a dream of mine for the USC Lusk Center to produce a one-stop shop for information on housing and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, and the people just listed made it happen.
As I read through the report, a number of things surprised me. Here is my top ten list of surprises:
- While Los Angeles County has been losing population, it has been gaining households, meaning that outmigration is not relieving pressure on the housing market.
- While Los Angeles City makes up 40 percent of the population of Los Angeles County, it has built 71 percent of the housing units over the past seven years.
- While Los Angeles County’s housing stock is, for a city its size, heavily oriented toward single-family homes, it has most recently overwhelmingly built multi-family homes.
- While homeownership nationally and in California has increased a bit since 1970, it has fallen in Los Angeles County, and fallen sharply in the City of Los Angeles.
- While the share of households with children has fallen throughout the nation, it has fallen more rapidly in Los Angeles County.
- While many still consider Los Angeles (and its surrounding county) to be a new urban area, the age of its housing stock reveals that it is not.
- While the share of households spending more than 30 percent or 50 percent of their income on rent has increased since 2011, the share of Latino households spending that much has decreased.
- The homeownership rate among upper-middle-class households has dropped dramatically since 2010.
- Renter incomes in Los Angeles County have risen much more rapidly than national renter incomes since 1980. Despite this, rent burdens have gotten larger.
- In a bit of good news, the number of unsheltered homeless people counted in Los Angeles dropped by 15 percent in the past two years.
I trust that you will find your own surprises as you read through the report. If something in particular stands out for you, please let us know–you may reach me directly at richarkg@usc.edu.
We look at this report as a beginning, as we plan on making this an annual product that will contain the freshest data available on the State of Los Angeles County Housing and Neighborhoods.
Thanks for reading!
