Finding affordable apartments in LA and Orange County is becoming downright impossible.

Rents are soaring to record-highs, and they could keep climbing over the next year. A housing expert says the reason the rent is so high is because of a pending state assembly bill, which will inevitably become law.

“I think it’s very high,” said one anonymous resident about the rent. “Mine is $1,700 a month for a one-bedroom.”

“It’s going up a lot,” said another resident, Skip Mukes. “The best I could find was $1,800 a month.”

According to the OC Register and Bureau of Labor Statistics, LA and OC rents soared at a 5.8 percent annual rate from July 2018 to July 2019 – the highest for that month since 2005.

Mukes is all too familiar with where we were then, and where we are now.

“When I came back to Los Angeles, the rents had skyrocketed based on the way it was when I lived here in 2009,” said Mukes.

The stats say so far this year, the LA/OC rent index has risen an average of 5.5 percent compared to 4.9 percent in 2018 and 4.6 percent from 2015-2017.

“It’s a result of the impending state legislation Bill AB-1482,” said Apartment Association of Orange County President Nicholas Dunlap.

That’s the rent control bill. Dunlap says property owners are raising rent before the bill becomes a statewide law and rent can’t be raised above a certain level.

“You now have a situation where people are kind of looking ahead and seeing the writing on the wall with this impending legislation and realizing, ‘Hey, if we didn’t get this done ahead of time then we could really be in a tough spot,'” said Dunlap.

Dunlap says that assembly bill is in the Senate Committee on Appropriations.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also says gas cost 1.5 percent more and food costs are up 3.1 percent in LA and Orange County in the last year.