If you guessed the Big Apple, you'd be wrong. It's the City by the Bay with a median rent of $1,463; New York City had the fifth highest at $1,187. San Jose, Boston, and Washington, D.C. were ranked second, third, and fourth respectively.
San Francisco, a city where "63.6 percent of all units are occupied by renters... has the highest median rent among the nation’s largest cities, beating New York handily, according to data from 2010 to 2012 released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, reports Examiner staff writer Jonah Owen Lamb.
San Francisco is the 14th-largest city in the country, with roughly 825,000 residents as of 2012, and it beat out every larger city in the U.S., and a handful of other high-rent locales, when it comes to median rents: $1,463.
The highest median rent, though, is not a measure of housing affordability, which looks at income as well. In San Francisco, "rents equaling 35 percent or more of household income only applied to 37.6 percent of rental units", writes Lamb. By contrast, Los Angeles, where median rent was $1,159, a whopping 52.7 percent of rental units paid 35 percent or more of their household income to rents," he adds.
While not the most unaffordable city in terms of rental costs, it ranked as the highest concern among San Francisco residents in a September survey, with "50 percent of those polled [citing] the affordability of living in The City as their No. 1 concern," writes Lamb.
The survey is based on "data from 2010 to 2012 released today [Nov. 14] by the U.S. Census Bureau." It was "released as part of the 2012 annual American Community Survey's three-year look at housing data," Lamb writes.
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