The single most authoritative longitudinal dataset on household income, race, rent burden, and housing tenure at the census-tract level — the backbone of nearly every analysis on this site.
The Record · Sources & Reading
Every finding
has a paper trail.
The following resources — datasets, academic literature, and investigative journalism — form the foundation of this project. Each is annotated with a single-sentence summary. Disagree with our conclusions? Start here.
I. Data Sources & Statistical Archives 06 items
Provides the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI) and Home Value Index (ZHVI) at monthly cadence, enabling real-time tracking of rent and home price movements with higher frequency than public datasets.
The first nationwide database of formal eviction filings and judgments, crucial for translating rent-cost stress into a measurable displacement event at the household level.
Fair Market Rent calculations, income limits, and assisted-housing inventories that define who qualifies for federal protection — and who does not — across Los Angeles.
Useful for investor-purchase share and for-sale-market pressure indicators that precede rent movements — a leading signal, where ACS is a lagging one.
Building permits, rent-stabilization inventory, and code enforcement records — the administrative trace of who is building, who is demolishing, and where.
II. Academic Research & Reports 05 items
The Pulitzer-winning ethnography that reframed eviction not as a symptom of poverty but as one of its principal causes — the intellectual foundation for modern displacement research.
A rigorous evaluation of Los Angeles's Rent Stabilization Ordinance, documenting which units it covers, which it leaves unprotected, and the consequences for the working-class tenants who fall through that gap.
The most comprehensive yearly synthesis of Southern California housing market conditions, combining supply, demand, demographic, and cost-burden metrics in a single regional dashboard.
Tracks the political war over housing supply in California through the rise of YIMBY activism, offering context for why Los Angeles zoning reform has moved so slowly despite widespread consensus on the crisis.
Introduces a typology of neighborhoods by displacement risk that has become the academic standard for separating gentrification from displacement, and exclusion from both.
III. Investigative Journalism 04 items
Documents the out-migration of working-class and middle-income Angelenos to inland California, Texas, and Arizona — the geographic signature of displacement when it can no longer be absorbed locally.
Traces the corporate and private-equity ownership of rental housing in historically working-class LA neighborhoods, exposing the scale of institutional landlord concentration after 2012.
A block-level accounting of every building in Los Angeles removed from the rental market via the Ellis Act — often the most decisive single mechanism of displacement in rent-stabilized neighborhoods.
A neighborhood-by-neighborhood audio investigation of cultural erasure in Boyle Heights, Echo Park, and Leimert Park, adding ethnographic texture to the quantitative record.
IV. Advocacy, Legal & Policy Organizations 04 items
Community-sourced cartography of evictions, no-fault removals, and tenant harassment — invaluable for capturing displacement events that never enter official court records.
Publishes tenant-defense case reports that reveal patterns of landlord behavior — in particular, which categories of tenants are most frequently served with eviction notices, and why.
Produces the most accessible analyses of state housing subsidy programs, Proposition 13 property-tax effects, and how fiscal policy routes housing resources unevenly across California.
Tenant-organizing coalition whose reports on corporate landlord practices have shaped the last decade of California housing legislation, including the 2019 Tenant Protection Act.