For nearly a decade, City Hall has operated on a single unquestioned assumption: Los Angeles is desperately short on housing, and the only solution is to build, mandate and regulate its way to affordability.
Billions in subsidies. Sweeping zoning overhauls. A relentless parade of new compliance obligations. All of it justified by one word – shortage.
There is just one problem. The data no longer supports it.
Between July 2024 and July 2025, nearly 54,000 more people left Los Angeles County than moved in – the highest numeric population decline of any county in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Since 2020, the county has shed more than 322,000 residents. You cannot have a housing shortage in a city hemorrhaging population at a historic rate. Shortage implies more people than units. What Los Angeles actually has is more units than qualified tenants willing and able to pay the asking rent.
The numbers confirm it. Among the 65,809 apartment units delivered in Los Angeles County since 2020, more than 8,500 remain vacant – a 13.1% vacancy rate for new construction specifically. The city’s luxury Class A buildings carry an 8.7% vacancy rate, the highest of any property segment.
Downtown Los Angeles exceeds 7%. Net absorption – apartments actually being leased – fell 83% year over year in early 2026.
Concessions such as “one month free” appeared on nearly 37% of all Los Angeles Zillow listings in late 2025, a record high. Landlords are competing for tenants. That is not what a shortage looks like. I see this first-hand. As a commercial real estate broker and co-organizer of a South Los Angeles landlord group of roughly three dozen property owners concentrated in South L.A. and Inglewood, I have a front-row seat to what these numbers look like on the ground. Our members are not hedge funds. They are working families who built their financial security unit by unit over decades. What they are experiencing is not a shortage. It is a collapse in qualified demand.
Renter base is shrinking
Several members are carrying units vacant for upwards of a year. When they do secure a tenant, rents are being negotiated 10% below the prior tenancy. The data bears this out: median rent in South-Central L.A. has fallen 4% year over year. In Inglewood – routinely cited by housing advocates as among the most rent-burdened submarkets in the county – one-bedroom rents have declined nearly 3%, with units available in some neighborhoods for as little as $1,750 per month.
Meanwhile, operating costs are rising relentlessly. The county capped rent increases at just 1.68% for 2025, while insurance, utilities and maintenance costs have risen at multiples of that rate. Assembly Bill 628, effective January 2026, now mandates landlords provide working stoves and refrigerators as habitability requirements with no corresponding allowance to recover the cost.
Federal immigration enforcement has compounded the damage on two fronts: it has removed a significant share of South L.A.’s renter base – 67% of L.A. County’s undocumented households were already rent-burdened before raids intensified – while simultaneously decimating the construction labor force. Foreign-born workers account for 53.7% of the Los Angeles construction workforce. You cannot mandate housing production while systematically removing the people who build it.
Underneath all of this is the deeper problem that no housing mandate can fix: Los Angeles is losing its economic base.
The county’s motion picture industry shed 42,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024 – nearly a third of its entire workforce. Manufacturing dropped 14,600 jobs in 2025 alone. California led the nation in tech layoffs. Major employers have relocated to Texas and Florida.
People do not leave cities because there are not enough apartments.
They leave because there are not enough reasons to stay. Every unit built without a corresponding job attached to it is a unit that will struggle to find a qualified tenant.
And when the small, independent landlords who can no longer absorb this regulatory and economic pressure finally sell, the buyer pool is thin and distorted by Measure ULA. The buyers who remain are professional property management companies and institutional operators – the exact corporate landlords that tenant advocates and politicians have spent years vilifying. The regulations designed to protect tenants from corporate ownership are manufacturing it.
If Los Angeles is going to build anything, it should build what the market is actually absorbing: single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. Residential-scale housing that integrates into existing neighborhoods, commands lower vacancy than the towers, and – critically – comes with its own parking. Fewer than 9% of Los Angeles- households are car-free, yet thousands of new apartment buildings are being constructed with no dedicated parking, offloading that burden onto surrounding streets and neighbors.
Small-scale housing does not do that.
The city and county should pause their current housing mandate agenda, reassess the market as it actually exists in 2026, and redirect their energy toward what will genuinely stabilize Los Angeles: job creation, economic retention and the kind of neighborhood-scale housing production that serves the residents who remain. The shortage narrative has had a good run. The data has moved on. It is time for policy to follow.
David Evans is a commercial real estate broker specializing in multifamily investment properties across Los Angeles County. He can be reached at david@ investmentpropertyadvisers.com.
