The Antelope Valley Times

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L.A. County residents dissatisfied with housing costs, survey says

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LOS ANGELES – The rising cost of housing is the biggest factor undermining residents’ satisfaction with life in Los Angeles County, according to the annual Quality of Life Index released Thursday by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the California Endowment.

The fourth annual survey found dissatisfaction with housing costs to be high among “struggling” residents, which includes mostly younger residents, those with household incomes of $60,000 or less per year, renters and people without a college degree.

The housing satisfaction rating of “struggling” residents was 37, compared to a 48 rating for “comfortable” residents who are mostly older homeowners with higher incomes and more education.

“Since the inception of the report, people have been concerned about their cost of housing, and their level of dissatisfaction just continues to get worse,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin.

At a rating of 42, cost of living was the lowest-rated category, below education (49), transportation and traffic (50), the environment (56), jobs and the economy (59), public safety (60), race relations (68), neighborhood quality (68) and health care (69).

Residents were asked to rate their quality of life on a scale of 10 to 100 in the nine categories and 40 subcategories of the survey. The overall rating this year among all nine issues was 56, the same as 2018 but a decline from 59 in the first two years of the survey. Satisfaction with cost of living has declined by eight points since 2016.

“In Los Angeles County, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that we are paying too much money just to have a place to live,” Yaroslavsky said.

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27 comments for "L.A. County residents dissatisfied with housing costs, survey says"

  1. What they need to do is be harder on crime and make going to jail hurt. The AV has only gotten worse over the years because housing is cheap and you have 15 people living in the same house. What the city needs to do is clean house. Do away with section 8 and clean the city up.

    • @Mike….Do you know anything about jail? Doesn’t sound like it. You sound like another clueless Antelope Valley knee jerk reactionary posting mindless comments about something he knows nothing about and also blaming the victim for their plight. You are in solid company judged by most of the comments on this thread. Believe me, L.A. County is hardly the promised land.

      • Accurate description of Mike, except I think he’s a Santa Clarita knee jerk reactionary.

  2. Our local cities need to build more low-income condos or apartments, there’s plenty of land to do so. I prefer that than to have my neighbor on section 8 destroying the property next door to me, when I bought my house and keep the yards/home beautiful and intact, it’s just not fair. I don’t blame many of these people, I wouldn’t want to get up and go to work if everything was given to me. Try getting up before 5a.m. every single day for 30 plus years to go to work and earn an honest living for a change.

  3. Housing is not a right! Work and buy or rent a house or rent an apartment. Too many people feel they are entitled to everything for free. I don’t agree at all.

  4. Its really sad there’s people really struggling. I pay almost a thousand dollars for a one bedroom trailor here in L.A. county its 20 minutes from the nearest town. I know people who own beautiful homes only to hoard it out filling the rooms with trash. Its sad that trash has better housing than humans.

    • They earned their homes. They didn’t rob people because ” times were tough”. They can put whatever they want in them. It’s mentality like this that excuses violence in the name of struggle. Most people struggle and everyone is paying too much for housing. Others don’t deserve to be robbed because someone else is having a hard time. You think someone else owes someone something because they came up from their struggle and now own a home?! Get the f outta here.

    • How would you know what they have in their rooms unless you’re being a nosey looky loo just like most tweekers of the A.V. ???

  5. L.A. County is so awesome – if you like 75 mile long traffic jams everyday. Or, if you like competing with rich foreign investors to simply have a place to live. Overrated comes to mind not to mention and sitting on a locked and loaded earthquake faultline and with no water supply of its own.

  6. Housing is not a right. If you can’t afford living in California, get out. I work hard for my money and I can barely afford living here. I don’t know where people get off thinking that they are entitled to everything. For example… Working a fast food job wasn’t meant to support a family of 6. Demanding $15 an hour is only costing people their jobs and raising prices.

    • Oh please, save it. How about you move? Nobody expects an oceanfront pad in Newport Beach. Affordable housing was available up until just a few short years ago. This artificially goosed housing market has been on a run since 2012. The Southern California real estate market is being used as a piggy bank for the deep pocket cash only foreign investor crowd and private investment firms. Can we say China? And don’t forge the house flippers. Short memories.

  7. If you don’t like the prices in L.A.County, then you’re free to move 10 miles north to Kern County or 40 miles east to San Bernardino County. nothing’s stopping you.

    Most of the people complaining about “can’t afford it” are ghetto trash who don’t really deserve to live in L.A. County in the first place. They’re better off in California City or Victorville or somewhere far, far, from here!

  8. L.A. County is way better than what the ghetto trash and illegal immigrants make it out to be and yet the county tolerates it at our expense. A price hike on the rent could curb the scumbag epidemic. There are plenty of other places that have lower rent and better opportunity for those that treat this place like a toilet. I think many people here in SoCal are tired of being sick and tired and we deserve better then having our toes stepped on by scumbag nonsense. If you dislike a place enough to treat it like garbage, wouldn’t it make sense to just leave?

  9. I think the rising of prices of houses in the AV is a good thing. one of my neighbors who was extremely ghetto recently moved out because he was not longer able to pay for his rent, and another one is in the process of leaving. I know its wrong that I have this opinion, but I left the valley to avoid ghetto people. Not to have them as my neighbors.

    • East Lancaster has the cheapest housing. Our mayor and city council are all West Side and rich and can care less about East Lancaster. This is why we need voting districts. How come Rex won’t sue Lancaster for districts like he did in Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Highland, and Santa Monica? Hypocrites all!

  11. There’s a whole other world outside Los Angeles. And it’s a world much more affordable. In fact, poor people clustering in expensive L.A. is like a non-swimmer in a lifeguard tower. Nobody should need a rescue the first day, but after that you better get out of there!

  12. Yep, L.A. sucks unless you’re rich or you really love 75 mile long traffic jams everyday. Get the cash buyer foreign investors out of the market. Stop selling out the middle class to the Chinese that are playing monopoly in U.S. real estate.

    • More or less since the invention of private property. When feudalism declared “all lands belong to the king” it was obviously incumbent upon that king to allow the peasantry to live on his land or he would have no peasants, creating a “right to housing.” Prior to that there was no need for any such right, since people could just live on land that had no owner.

      In the US, from its inception, title to all land originates with the state, so effectively if you deny a right to a place to live you are denying the right to live, which is a violation of the most basic line of the constitution.

    • Our County Supervisor is under the influence of Rex and Marvin so that you would think she is on their staff doing what she used to do for Mike A. At least he was fair to his district.

      • The Lancaster disfunction includes our County Supervisor who is afraid of her own peers from that city. She needs to grow a backbone.

        • She won’t we just need to support whoever she runs against. Katie Hill says we have the power to change it.