When Rob Lowe moved to California with his mother and siblings in the 1970s, they settled in Malibu. Money was scarce. Divorce can be economically crippling for obvious reasons, and Lowe's parents had divorced. Hard as it is to imagine, Malibu was somewhat “working class” then, which helps explain the why behind where they moved to in California. A call to his father in Ohio was a rare luxury.
Nowadays one would be hard pressed to find hard-up families who would move to Malibu. Where would they live? Everything is so expensive. California housing isn't expensive solely because of stringent development rules. A lot of it's just a function of rising wealth in an economically dynamic state (if a country, California would have the world's fifth largest economy) chasing what's finite. Evidence supporting the previous point is downtown Los Angeles. Real estate there was not-too-long-ago cheap. So was living cheap. Now it's a popular place to live, and as a consequence of DTLA's popularity it's increasingly expensive to take up residence.
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