Which Cities Are Cheaper Then They Were 10 Years Ago?
I used Tableau & a bit of python + Pandas to figure out the rental price changes (from Zillow) adjusted for inflation (Bureau of labor statistics) per city. The numbers are truly shocking for renters, with significant above-inflation rental increases almost across the board. The geometric mean of each year’s increase is 2.5% per year above inflation, although real rents decreased in the last one and a half years. Those gains, however, are not ubiquitous, with Washing DC, Portland, San Fransisco, and Minneapolis rents falling since 2015. Chicago has the most stable rents, seeing barely any movement at all. The biggest movers are almost all small towns in warm weather climates, palm springs CA, Vero beach FL, malibu CA, for instance. Notably, Newport Rhode Island also makes that list. Here's the inflation adjusted full list & viz:
Trends
The most expensive cities in 2015 got more expensive slower then the least expensive ones (top 20, vs middle vs bottom 20):
It appears cities with recent political unrest that made national news saw rents go down. This is just an observation though, with no concreate evidence. it's possible it could any number of factors, like zoning reform, population changes, etc.
Change Map
Putting the real dollar rent change on a map, the only thing I can say for certain is it's getting more expensive to rent almost everywhere. Despite a population boom in Texas, Houston is cheaper than it was 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Same for NYC. Despite a population loss in Chicago, rents have barely changed. Florida and Arizona saw some of the fastest rental increasers in the country.
Stack
- Zillow and the BLS for rental & inflation data respectively
- Python & Pandas to prep the data and build the data sources.
- Tableau desktop to build the visualizations, hosted by tableau public
click here for code