Los Angeles is shrinking. About 10,000 people are leaving the city every year, and another 50,000 leave the surrounding county. This has been going on for over a decade. And yet over that same time frame, rents have nearly doubled.Shouldn’t fewer people mean lower demand for housing? Even if the city didn’t build a single additional unit, if the number of people in need of housing goes down, shouldn’t the price of housing go down, too?
One would think. But it turns out that the way Los Angeles is shrinking causes the demand for housing to go up, not down.
The problem for Los Angeles is that, due to Democratic Party mismanagement and incompetence, the city is a terrible place to raise a family. The schools struggle to teach children how to read, the homeless have overtaken too many parks, and government unions have made basic municipal services needlessly expensive and slow.
This means the people most likely to leave Los Angeles are young families, and those most likely to stay are young single people and aging retirees. When your city is a good place to raise a family, your houses are filled with at least two, often three, sometimes even five to six people. Mom, dad, and their children can all live under one roof.
