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Angelenos' Rent Went Up $1.7 Billion In 2014
Short on rent (Photo by Seth Anderson via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
We knew the rent has been out of control in Los Angeles but now we have a tally of precisely how much it went up this year: $1.7 billion more than in 2013.
Zillow released numbers today on how much American renters paid in 2014, compared to 2013 and then broken down by major metropolitan areas. Overall, American renters paid $441 billion in 2014 compared to $420 billion last year. That represents a 4.9% increase. And there are more of us renting: the population of renters went up 1.9% from last year.
Renters in the Los Angeles area paid the second most to landlords, which makes sense since we're the second largest Metro area. We paid $34.2 billion this year compared to $32.5 billion in 2013. Our rents went up slightly higher than the national average at 5.3%. If you break it down, we paid on average $42/month more this year than last year. Rents were on the rise in the Inland Empire, too. In Riverside, it went up 4.4% or an average of $26.
But hey, at least we're not San Francisco: renters paid on average $163/month more than last year or 13.5% more than 2013. Those are the cold hard numbers that explain why cool Bay Area bands and others are heading down to Southern California. (Then again, those tech nerds up in San Francisco tend to have better incomes.)
Here are the numbers:
Rent is too damn high (Zillow)
The real bummer about rising rents is that our incomes aren't even close to keeping up, and that trend is expected to continue. Here's the depressing analysis from Zillow:
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"Over the past fourteen years, rents have grown at twice the pace of income due to weak income growth, burgeoning rental demand, and insufficient growth in the supply of rental housing. This has created real opportunities for rental housing owners and investors, but has also been a bitter pill to swallow for tenants, particularly those on an entry-level salary and those would-be buyers struggling to save for a down payment on a home of their own," said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries. "Next year, we expect rents to rise even faster than home values, meaning that another increase in total rent paid similar to that seen this year isn't out of the question. In fact, it's probable."
So maybe it's time to think about a roommate if you don't already have one.
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