We ranked 108 Los Angeles neighborhoods by affordability, and the cheapest rents are the least affordable

The Basin's neighborhood pages have carried what a neighborhood holds since they launched: its parks, its rail stops, its restaurants, its reported crime. They have never carried what it costs to live in one. As of today they do, for all 114 neighborhoods on the map, and this is what the ranking says.

The measure is the census's own. For every renter household in Los Angeles the Bureau asks what the rent is and what the household earns, works out the share inside that one household, and publishes the counts. 59.25 percent of Los Angeles renter households pay 30 percent or more of their income in rent. 32.57 percent pay half or more. Sorted by that share, the city's neighborhoods run from 44.6 percent to 77.0 percent, and the order is not the one anybody would guess.

The ten hardest places to be a renter

Eight of the twenty hardest neighborhoods sit in Council District 8, which is Marqueece Harris-Dawson's. No other district holds more than three.

Look at the rent column. Eight of these ten rent below the citywide median of $1,932, and four of them rent for under $1,600. The single most burdened neighborhood in Los Angeles is one where the middle rent is $1,758 a month.

The ten easiest

Every one of the ten most affordable neighborhoods in Los Angeles except Cypress Park rents above the citywide median. Brentwood, Bel-Air and Playa del Rey are on this list.

It is not a fluke of the top and bottom

Sort all 108 into four groups by what they charge, and the pattern holds the whole way down.

Burden falls at every step as rent rises. Across the 108 neighborhoods the correlation between the burden rate and the median rent is negative, at -0.27. The correlation between the burden rate and renter income is -0.60, more than twice as strong.

What a neighborhood charges barely predicts how hard it is to live in. What its renters earn predicts it well. That is the finding, and it is the reason the ranking looks upside down.

Which is a fact about the people, not the rent

There is an obvious objection and it is correct: Brentwood is not cheap. It is the seventh dearest neighborhood on this map. It ranks as the most affordable in Los Angeles because the households renting in it have a median income of $134,736, more than twice the city's $63,686, and $2,974 is a manageable share of that.

A burden rate describes the people who are already there. Somebody who could not carry Brentwood's rent does not live in Brentwood and never enters its denominator. The neighborhood is affordable to its renters partly because unaffordability sorted them out in advance.

So here is the same question asked the other way. Take one household, the city's median renter at $63,686, and ask what each neighborhood's median rent would cost it. Nothing about the neighborhood's own residents enters this at all.

The ranking turns over almost completely. Gramercy Park goes from 2nd hardest to 104th. Brentwood goes from 108th to 7th. Watts is 14th on burden and 106th here. Playa del Rey is 105th on burden and 9th here.

Both tables are right. They answer different questions, and the difference between them is the whole subject:

• Sorted by burden, the question is how hard is it for the people who live here. By that question the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles are the hardest, because rent that is low in dollars is not low against $35,000.
• Sorted by one fixed household, the question is how hard would it be for you to move here. By that question the west side is out of reach and South LA is not.

One number worth keeping from the second table: for a household on the city's median renter income, 84 of the 108 neighborhoods cost 30 percent or more. Eighteen cost half or more. There are 24 neighborhoods in Los Angeles that household could rent in at the census's definition of affordable, and it earns more than half the renters in the city.

Nowhere in Los Angeles is this under 44 percent

95 of the 108 neighborhoods have more than half their renters paying 30 percent or more. 52 are above 60 percent. Five are above 70. The best result anywhere on the map, in the richest renting population in the city, is Brentwood's 44.6 percent.

Severe burden, the census's word for paying half your income or more, runs from 19.5 percent in Cheviot Hills to 52.6 percent in Gramercy Park, where more renter households than not spend half of everything they earn on rent.

Two things this measure does badly, and one it does not do at all

Students. A household of students reports a student's income. University Park is 4th hardest in Los Angeles and it is wrapped around USC; Westwood is 5th and it is wrapped around UCLA. Their renters are not poor in the way a burden rate implies, and both would sit much lower on a ranking that could tell a student from a low-wage worker. The census cannot, and neither can we. The two are flagged on their pages.

