I can’t comment on whether rents are going up, but can say that rents are about 1/3 the cost of an equivalent mortgage in Poway.
We rented a $950,000 house in a nice Poway neighborhood, while we were building a house, and paid $2500/month. The landlord had just purchased the house as a rental (investment) property, and her mortgage should have been about 3x that amount.
Now we are selling our newly constructed home, and are again looking at rentals in Poway, and am surprised that most houses rent for $1650 – $2250.
We are taking out the equity, and renting for the next 5 years until the market corrects. I think the bubble forecasters are conservative in expecting a 20% – 30% correction, because in any excess, the pendulum first swings the other way before it normalizes. A correction of 40% – 50% is more likely, and if you follow the trendline of median house price/per capita income, and the trendline for housing prices following inflation, you will get to about a 50% correction. It may take 4 – 5 years to get there.