Who for? Like we paid $1700 plus $80 for an extra spot. I think they will "renovate" the unit and try to rent it for more now. It wasn't in the city, and it was one bedroom (up about 50% over 12 years), but that's not a cheap area. Is it that a disproportionate number of rentals are in NYC? Is this because corporations are buying up and renting out single family houses?
Nationally. The median monthly asking rent was over $2k, apparently.
I am skeptical of that figure, but also astonished if it's accurate.
I think it's accurate. The higher the rent the longer it stays on the market so it's higher than the average rent.
I also think that a lot of cheap places go through more informal markets that Redfin might not be seeing official listings for.
Looking at the article, the average might be for the 50 largest metro areas nationally (not every city across the country). Am I reading that right? It would make more sense.
Here's what I find for an average of what people are paying https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-rent-by-state
The Rent Is Too Damn High!
2: sure, but is there a higher number of rentals in expensive cities, which would affect the median?
Also, I don't in any way mean to say that housing is not hugely unaffordable for a lot of people. I moved further out to a rural ish suburb. I like it a lot, but if I'd had closer to the income I have now 10 years ago, with savings and no student debt, we could have bought in our old urban-ish inner city suburb. We're paying more on our mortgage for a proper house with a decent amount of space, but I figure that as renters, eventually we would be priced out. Tim was initially underpaid when he moved to the US (by around $20k) and it was tight but he could afford it. Even though he makes a bigger salary now, that apartment isn't really affordable on one salary, if you want to save for a house, say.
Yes, unless we get housing built routinely at a scale and in location approaching the demand, rent will keep going up and people will get more and more immiserated.
Median gross rent in 2016-20 ACS = $1,096. In 2006-10 it was 841.
It does seem like the moratorium end did not prompt a massive wave of evictions as some predicted, although they did go up from the data we have. Possibly because evictions have been a low boil for ages, and the moratorium wasn't reliably enforced.
Are there any meaningful ways to quantify how much housing needs to be built, or is it too irregular throughout the country?
I think it's possible but I don't know what the number is. In California it's in the millions. In some states it might be much lower vs population.
My understanding is that there was a lot of overbuilding in the aughts followed by under building in the teens. In MA, we built more housing in the 70's when our population was stagnant than we did in the last decade. But we're also building a ton of luxury stuff anywhere near the mbta in historically lower income areas. Boston, in particular, has very dysfunctional policies which encourage the production
See this profile of Boston's new progressive mayor Michelle Wu and what she's up against.
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/city-limits-boston-mayor-michelle-wu-affordable-housing/
Happy to report that my town cobbled together money from the Feds, state and town to make a highway crossing safer, add pedestrian-friend,y spots, bike lanes, park, benches and 30 units for affordable housing for elderly (62+) and disabled. There is an apartment complex that was approved bordering the old mill town by the river, but that property was listed for sale on Redfin not that long ago. Otherwise most of the building is large single family houses.
I've been pushing ADUs in my city. Right now you are allowed to have a detached ADU if it is in an area zoned rural or agricultural. Meanwhile, the dense parts of town are filled with 100 year-old stand-alone garages that could easily be into studio living space at a far lower cost than new construction.
The other option is to build soulless blocks of "workforce housing" on the outskirts of town.
How about soulless worker housing with small wooden ducks in the yard?
Thanks for making me picture a chain gang of sad rubber duckies ringed by shacks, Moby.
I mean, that's always my go-to image when someone mentions Walter Gropius.
Lots of people remember the politics of Weimar and forget the culture.
We built more in the 00's than before. I am suspicious of claims of overbuilding in the current urban context.
20: I was thinking more of some of the developments in Arizona and Florida from the early aughts.
21: Oh yeah, the sprawl for the sake of more packageable mortgages. That was awful, agreed.
I'm trying to move to LA (or the LA area) right now and while I'm not in a bad position relatively speaking* the gap between new, often "luxury"-style housing, and older construction is really frustrating. It seems like there are a bunch of vacancies at new complexes where studios start at $2600+/month and 1-bedrooms are even more while there are relatively fewer listings below that threshhold. I say "seems" because I don't know what's accurate. The really aggressive advertisers may not actually have many units on the market. But if it's true then the hoped-for effect of people moving out of less expensive housing as they increase their incomes may be muted.
If I weren't leaving the Bay Area, I wouldn't move out of my current place because the jump in rent to a nicer - not even necessarily larger - apartment would be more than I'd be willing to pay. I'd be curious to know the current median rent based on what people are actually paying, not just what's listed. I'm in a stabilized building (older construction, protected by law) and way below market now, having lived here seven years. I bet lots of people in expensive metros are basically feeling trapped - too expensive to move unless they leave the region, but not in high risk of eviction as long as they keep their current work and don't move.
Are we seeing 5+ people in a one bedroom apartment, on a large scale?
I don't know about 5+ people but in the Bay Area there are lots of apartment neighborhoods where it's extremely difficult to find street parking, which I suspect is due to apartments having dedicated parking for maybe 1 or 2 cars and enough residents for at least 2-3 cars per unit since pretty much everyone has a car. I'm surprised I'm not living in a neighborhood like that, as nearly every place in my price range when I moved here in 2014 was situated like that.
*I can afford to live alone in a one bedroom, or at least the rental listings suggest that I can find something that will work out eventually. This would likely not be possible if I hadn't switched into an "IT"-classified position in more-or-less the same field without actually going into "tech". I'd have tried to go into tech otherwise.
Oh, I didn't address the "how much are people crowding up".
HUD measures overcrowding by number of people per room in the house - that's per every room, but excluding bathrooms and kitchens. >1 people per room is overcrowding, >1.5 is severe overcrowding. So 3 people in a 1-bedroom counts as overcrowded, 4 as severely overcrowded.
LA arguably has a worse housing crisis than the Bay, as incomes are far lower but rents are not.
San Francisco, 2011-2015:
2011-2015, counties:
San Francisco: 6.3% overcrowded, 3.5% severely
Alameda: 6.5% overcrowded, 2% severely
Santa Clara: 7.7% overcrowded, 2.5% severely
Los Angeles: 11.8% overcrowded, 4.8% severely
2011-2015, counties:
San Francisco: 6.3% overcrowded, 3.5% severely
Alameda: 6.5% overcrowded, 2% severely
Santa Clara: 7.7% overcrowded, 2.5% severely
Los Angeles: 11.8% overcrowded, 4.8% severely
Is it fair to assume that these numbers have gotten worse in the last 3 years? Does remote workers moving to the suburbs, exurbs, Boise, or Montana make a difference, in the upper ranges? (I'm assuming that remote workers come disproportionately from the top third of rentals.)
I doubt it because I think most of the overcrowding is among workers who couldn't go remote.
There may have been an improvement just because of the (pretty brief, now regressed) drop in rents in 2020.
But I can't even find this HUD data post-2015.
i can never really participate in these discussions bc my perspective is so wildly distorted by being in sf ... we are toggling btwn buying a flat & paying vastly more per month on a loan than we do in rent (old flat, rent controlled) even with a substantial down payment vs continuing to grow the savings pot for 5-10 years while negotiating with the landlord to make some joint-investment improvements to the place we are in, & possibly staying in the rent controlled flat long enough to get the kid on the lease so that he'd at least have that housing option. could be the most valuable legacy we leave him!