The areas with no affordable escape from pollution
Environmental burden is usually mapped on its own. This lens combines it with rent burden, rent measured as a share of local income, to find the areas where residents face the worst pollution exposure and have the least financial room to leave it.
Exposure is the equal-weighted mean of six CalEnviroScreen measures: diesel particulates, traffic proximity, fine particulates, ozone, cleanup sites and hazardous waste. An area scores highly here only when both halves are high, so a polluted but affordable area and an expensive but clean one both sit lower than a place carrying each at once.
Same weighting, on a map of all 7,644 areas, where you can change the balance and see every measure behind a place.
Highest combined burden
Mean score across every measured cell in each neighborhood, ranked against 262 neighborhoods. Names carried by fewer than three measured cells are left out, as are the cluster names this project invented where no established neighborhood name existed.
| # | Neighborhood | Burden score | Median rent |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Downtown LA | 96 | $1,425/mo |
| 2 | Chinatown | 96 | $1,600/mo |
| 3 | Arlington Heights | 90 | $1,650/mo |
| 4 | Cudahy | 88 | $1,525/mo |
| 5 | Vernon | 88 | $1,425/mo |
| 6 | Hollywood | 86 | $1,850/mo |
| 7 | Elysian Valley | 86 | $1,775/mo |
| 8 | Avocado Heights | 86 | $1,900/mo |
| 9 | Irvine Business Complex | 85 | $2,775/mo |
| 10 | Historic South-Central | 85 | $1,350/mo |
| 11 | East Hollywood | 85 | $1,625/mo |
| 12 | Westlake | 84 | $1,375/mo |
| 13 | Van Nuys | 84 | $1,700/mo |
| 14 | Central-Alameda | 84 | $1,425/mo |
| 15 | Sun Valley | 84 | $1,725/mo |
| 16 | Bell Gardens | 83 | $1,550/mo |
| 17 | Maywood | 82 | $1,450/mo |
| 18 | Florence | 82 | $1,400/mo |
| 19 | Lincoln Heights | 82 | $1,350/mo |
| 20 | El Monte | 82 | $1,625/mo |
| 21 | West Puente Valley | 81 | $2,525/mo |
| 22 | North Hollywood | 80 | $1,750/mo |
| 23 | Panorama City | 80 | $1,750/mo |
| 24 | Irvine Spectrum District | 80 | $2,775/mo |
| 25 | Valley Glen | 79 | $1,750/mo |
This ranking describes conditions, not blame, and it is the layer of the index most worth citing alongside the underlying CalEnviroScreen figures rather than on its own.
Use this data
Free to reuse with credit, including commercially.
How this is measured
CalEnviroScreen 4.0 (six exposure percentiles) adjusted by ACS rent-to-income
Every measure is a percentile rank from 0 to 100 against all 7,644 populated cells in Los Angeles and Orange County, so a score describes how an area compares within the region rather than against a national baseline. This lens scores 7,479 of them. Block-group figures are blended onto the grid by distance-weighted nearest centroids.
Data compiled 2026-08-20, methodology v1. Free to reuse with credit under CC BY 4.0; place counts come from OpenStreetMap and carry share-alike. Full terms, column definitions and limitations are on the data page.
Other ways to read the index
- Compare two places side by side
Every measure at once for up to four areas, each drawn against the whole region.
- Where rent goes furthest
Neighborhoods across LA and Orange County ranked by median rent against every other area in the region, using ACS block-group data.
- Cheap rent without needing a car
Neighborhoods in LA and Orange County that combine low rent with walkable streets and transit access, ranked from block-group and EPA walkability data.
- Low rent and clean air together
Where lower rent overlaps with cleaner air in LA and Orange County, using CalEnviroScreen diesel particulate and traffic data alongside ACS rents.
- Tree cover, clean air, little traffic
LA and Orange County neighborhoods ranked on air quality, traffic exposure and tree canopy, from CalEnviroScreen and national land-cover data.
- Plenty nearby, easy to get around
LA and Orange County neighborhoods ranked on restaurants, cafes, groceries and parks nearby combined with walkability and transit access.
- Where home prices go furthest
LA and Orange County neighborhoods ranked by ACS median home value, showing where buying costs least relative to the rest of the region.
- Where police report the fewest incidents
LA and Orange County neighborhoods ranked by police-reported violent and property incident rates, from LAPD, LA County Sheriff and CA DOJ records.
- Where growing up led to higher adult earnings
LA and Orange County neighborhoods ranked on Opportunity Atlas outcomes: what children raised in each area earned as adults, from Census-linked tax records.