this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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I don't believe average rent was $500 in 1990. In 1995 I was paying $450 per month to sleep on a couch in someone's house. I eventually saved enough for all of the moving expenses and managed to get a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in a terrible part of town for $485. When I found a roommate I moved to a better part of town and our two bedroom apartment was $700 per month. That was like 1996. This was all in a fairly affordable city. So pardon my suspicion, but I think this post is creating a rosier past than the one we lived through. Also, minimum wage was $4.25 an hour everywhere. Now it's $15-$20 per hour in most major cities. Overall I think the poor are making more comparatively, but the middle class are worse off, and it's a shrinking economic status group.
Quick Google for the Census Bureau only turns up median rather than mean:
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/time-series/coh-grossrents/grossrents-unadj.txt
Median is probably a better value here since it's going to reduce outlier effects.
Looks to me that median rent in most states in 1990 was closer to $300-400 per month than $500.
$620 for California, which is where I was. I guess some parts of the country are way cheaper, even though I was in a city that was considered affordable in California.
My 2007 apartment was $475. It is now $1,485.
Rents were fairlyish stable until the housing market crash.
That apartment was $790 in 2010. The rent hike was a long time ago, and since then it has just more or less been following inflation/gouging patterns seen elsewhere.
I will acknowledge that shit went crazy after covid too. My rent went up 22% in two years, and house prices were going up hundreds of thousands of dollars within a year.
Yeah that's true. I was lucky enough to have gotten a mortgage right before covid so I haven't personal experience on rent hikes as a result, I recognize.
It finally pushed us to get serious about buying, and we bought a home at the end of last year. We were feeling like we'd never be able to afford a house, but we made it happen! We had to move an hour outside of the city, but we still made it happen.