Inglewood, California, has fully been hit by gentrification. There doesn’t seem to be much of any “Inglewood Swangin” as Hip-Hop artist Mack 10 rapped about in the late 1990s. Current home prices in the former South Los Angeles “hood” spiked 63 percent from 2014 to 2018. This is no doubt one of the most quickly transforming pockets of Los Angeles, found a newly released analysis from PropertyShark.
According to PropertyShark, the median sale price in the South LA city went up from $298,044 in 2014 to $485,000 in 2018, making it the fastest-growing real estate market in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
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“That quintessential three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,500-square-foot house on a residential tree-lined street, that’s what we found here,” real estate agent Max Armand told Curbed.
Still, Inglewood is more affordable than nearby communities in L.A., where the median was $870,000 in 2018.
Several corporations have invested heavily in the area and a $2.6 billion NFL stadium was recently erected and is open next summer. A train line is on the way that will bring three Metro stations to the city.
“It’s popping over here,” said real estate agent Heather Presha of Keller Williams Realty in Inglewood. She formerly worked in Beverly Hills before opting to work the market in Inglewood a couple of years ago.
“The way things have been going, it’s been pretty crazy,” she says. “Four and a half years ago, I couldn’t get anyone get to move to Inglewood.”
“I don’t think that anyone thought that Inglewood would gain the momentum that it has,” said Jennifer Okhovat, an agent with Compass. “Buyers are being priced out of other neighborhoods and are seeing the potential that Inglewood has and the gentrification that is coming.”
There are those in the community who are fighting gentrification. They have urged city leaders to adopt rent control to assist tenants as housing costs rise.
