Why Does Living In LA Cost so Fucking Much?
Where Your Rent is as High as Your Uber Surge Pricing
Ah, Los Angeles—the land where dreams are made, just in time to be crushed under the weight of sky-high rent.
Moving to LA comes with this rite of passage where you walk into your first apartment and realize your closet could fit in a shoebox, your kitchen is a miniature stage for tiny culinary catastrophes, and your "view" is another apartment building. Yet, we persist. But why is LA so wildly, absurdly, gasp-inducingly expensive?
This question gets asked twice a week on the Los Angeles Reddit sub and tldr answer will always be that there are less homes than people who want to live here because it's one of the most desirable cities to live in on the planet. I actually didn’t REALLY know exactly why until recently. I was lucky to be born and raised in LA, so realizing it was not normal for a studio apartment to cost a few thousand bucks in rent was a shock.
But let’s examine a more elaborate answer…
Everyone Wants to Be Here, for Better or Worse
There’s this magnetism to LA that’s hard to ignore. Between the endless sunshine and the fact that you might run into Jon Hamm at Little Doms, it’s a place people are drawn to. And that demand means that, yes, prices go up—just like the cost of anything with Timothée Chalamet's name attached to it.
Supply and demand may sound like a cliché, but if people weren’t literally tripping over each other to live here, we wouldn’t be paying $3,000 a month for a shoebox that was originally designed to be a garage.
Honestly, given California politics compared to the rest of the nation, I think LA landlords are lucky as fuck, people basically would rather pay high rent here than live in other parts of the country!
Zoning Laws from the 1970s That Refuse to Die
If you’ve looked at Zillow lately, you know that “studio apartment with a partial view of a dumpster” is going for just shy of a million dollars. Want to move to Echo Park or West Hollywood and get a place with enough space for your mattress and potted fern? That’ll be your life savings, plus a few minor organs on the black market. LA housing costs are in a league of their own—and it’s not even a fun league like the NBA or MLB.
Tight zoning laws, and rent control (that some say does more harm than good) keep competition high. So every apartment, no matter how dingy, becomes a Hunger Games arena in the LA housing market.
Investors and Foreign Buyers Treating Housing as Monopoly Pieces
These days, housing isn’t just for, you know, housing.
Instead, wealthy investors and foreign buyers have figured out that it’s a nice way to park money. These homes sit empty, waiting to appreciate in value while those of us on the ground floor (literally) scramble for a lease. It’s hard to find affordable housing when people are collecting homes like Pokémon cards, except these cards cost a cool million apiece.
NIMBYism: The “Not In My Backyard” Army
Meet the NIMBYs—Not In My Backyarders—those friendly neighbors who are adamantly opposed to any new construction near them, even if it’s housing for, you know, human beings who need shelter. There’s this ongoing argument that new buildings “ruin the character” of neighborhoods. What exactly is the “character” of a neighborhood if not people who actually live there? But NIMBYs won’t hear it, which means fewer new housing developments and higher prices on what’s already there.
Infrastructure: Or, the Lack Thereof
LA wasn’t exactly designed with density in mind. For a long time, this was a car-centric city with suburban sprawl. Now that demand is up, it’s like trying to retrofit an old jalopy with Ferrari parts—awkward and very expensive. Every new development requires significant upgrades to infrastructure (think roads, plumbing, electricity), which only drives up the cost of housing even further. LA was built for endless sunshine, not endless people.
The Airbnb Effect: When Your Apartment Is Everyone’s Vacation Home
Everyone loves a good Airbnb—until every apartment building in LA turns into one. With short-term rentals galore, you’ve got landlords kicking out long-term tenants to charge $200 a night for the same unit. So while LA gets more places for tourists, those of us who live here are left with even fewer options. Sure, visitors might love paying for a "local experience" in Silver Lake, but us "locals" are barely hanging on.
So What’s the Solution?
If only I knew! Maybe a miracle rent control law, or better yet, a complete city overhaul?
In the meantime, try to keep the dream alive with some survival tips: get cozy with roommates, accept that you might need to live more inland, and keep bringing your lunch to work.
Because here in LA, it’s not just about having a place to live. It’s about navigating a maze of prices, people, and policies to find a corner of the city you can call your own—even if it is a little overpriced.