Friday, October 10, 2025

UCLA Survey: 20% of Californians Concerned About Ability to Pay Housing Costs

CITY NEWS SERVICE

Nearly 20% of California adults worried about their ability to pay their rent or mortgage during 2024, prompting some of them to either take a second job, cut back on health care or stop saving for retirement to help make ends meet, according to data from a UCLA survey released Thursday.

According to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research’s California Health Interview Survey, roughly 5.9 million California adults, or 19.9%, said they worried very often or somewhat often about paying their monthly housing costs in 2024. That’s up from 18.8% in 2023 and up from 15.1% in 2021.

About 15.6% of adults said they took a second job or performed additional work at their existing job to help pay their housing costs. About 14.2% said they stopped saving for retirement, while 15.9% racked up more credit card debt, 12.2% cut back on health food and 5.8% cut back on health care, according to the survey data.

Single parents with children were even more concerned about housing costs, with 36.2% saying they worried often or somewhat often about paying their mortgage or rent — well above the 12.8% among married parents with children.

“The California Health Interview Survey provides clear, quantifiable data showing that millions of Californians have been struggling to get by,” Ninez A. Ponce, principal investigator of CHIS and the center’s director, said in a statement. “This continues our history of CHIS providing freely accessible data about the vast, interconnected array of factors and conditions affecting the health of California’s large and diverse population.”

The survey also identified other areas of financial concern for residents, with 10.5% of adults saying they struggled to pay for their own or a household member’s medical bills over the previous year. About 15.4% reported they had to delay or forgo medical care in 2024, with roughly 25% of those people citing costs or insurance issues as the reason.

Nearly half of adults earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level — roughly $30,120 for a single adult — said they could not afford enough food in the past year, according to the survey data.

Meanwhile, the survey data also found a rising number of people experiencing acts of hate in California. According to the survey, about 3.1 million Californians aged 12 and up directly experienced a hate act — up from 2.6 million the prior year. About 15% of California aged 12 and older — or 4.8 million — reported witnessing a hate act in the previous 12 months.

“The data show that hate is pervasive,” Dr. Alex Bates, senior data analyst for the California Health Interview Survey and lead author of the fact sheet on acts of hate, said in a statement. “But understanding the types of hate acts people experience, reasons they are targeted, and where these incidents occur can help better inform approaches to prevent and address hate in California.”

Of the Californians who reported experiencing acts of hate, 83% said they encountered verbal abuse or insults, while 55% said they were targeted because of their race or skin color, while 40% were targeted due to characteristics such as ancestry, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.