When Renting Beats Buying, Los Angeles Risks Losing Its Jewish Future

The Los Angeles Times has supplied a stark new indication of Southern California’s housing failure. According to its August 19 analysis of Realtor.com data, the median monthly cost of buying a home with up to two bedrooms in metropolitan Los Angeles is $4,836, compared with a median rent of $2,787. That $2,049 difference is the largest among the nation’s 50 biggest metropolitan areas. Renting may therefore be the rational financial decision for an individual household today, but a region in which purchasing even a modest home makes dramatically less sense than renting has created a dangerous long-term incentive: families remain in Los Angeles only until marriage, children or the need for greater stability forces them to reconsider. Renting itself does not preclude a family from building a meaningful life, but involuntary and indefinite renting exposes families to rising rents, property sales and repeated displacement. 

Parents cannot confidently determine where their children will attend school, which congregation they will join or whether grandparents and grandchildren will remain near one another. They hesitate to invest emotionally and financially in neighborhoods they may soon be forced to leave. When homeownership becomes unattainable, Los Angeles does not simply lose prospective buyers; it risks losing the families most prepared to put down roots, raise the next generation and sustain communal institutions for decades.

For the Jewish community, this threat is particularly severe because Jewish life is built around proximity, continuity and intergenerational relationships. According to the 2021 Study of Jewish LA, approximately 565,000 Jews live in nearly 300,000 Los Angeles households, making this the nation’s second-largest Jewish community within a federation service area. Yet 19% of those households described themselves as financially struggling, while 27% spent at least 30% of their income on housing. Among financially struggling Jewish households, the housing-burden rate reached 59%. Families that need to live near a synagogue, Jewish school, kosher market or relatives who provide childcare face an additional geographic premium. 

Observant families need to remain within walking distance of a congregation, placing them inside some of the region’s most expensive neighborhoods. In a 2019 article published by eJewishPhilanthropy, young Orthodox professionals described an impossible triangle in which remaining in Los Angeles forced them to choose among owning a home, paying for Jewish education and saving for retirement. Families confronting that choice may delay having children, remain in homes they have outgrown, abandon day school, postpone retirement savings or leave Southern California entirely. The loss is not merely financial: each departure breaks another strand connecting children to grandparents, families to congregations and future leaders to the institutions that educated them.

The strain is already visible in Jewish education. According to Builders of Jewish Education, greater Los Angeles Jewish day schools enrolled more than 10,000 students in 2019–20 and 9,592 in 2020–21. During the 12 years ending in 2019–20, enrollment in Community, Conservative and Reform schools fell by 20%, or approximately 900 students, while Orthodox-school growth offset much of that decline. The proportion of students receiving need-based tuition assistance nevertheless increased from 40% to 55%, demonstrating how difficult participation had become even before the latest escalation in housing costs. 

The 2021 Study of Jewish LA found that only 15% of Jewish K–12 students attended a day school or yeshiva, and among parents who had previously enrolled a child or considered enrollment, 51% cited cost as a reason for not doing so. Jewish summer camp faces similar affordability pressures. 

Government records cannot provide a precise count of Jewish Angelenos moving to particular cities because neither the Census nor the Internal Revenue Service records religion, but the general migration pattern and the expansion of Jewish infrastructure reveal a significant geographic redistribution. 

More concrete signs of growth appear farther inland. Chabad of Bakersfield, which began in the rabbi’s home, opened a permanent 10,000-square-foot center in 2017 after 15 years of local activity. Chabad of Riverside has reported that both the Inland Empire and its Jewish population have grown sufficiently to require a permanent center on nearly an acre of property. Chabad of Temecula, founded in 1999, is now developing the first dedicated synagogue and Jewish campus in southwestern Riverside County, with land purchased in 2022 and foundations begun in 2023. 

These developments cannot establish that every participant came from Los Angeles, but they are the institutional footprints left when Jewish households spread toward communities where a house and family life appear more attainable.

The same pattern is visible in states receiving large numbers of former Angelenos. Chabad’s expansion in those destinations offers a revealing indicator of where Jewish communal demand is emerging. In the Dallas–Fort Worth area, Chabad of Carrollton-Lewisville began operating in 2024 to serve Jewish households moving into expanding northern suburbs. 

The clearest connection to California appears in Boise, where Chabad’s rabbi estimated in 2022 that 1,500 to 2,000 Jews lived in the city and another 1,000 to 2,000 elsewhere in Idaho. He reported that more Jews may have moved to Boise during the preceding few years than during the previous decade and specifically identified California as one source of newcomers. Chabad growth is not a precise migration census—new centers can also reflect natural growth, increased engagement or better outreach—but its new buildings, programs and personnel mirror the same redistribution visible in IRS records.

Research from the California Policy Lab explains why this redistribution may become permanent. Californians who left the state moved to communities where monthly housing costs averaged $672 less and median homes cost almost $398,000 less. For Jewish families, those figures represent the possibility of bedrooms for children, a dining room for Shabbat, predictable access to a congregation and enough financial security to pay tuition, attend camp and contribute to communal institutions. 

Jewish Los Angeles must therefore begin treating housing as a matter of communal survival by developing family and workforce housing on communal land, connecting educational assistance with homeownership support, strengthening institutions in emerging inland communities and conducting a longitudinal study of the Jewish families who leave. 

If Los Angeles becomes a place where only inherited homeowners and the exceptionally wealthy can establish permanent lives, its synagogues and schools may retain their buildings while losing the middle-class families who give those buildings a future. Chabad centers rising in Temecula, Rancho Mirage, Franklin, suburban Dallas, Florida and Boise are signs of Jewish resilience, but they are a stark reminder that Jewish families will put down roots somewhere, and if Los Angeles offers them no ground in which to do so, those roots will increasingly grow elsewhere.

Lisa Ansell is Assoc. Director of the USC Casden Institute and Lecturer of Hebrew Language at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles.