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LA Cost of Living, 1940 to 2026
A free dataset from The Basin  ·  basin.la/data/index.html#la-cost-of-living
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The full method, the column definitions and the known limits are written up and
available on request: data@basin.la

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ABOUT THIS DATASET
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THE BASIN - LA COST OF LIVING, 1940 TO 2026
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Median home value, median gross rent, median household income and the binding minimum wage
for the City of Los Angeles at six benchmark years (1940, 1960, 1980, 2000, 2020, 2026),
deflated to 2026 dollars with the Los Angeles consumer price index rather than the
national one.

Every cell carries its own geography, universe and source, including the ones left blank
rather than estimated.

Everything underneath is free and public. No account, no API key and no login was used for
any source. What is sold is the assembly: two of the six benchmark years exist only as
un-OCRed scans of printed Census volumes, one exists only inside a 61 MB fixed-width 1980
summary tape with no place-name strings in it, and the deflator, the universes and the
minimum-wage coverage rules are each a place where the obvious answer is wrong.

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1. FOUR RULES THIS FILE IS BUILT ON
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1. The panel is Los Angeles CITY only, and it never silently falls back. Every housing
and income cell in la_cost_of_living_panel.csv is the city. Where a city figure does not
exist the cell is empty and la_cost_of_living_sources.csv gives the reason. County,
state and national figures exist but live in a separate file so no chart can accidentally
mix geographies. This matters: LA city median home value has run above both the county
and the state at every benchmark year measured. In 1960 the city was $17,300 against a
county of $15,900 and a state of $15,100.

2. Nominal and real are explicit. Plain columns are nominal dollars of that year;
columns suffixed _2026usd are real. deflator_to_2026 is the multiplier, and it is
rounded to 4 decimal places before being applied, so nominal * deflator_to_2026
reproduces the published real column exactly. The first build did not do this and the CSV
was silently non-reproducible by about 0.005 percent.

3. The deflator is the Los Angeles CPI, not the national one. BLS series CUURS49ASA0
(CPI-U, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Anaheim, all items) runs back to 1915, so every benchmark
year is covered by the local index and no national splice was needed anywhere. The
national series ships for reference only. The two have diverged materially: the 2020 LA
index is 278.567 against a US 258.811.

4. The 2026 housing and income cells are empty on purpose. There is no 2026 Census
figure to have; the newest ACS vintage is 2024 and the 2025 one-year file publishes in
September 2026. The 2026 row instead carries clearly renamed current and *_latest_acs
columns from Zillow and the 2024 ACS. They are a different basis and must never be plotted
on the same line as the 1940 to 2020 Census series.

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2. PANEL, IN FULL
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| Year | Median home value | Median gross rent | Median household income | Binding minimum wage | LA CPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | $3,824 | $28.44 | none exists | $0.30 federal | 13.900 |
| 1960 | $17,300 | $78 | not acquired | $1.00 federal | 30.000 |
| 1980 | $96,100 | $262 | $15,735 | $3.10 federal and CA | 83.700 |
| 2000 | $221,600 | $672 | $36,687 | $5.75 California | 171.600 |
| 2020 | $670,700 | $1,523 | $65,290 | $15.00 LA city | 278.567 |
| 2026 | no source | no source | no source | $18.42 LA city | 352.630 (partial) |

The same rows in 2026 dollars, with the ratios:

| Year | Home value (2026$) | Gross rent (2026$) | Income (2026$) | Min wage (2026$) | Value / income | Rent as % of income | Hours of minimum-wage work for one month's rent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | $97,011 | $721.50 | | $7.61 | | | 94.8 |
| 1960 | $203,349 | $916.84 | | $11.75 | | | 78.0 |
| 1980 | $404,869 | $1,103.81 | $66,292 | $13.06 | 6.11 | 20.0 | 84.5 |
| 2000 | $455,388 | $1,380.96 | $75,392 | $11.82 | 6.04 | 22.0 | 116.9 |
| 2020 | $849,039 | $1,927.97 | $82,651 | $18.99 | 10.27 | 28.0 | 101.5 |
| 2026 | | | | $18.42 | | | 150.6 (different basis) |

The 2026 hours figure uses Zillow asking rent divided by $18.42 and lives in a separately
named column, hours_min_wage_for_current_rent. It is not comparable to the rows above it.

The minimum wage rule: the rate legally in force on July 1 of each benchmark year,
and "binding" means the highest rate that actually reached a general adult worker in the
city. That distinction is load-bearing: see trap 1.

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3. FILES
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| File | Rows | What it is |
|---|---:|---|
| la_cost_of_living_panel.csv | 6 | The panel. One row per benchmark year, 27 columns |
| la_cost_of_living_sources.csv | 30 | One row per panel cell: value, geography, nominal or real, universe, source, and empty_reason for every blank |
| la_cost_of_living_geography_comparison.csv | 65 | The same variables for city, county, California and US, so the spread can be shown without the panel mixing geographies |
| cpi_annual_la_us.csv | 114 | LA and US CPI-U annual averages 1913 to 2026, with the deflator |
| minimum_wage_history.csv | 82 | Federal, California and LA city, every effective date, with a coverage column and a per-row source |
| avg_prices_annual_la_us.csv | 671 | BLS average prices, 15 series, annual |



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TERMS: SOURCES AND RIGHTS
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LA COST OF LIVING, 1940 TO 2026
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Sources, rights and terms. Licenses were read from each publisher on 2026-08-13.


THIS RELEASE
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Not the records. Every record underneath this release is a public document, and the
table below says exactly where to get it. What is licensed here is the cleaning and
the joins: the entity resolution, the crosswalks, the bridged definitions, the
verification, and the documentation that makes the result safe to rely on. The method, its known limits and the column-level detail are all under "About this dataset" above.


RIGHTS POSTURE
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ATTRIBUTION. Sellable with attribution. One or more sources ask to be credited, and the lines to carry are listed below.


UPSTREAM SOURCES
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| Source | Publisher | License |
|---|---|---|
| Decennial census summary files, 1980 / 1990 / 2000, and 2020 PL 94-171 <https://www.census.gov/> | U.S. Census Bureau | US government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. §105) |
| American Community Survey 5-year estimates and table shells <https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs> | U.S. Census Bureau | US government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. §105) |
| Consumer Price Index and average price series <https://www.bls.gov/cpi/> | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | US government work, public domain |
| Minimum wage histories <https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/minimumwagehistory.htm> | U.S. DOL, SSA, California DIR, and the City of Los Angeles | Government works, public domain |
| Zillow Home Value Index research data <https://www.zillow.com/research/data/> | Zillow | Published free for public use, attribution requested |


Attribution to carry


- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Zillow


WARRANTY
--------

This release is provided as is. Its accuracy checks, their results and its known
limits are stated plainly under "About this dataset" above, and those statements are the whole of what
is claimed for it. Underlying sources are republished by their agencies on their own
schedules and may be revised after our extraction date. Where a figure can only be a
lower bound, the documentation says so.

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LICENCE
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Free to use, including commercially, with attribution.

    Data processing: The Basin (basin.la)

The records underneath this release are public. Federal figures are US government
works and municipal filings are public records; none of that is ours and none of
it is licensed here. What The Basin built is the assembly: the extraction, the
joins, the derived measures and the documentation. That work is given away with
this release rather than licensed, and you may redistribute it, including as part
of a commercial product, provided the attribution above travels with it.

If a source carries its own attribution requirement, that requirement survives
this grant. The source table is under "Terms" above.

No warranty. The full method and the known limits are available on request:
data@basin.la

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The Basin  ·  basin.la  ·  data@basin.la
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