Small neighborhoods. Six of the 114 do not get a rank. Chatsworth Reservoir, Griffith Park, Hansen Dam and Sepulveda Basin are open space rather than places people live, and Elysian Park is under the 4,000-resident floor the neighborhood pages already use. Beverly Crest clears that floor and fails a second one: every figure here is read off the middle of a distribution of renter households, and with 444 of them the middle does not mean anything. Its counts are published and its rates are withheld, with the reason on the page.

What it does not do at all is tell you why. Nothing here says whether a neighborhood is burdened because rents rose or because incomes fell, and nothing here is a time series. This is the 2020 to 2024 five-year window, one photograph.

The whole list

All 108, worst to best. The last column is the matched ratio, two medians divided, and it is here because a share of income is easier to picture than a burden rate. It is the weaker of the two measures and it is not what the ranking uses.

The six with no rank: Beverly Crest, Chatsworth Reservoir, Elysian Park, Griffith Park, Hansen Dam and Sepulveda Basin. Four are open space, one is under the population floor these pages already use, and Beverly Crest has 444 renter households paying cash rent, which is not enough for a middle.

Method, and the one mistake that would have broken the ranking

Every figure is the American Community Survey's 2020 to 2024 five-year estimate, apportioned from the 1,255 census tracts that touch the city onto the 114 Mapping L.A. neighborhood lines, the same boundaries and the same tracts every other Basin neighborhood figure uses.

Two decisions are load-bearing.

A median cannot be averaged. A median is a rank, not a quantity. Two tracts of a hundred renter households with medians of $1,000 and $3,000 do not make a neighborhood median of $2,000, and 40 percent of a tract's median is not anything at all. So no published median is ever touched here. The binned distributions are apportioned as counts, pooled into the neighborhood, and a median is interpolated out of the pooled distribution exactly once, at the end. Counts survive arithmetic; summary statistics do not.

Rent is paid by renters, so the income under it has to be renters' income. Median gross rent describes renter households. Median household income describes all households, owners included, and in Los Angeles owner households have a median income of $133,574 against $63,686 for renters. Dividing the first by the second is the ratio almost everyone reaches for, and it puts money belonging to people who pay no rent into the denominator.

Citywide that reads 28.17 percent when the matched figure is 36.41 percent. The error is not a constant: it scales with how many owners a neighborhood has, so it runs from 0.36 points to 24.60 points across the 108. It does not merely depress the level, it reorders the list. Ranked both ways, only 2 of 108 neighborhoods hold their position. Lake View Terrace, which is 73 percent owner-occupied, moves 82 places.

Both ratios ship in the published data, side by side, computed on identical bins with the same estimator so the gap between them is the size of the mistake and nothing else. The ranking on this page uses neither. It uses the burden rate, which never collapses anything: the census did the division inside each household, where the rent and the income belong to the same family, and all we pool is counts of answers already given.

What we are least sure of. Apportioning by area assumes households are spread evenly inside a census tract, and they are not. A neighborhood smaller than the tracts beneath it takes all of its renters from tracts that were cut, and the median neighborhood here draws 60 percent of its renters that way. To find out how much that matters, the whole panel was rebuilt under a cruder rule with no splitting at all, every tract assigned whole to the neighborhood holding most of it. The two are wrong in different directions. Across the 106 neighborhoods comparable both ways the burden rate moves a median of 0.71 points, and 8 of the top 10 survive the change. Hollywood Hills West does not: it moves from 22nd to 74th, and it takes 100 percent of its renters from split tracts. Every neighborhood's exposure is published in the panel as split_tract_renter_share.

Full figures for all 114 neighborhoods, the 15 council districts, the tract crosswalk and the verification output are in the LA Neighborhood Affordability Panel. Each neighborhood's own page now carries these five figures under What it costs to rent here.