Despite the rumors and any presidential confusion, the pandemic isn’t over. Nevertheless, the depopulated American downtowns of 2020 and 2021 are bouncing back, with city dwellers returning from their country retreats or parents’ houses to fill up restaurants, concerts, parks, public transit — and rental units.
That makes things hard for apartment hunters. Pandemic deals are long gone, replaced by record-high rents, with added competition from would-be buyers thrown back into the rental market by high prices, rising interest rates and a shortage of homes for sale. Simply put, housing is expensive and there isn’t enough of it.
You’d think that the steady increase in rental apartments in major cities around the country would help. A recent study by StorageCafe found that about 391,000 rental units have been completed since 2013 in the downtown areas of the 100 largest U.S. cities, making up more than 37 percent of all downtown apartments nationally. In some quickly expanding Southern cities, much larger gains were seen. In Nashville and St. Petersburg, Fla., for example, over 70 percent of apartments were added since 2013. Miami and Tampa, Fla. were close, with new units making up 69 and 66 percent of their downtown rentals.
But if you just go by volume, downtown Atlanta came out on top, with 21,508 new units since 2013, or 52 percent of rentals there. Los Angeles was next, with 19,342 new units, or 46 percent. In the Northeast, the rapidly transforming skylines of Jersey City and Downtown Brooklyn ranked eighth and ninth, with each adding nearly 20,000 units since 2013.
This week’s chart, based on StorageCafe’s research, shows the top 20 U.S. cities as measured by the number of new rental units built between 2013 and 2022.
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Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
