Southern California’s housing market has spent the last decade pulling a neat little trick: inland counties are racking up the biggest percentage gains while coastal areas still wear the region’s highest price tags like a very expensive badge of honor. That split is reshaping what “affordable” means and forcing buyers to rethink where they can actually land a home.
Columnist Jonathan Lansner at The San Diego Union-Tribune dug into ATTOM homebuying data through Sept. 30, comparing all six Southern California counties over a full decade to see where prices climbed the fastest. His breakdown shows the biggest percentage jumps cropping up inland rather than along the coast, and comes with an interactive tool that lets readers see the decade-long winners and laggards by county.
What the San Diego analysis found
A significant part of the story hinges on basic math. In places like the Inland Empire, home prices started from a lower base, so each dollar added translates into a much larger percentage gain. Coastal counties, by contrast, still dominate when you look at raw dollars, even if their percentage growth looks tamer on paper.
To put it in perspective, Zillow data cited by the Los Angeles Times pegged the six-county average home value at approximately $860,000 as of this September. So yes, inland areas may be posting flashier percentage gains, but that does not exactly make the coast a bargain. Looking at both percentage change and absolute price is key to understanding how affordable (or not) each county really feels to buyers.
Why inland markets jumped
Analysts point to several forces pushing demand away from the shoreline, including migration out of historically pricier coastal cities, buyers seeking larger homes, and the spread of remote work that makes a longer commute to the office less burdensome, with many inland markets starting from lower prices and not always keeping up with new construction, that extra demand helped fuel faster percentage gains, even as Los Angeles and Orange counties held onto the highest dollar values.
Local officials and planners say this pattern is turning up the heat on long-running debates about building more housing near major job centers and transit, since both inland and coastal markets are feeling the squeeze in different ways.
How readers can explore the numbers
Lansner’s column comes with a county-by-county interactive visualization that allows readers to click through all six Southern California counties, compare 10-year percentage changes side by side, and see how their area ranks. The Flourish graphic is available at Flourish, and the full analysis and methodology are laid out in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
