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89.3 KPCC: No Place in SoCal is Immune from Rising Rents: USC Report

July 12, 2016

No neighborhood is safe from the rising costs of housing in Southern California.

That's the new finding in the new 2016 Casden Multifamily Forecast reportby USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate.

"Historically there have been pockets of affordability," says co-author Raphael Bostic, "so that there were places people could go where they weren't going to have to pay rents that would be affordable for higher income people but not everybody else."

But those pockets are starting to shrink everywhere across the region.

The average rent in Los Angeles County increased 4.8 percent in 2015, while apartment prices in Orange County jumped 5.4 percent.

Even areas like the Inland Empire, which is traditionally more affordable, saw rents climbing 5.2 percent over the course of last year.

"Riverside and the Inland Empire have always been an escape hatch for people who were looking for something more affordable and willing to travel the difference," says Bostic, "but even those places are starting to see pressure."

It's a clear shift from the Lusk's Center's past Casden report in 2014 when neighborhoods like South L.A. and Long Beach saw dips in rents.

But this time around, every single area studied saw a jump in cost.