NEW UCLA DATA FOR DEMOCRACY BRIEF focuses on housing inequality in Los Angeles.
This report looks at how many people are homeless in Los Angeles, how that number has evolved over time, and how homelessness varies by racial or ethnic background.
Professor Ananya Roy researches global movements for housing justice and access to housing. As she states: “I was so tired of doing research on the ‘housing crisis,'” she refers to her work as “housing justice.” I wanted to consider how, in addition to being a time of crisis, this is also an opportunity to elevate and highlight innovative housing concepts.
In Housing Inequality in Los Angeles, the most recent study brief in the UCLA Centennial Initiative Data for Democracy series, Roy discusses her thoughts on the matter. The series aims to involve educators, schools, and students in UCLA research concerning issues pertaining to equality, opportunity, and social transformation. The UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs’ Institute on Inequality and Democracy, along with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, collaborated with the Data for Democracy team to compile the housing brief.
Examining housing instability and movements to achieve housing justice in local communities through charts, graphs, tables, maps, and interviews, the Data for Democracy short delves deeply into the challenges surrounding housing in the Los Angeles region and is open to K–12 students around the city. Teachers and students at local schools receive access to the brief online. It costs nothing to access or utilize the briefs.
Los Angeles’s Housing Inequality presents and examines data regarding property ownership and rental patterns in the city, as well as historical trends. The study delves deeper into how expensive rent is for families in Los Angeles. The recently released brief closely examines the amount of homeless people living in Los Angeles, how that number has evolved over time, and how homelessness varies by racial or cultural group. Since “houselessness” is the most obvious and pressing component of housing inequality in Los Angeles, the research pays close attention to it.
The brief’s data representations indicate that 55% of Los Angeles County’s population rents, which is a significantly greater percentage than the 30% of renters in other American regions. According to the data, the percentage of households renting has been rising over time, with Latino and Black households having higher rental rates than households belonging to other racial or ethnic groupings.
