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Ah, the Golden State, with its glassy Pacific beaches and its hazy sunshine. California really is the promised land.
Or is it?
A study released on Tuesday by WalletHub counted the best and worst small cities in America. The bottom 23, out of the 1,268 ranked, were in California, with the city of Bell topping—well, bottoming—the list.
Has the Golden State lost its shine?
“We were surprised that so many of the worst cities were in California,” says Jill Gonzalez, an analyst at WalletHub. “But a lot of this is just snowballing down from the economic factors.”
WalletHub measured factors including poverty rate; number of restaurants per 100,000 residents; unemployment rate; school system ranking; crime; and homeownership.
What it found was a tale of two states, both geographically and socioeconomically. California—the most economically unequal state in the nation, according to a separate report—also is home to 15 out of 20 of our most expensive cities. A closer look reveals why.
Whereas some of the best places to live are in the tech-booming areas of Northern California—Los Gatos (which has the second-lowest level of residents below poverty level) in Silicon Valley checks in at 109, and Los Altos at 122 (they’re not at the top because they’re just not affordable enough)—the great bulk of the state’s low-ranked cities are in Southern California. Most of them are in southern Los Angeles County, including Lynwood, Compton, Huntington Park, and Bell Gardens.
These cities “were designed as workforce housing when there were a lot of manufacturing jobs in California and you could afford a home,” says Josué Barrios, a Realtor® in Downey, a town in the same area. But things went downhill in the 1980s. “Those jobs have left, and they haven’t been replaced.” More recently, the recession compounded the economic malaise.
Then there are the environmental factors. “They’re sandwiched between major freight corridors that come in from the ports,” says Barrios. Those clogged freeways contribute to major pollution, and, in addition to the health hazards, they make locals’ commutes risky.
Many of the cities are food deserts—areas without easy access to healthy food, which contributes to rampant childhood obesity. According to Barrios, this is because land-use and zoning laws make it easier to open a liquor store than a grocery store.
Meanwhile, despite their lack of desirability, housing still isn’t cheap. The average home price in Bell, the worst small city in America according to this ranking, is a whopping $499,000.
“In a lot of these cities, people just aren’t pulling in the household income to afford a home,” says Gonzalez. “You might not get the same cost of living in Compton [as in] Los Angeles, but it’s definitely skewing higher than the middle of America.”
So people just can’t afford to buy a home. Low homeownership rates generally correlate to a lower quality of life, because residents aren’t as invested in their community, Barrios says.
(Homeownership is low in some wealthy areas, too. The highest housing costs and lowest homeownership rate in WalletHub’s ranking is in West Hollywood.)
The five cities on the list with the lowest level of college grads were all in California, and their public schools suffer from neglect, Barrios says.
Without the good schools, the jobs, and the safe streets, these cities have also seen population loss, another of the ranking factors.
“There’s a large exodus from these places,” says Gonzalez.
It sounds dismal, but for his part, Barrios, who grew up in the area and was even mayor of Cudahy, a town just south of Bell, isn’t discouraged. He’s seen a new generation of legislative leadership and already heard rumblings of change, with new parks, talks of rerouting the freeways, and commitments to reinventing the schools.
“I know that our cities are not going to be there in five or 10 years,” he says, “but I’m hopeful.”
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