The pattern didn't appear overnight. It was built.
For nearly a quarter century, a quiet architecture of rising rent, speculative investment, restrictive zoning, and policy inaction has reorganized who can afford to live in Los Angeles, and who cannot. This project is an attempt to render that architecture visible — not as a single villain or a single statistic, but as a system that produced its results on purpose.
We combine public-sector data (Census, ACS, HUD) with private-sector signals (Zillow, Redfin, eviction filings) to trace displacement where it actually happens: at the scale of the neighborhood, the block, and the household. Our goal is not advocacy. It is accounting.
Every chart, every table, and every number on this site can be traced to a public source. Where we made analytical choices — which years to compare, which neighborhoods to group, which outliers to exclude — we say so plainly, and we list those choices below under assumptions. Disagreement is welcome. Obscurity is not.
What follows is an investigation in three parts: what rents look like now, who was displaced as they rose, and which policy levers — used or unused — shaped the outcome. Begin wherever you like.