Survey Shows Residents Are Less Likely To Leave LA County

L.A. County residents are less likely to pick up and leave than they were during the pandemic, when a new work-from-home culture upended the need for many to be tethered to a physical workplace, a new survey has found.

According to a survey of around 2,000 randomly selected residents by LABarometer, a research center within USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, 10% of residents wanted to leave the county at the height of the pandemic. That number has now dropped to just 3% of residents saying they want to leave Los Angeles County next year. In 2019, when the center first began conducting the survey, 8% of residents indicated a desire to leave.

Kyla Thomas, director of LABarometer, said the survey also indicates that people are even less likely to move to different neighborhoods within Los Angeles County.

“This is driven primarily by renters, and we suspect that it's related to economic conditions, that it's generally become more costly for people to move,” she said.

Thomas notes that rent in the county has increased 12% since last year and that mobility has also decreased at the national level.

‘Growing social and economic strain’

Even though residents are less likely to leave Los Angeles County, 20% of those surveyed had to move because their rent was raised.

The survey found that more than 60% of the sample group are rent burdened — meaning they spend around one third of their pay toward housing, while over 30% are extremely burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing. Just over half of those respondents are renters and can afford a maximum of $1,750 on rent.

Agueda Dudley-Berrios with Community Power Collective, a community organization that mainly works with low-income, Latinx communities in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, attributes the rent struggles to the pandemic.

“A lot of folks, both in the city and the county actually, are also still catching up or trying to catch up on debt that was accumulated during the pandemic,” Dudley-Berrios said.

She added that during the pandemic, immigrant communities in particular did not have access to “the financial safety nets or safeguards like unemployment or stimulus checks.”

She also pointed to “deep historical roots, familial ties to their homes and their communities here who have built each other up, who take care of each other,” that discourage people from moving.

Discrimination increased

The survey also found that close to 50% also experienced day-to-day discrimination, up from 39%, said Thomas.

“We see a particularly steep increase among Hispanic residents and among younger people aged 18 to 39,” she said. “The fact that we're seeing It predominantly among Hispanics suggests that it may be related to some sort of kind of racial, ethnic, or anti-immigrant discrimination. And then among younger people, we see the sharpest increase in reports of discrimination attributed to your job and religion.”