Boston rent prices could soon surpass San Francisco’s as second-most expensive in U.S.

San Francisco is known for having some of the most expensive rental prices in the country. A new report from housing rental website Zumper found that the Bay Area has a new, and expensive, competitor: Boston.

“It’s pretty shocking,” said Jeff Andrews, a data journalist at Zumper who wrote the report. “If you said that in January 2020, Boston was about to pass San Francisco, you’d be like ‘You’re a crazy person. That would take an apocalypse.’ And lo and behold, it happened.”

Andrews analyzed the median one-bedroom apartment rent prices in major cities across the U.S. for January 2022, and found that Boston’s one-bedroom rent is $2,720, just $130 shy of San Francisco’s $2,850 rent. New York topped the list at $3,260, having beat out San Francisco since last summer. (The median one-bedroom rent nationally is $1,374.)

That would’ve been almost unthinkable just two years ago, when San Francisco’s one-bedroom price was $1,300 above Boston’s. Since then, San Francisco’s rents have stagnated somewhat, while Boston’s jumped.

In Boston, the median one-bedroom rent dropped by 19.2% between March 2020, when the pandemic hit and rent was $2,500, and January 2021, when it fell to $2,020. “That is an incredible number for nine months,” Andrews said.

Since then, Boston’s median one-bedroom rent is up 26.5% year-over-year, and 8.8% beyond the price in March 2020.

Andrews chalked this dramatic rise up to the parallel rise in home prices, because expensive homes become out-of-reach for renters who would otherwise want to buy, jacking up rental prices for everyone down the line. Inflation and increased wages have also increased prices.

Dawn Ruffini, president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, noted that Boston is a “destination city” with lots of opportunity for people looking for jobs.

Ruffini recommended that renters who are able should look into buying property instead, while interest rates are still low.

“When you look at the amount you’re paying for rent versus what that gets you for a mortgage, sometimes you have a pretty good apples-to-apples transition into ownership,” she said.

Of course, these expensive housing prices hurt the lowest-income renters most. Rachel Heller, CEO of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, placed the blame on a low housing stock and long zoning and approvals processes for new construction.

“It doesn’t mean that producing more homes will result in drops in rent,” she said. “We also need to put our resources into affordable housing so that while we’re growing the overall number of homes, we’re also increasing the number of homes that are affordable.”

Top 5 most expensive one-bedroom median rents, January 2022:

1. New York City, $3,260
2. San Francisco, $2,850
3. Boston, $2,720
4. San Jose, CA, $2,390
5. Miami, $2,340