When Van Nuys High School students returned from summer break in August, the campus felt a bit different. Classrooms that once held 30 students now had more empty desks. Across LAUSD, enrollment had dropped again, continuing a slide that has seen the number of English learners alone fall from 157,000 in 2018 to roughly 62,000 in the current year.

“Weve lost teachers because we’ve had less students but I don’t really notice much of a difference in my classrooms because we still have so many students,” science teacher Ms. Dana Hung said.

NUTGRAF: The empty seats are part of a larger story. For more than two decades, California has lost more residents to other states than it has gained, driven by housing costs that have outpaced, long commutes and a cost of living that keeps climbing. Now with stepped-up federal immigration enforcement adding fear to the equation and school funding tied directly to attendance, the consequences are hitting schools like Van Nuys where it hurts most: right in the budget.

The pandemic accelerated the trend, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, but the roots go deeper. attributes this decline in residents in recent years to the covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Lori Ann Campbell, an Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at California State University Northridge said several forces were pushing Californians out .

“The social reasons are varied,” she said. “But the economic reasons are clearly tied to expensive housing costs, long commutes and employment.”

These costs show up in the data.

The Consumer Price Index, which tracks how much consumers pay for everyday goods like food, gas, healthcare and housing, tells the story in numbers. California’s CPI stood at 249.7 in 2015. By 2020 it had climbed to 285.3, and by 2024 it reached 342.0, according to the State of California Department of Industrial Relations. In less than a decade, the cost of living rose by about 37%.

Inflation has hit the entire country, but California’s cost of living was already among the highest in the nation, making each increase harder to absorb.

Housing is at the center of it, Campbell explained.

“Everyone needs a place to live, so housing costs affect us all,” she said.

People can work harder or find better-paying jobs, she said, but no one can set the rental price of an apartment. When housing costs rise faster than paychecks, some families make the practical decision to leave.

“Once families realize that housing costs are increasing at a faster rate than their pay is increasing, some will decide to search for more affordable locations,” she said. “That’s a pragmatic decision.”

“I have a couple of family members that moved to Idaho because costs were just too expensive down here, they have four kids,” history teacher Mr. Jacob Ferrin said.

The shortage goes beyond price. Even families with enough money to buy, face a different obstacle, Campbell said.

“Wall Street investors have increasingly turned to single family homes as investments,” she said. “Those investors can pay cash for homes, and many families trying to buy homes cannot compete with an all-cash offer.”

The pressure falls on different groups in different ways.

“Younger people who are trying to establish themselves, buy homes and have children may move,” Campbell said. Homeowners who have already built equity can cash out, selling in California and buying for less elsewhere.

Whether that pattern continues depends on whether the state can build its way out of the problem, Campbell said.

“It depends on whether California communities will be able to build enough housing, and, specifically, enough affordable housing,” she said. “Building luxury homes for the wealthy will not help younger families stay here. California needs to build ‘starter’ homes and townhouses.”

Housing costs also shape decisions about starting a family.

“If younger people are delaying having children because they can’t afford to start families or can’t find housing to accommodate a growing family, that may motivate them to move,” she said.
The pattern is not new.

“California has seen people moving out since the 1990s,” she said. “The states that have seen the most migration of Californians have historically been Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon.”

For many Californians, the decision involves more than money. In a state as diverse as California, leaving can mean giving up a community.

“Having a community of people who are of the same ethnicity as you is important,” she said. “Those are legitimate concerns.”

That concern has taken on new urgency as federal immigration enforcement has intensified in Los Angeles. ICE operations across the San Fernando Valley have targeted neighborhoods where Latino residents live and work.

“The federal government’s ICE activity has only heightened that concern,” Campbell said.

Despite the raids, the left-leaning politics in large California cities may still be appealing to some, even though the cost of living is high.

“Families may choose to stay in California, hoping that the state’s more liberal politics will offer some protection,” she said. “That’s also a pragmatic decision.”

Immigration enforcement has also pushed some families out of the country entirely.

“People who are undocumented or legal immigrants who are struggling to afford to live in California may return to their country of origin,” she said. “I think that’s part of the Trump administration’s goal, to make life so hard that people ‘self-deport.’”

Whatever the cause, the people leaving take their children with them. And in a state where school funding is tied to attendance, every missing student means less money.

“Population loss is already creating serious problems in California,” Campbell said. “People have moved out of state, but people also are having fewer children and Californians are getting older. All of those factors mean that there are fewer children than in the past.”

At Van Nuys High School, the enrollment decline has already changed daily life on campus. The school’s total site allocation for the current year is about $1.8 million, but after salaries and benefits, roughly $9,000 remains for everything else: paper, supplies, classroom materials.

“The school gets money per student so if there’s a student that’s absent, we actually don’t get money for that student which is what we use to pay our staff and principal and get supplies which is why attendance is kind of important,” Ferrin said.

Campbell explained that the phenomenon of reduced enrollment isn’t new.

“Public school districts across Southern California have been experiencing lower enrollment for several years,” Campbell said. “This was occurring before the pandemic and it is projected to worsen.”

But Ferrin also points to another reason for this decline in enrollment.

“Yes people are leaving, but birth rates are also declining because people aren’t having children,” he said. “So people leaving Los Angeles and people not having children are a part of the same economic problem which is people don’t have the money to live.”

LAUSD officials have said there are no planned school closures this year, but the financial pressure continues to build. With 2,176 students, Van Nuys remains one of the larger high schools in the district, but its budget has shrunk alongside enrollment.

“These will be hard, painful decisions for school districts to make,” Campbell said.

At Van Nuys, painful decisions have already been made through program cuts. Without students, the school is unable to acquire the needed funds to keep certain programs or teachers.

“As we lose students, we lose programs,” Ferrin said. “For example, we don’t have cooking anymore because even though the classes were full, it wasn’t a graduation requirement. And as a school, who are you going to cut, the teacher teaching a graduation requirement or the one who’s teaching an elective? Cooking was a really great program and a really great pathway and a lot of students loved it but that’s just part of the bad calculations that happen in these situations.”

The effects extend beyond schools. When working families leave, the communities they built behind them change, too.

“Losing working and middle-class families can create communities that become unaffordable,” Campbell said. “For example in Palo Alto teachers, social workers, fire fighters and police officers can’t afford to live in the communities that they work in.”

Ferrin explains that within his own life and the school community, many also can’t afford to live where they work.

“I know that there are a couple of teachers from Van Nuys that live in Lancaster and I have a friend who lives in Santa Monica but she has a house in Lancaster so that’s a crazy drive,” he said.

Campbell proposes a possible solution to this issue.

“What I would like to see is communities with more legal power to demand that developers build mixed-income housing developments – where housing is available at many price points, not just luxury housing,” she said. “Communities that have less segregated income are beneficial for everyone.”

This article originally appeared in the Early Spring 2026 print edition.