Salaries in LA area are low. I used to get recruiter spam for positions paying 38k-50k and asking for two years of experience. This wasn't even very long ago, about late 2013 in the Santa Monica area
I don't think that is a truthy assessment as I just got a recruiter email in my inbox at $140k for full stack node.js. I think you can easily find both ends of the spectrum. Average seems to be about around $80-115k for most devs in LA.