Long Beach tenant Shelby Bisaccio summed up the Southern California rental market in one word.
“Expensive.”
Bisaccio, a 32-year-old bartender, had been apartment shopping about a month ago, but gave up because she couldn’t find anything she could afford.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said while folding clothes at an east Long Beach laundromat. “Just for a one bedroom, it’s $2,000 (a month). That’s on the bad side. This neighborhood, a one bedroom is $2,400 to $2,500. And that’s lowball.”
Even though the pace of rent hikes slowed dramatically in Southern California over the past 1 1/2 years, tenants say they still struggle to pay for housing.
During the height of the pandemic, rent hikes soared into the double digits.
In the year ending in December, Orange County rent growth had cooled to 2.4%, or just $62 a month more than the year before, according to a composite of data from apartment trackers CoStar, RealPage and Moody’s Analytics/Reis.
In Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire, rent even fell a little bit, dropping $35 and $22 a month, respectively.
Despite the cooldown, however, rents still are higher — 15% to 31% higher — than they were before the pandemic.
Los Angeles County rents are up $315 a month since the pandemic, composite numbers show. Orange County rents increased $572 a month, while Inland Empire rents were up $465 a month.
“Even as rent prices go down, somebody who looks for a new apartment today could still be experiencing a jump,” said Rob Warnock, a senior research associate with Apartment List, an online rental search site. “For those people who move today, they’re going to experience a different market than what they may have seen in 2019.”
The pandemic-era rent jump increased the number of cost-burdened renters while ballooning homelessness by 30,000 people across the state.
The number of Southern Californians paying more than a third of their income on rent increased 2 percentage points to 58%…
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