According to the rental site Zumper, the median rent for a one-bedroom house in San Francisco last month was $3,590. For the same price, you could rent a house in Zumper’s cheapest city (Wichita, Kansas, $450 a month) and have enough left over to buy a monthly bottle of Napa’s Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, the ninth most expensive wine on the market today.
Once again, San Francisco ranked as the priciest city in Zumper's National Rent Report. The $3,590 price tag was a 2.6 percent bounce from the previous month, but still a little below Zumper’s all-time high of $3,670 last October. For the October price, folks in Wichita could also treat themselves to this record-setting $80 Starbucks latte every month, on top of the wine.
Possibly more alarming is the continuing ascent of rents in Oakland, which climbed to the survey's number four spot in February: $2,250 a month. That just barely dislodges San Jose from number four; a one-bedroom down there is also $2,250, but for Oakland that number is a record, rising 2.3 percent and breaking the previous Oakland Zumper high of $2,210 back in December.
For the price of renting a home in Oakland, big spenders in Wichita can pay the rent and also buy airfare to Toronto to go eat this $1,000 steak at the Harbour Sixty Steakhouse.
New York City and Boston came in number two and three, at $3,280 and $2,290 a month, respectively, an increase of 1.9 percent over January in New York, but a decline of 2.1 percent in Boston. (Zumper notes that Boston rents have been flat for some time.)
This means that if you were renting in New York instead of San Francisco, you could pay the rent and buy your kids a new 3D printer every month. Move to Boston and for what you're paying now on average you could get a one-bedroom house and a four-night stay at a Baja coast resort every month.
(For the record, these products are not sponsors.)
For that matter, even just moving from a one-bedroom house in San Francisco to the same house in Oakland would free up enough money every month to buy 25 kilos of black market, poached abalone.
Zumper calculates average rents by aggregating a million active listings in the United State's 50 largest metro areas by population on a month-to-month basis. We calculated all the rest of that stuff mostly just with Google. You can download the full Zumper report here.
- March 2016 Rent Report, Brief [Zumper]
- March 2016 Rent Report, Full [Zumper]
- Most Expensive Wines [WineSearcher]
- 101 Shot Latte Sets Record [People]
- Introducing the $1,000 Steak [Vv]
- Mattel's $300 3D Printer [The Verge]
- Riu Palace Cabo San Lucas [Cheap Caribbean]
- The Complete Black Market Price Guide [Zero Hedge]
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