2014’s Most and Least Expensive Metros | Hacker News Reader

2014’s Most and Least Expensive Metros

blog.kwelia.com

44 pointsgphil36 comments

Should add "US" to this title.

2014's Most and Least Expensive US Metros.

I agree, I thought this article was going to be about public transportation, since in many places outside the U.S. a "metro" is a subway/train.

I was actually looking forward to a comparison of actual metro fares.

I actually had posted it with (For Rental Housing) tacked on the end of the title for clarity, but the mods saw fit to remove that part. Omitting the "in the US" part from that was myopia on my part though--we only aggregate data in the US for now.

Call it metropolitan instead of metro. Metro might be short for metropolitan but it means subway, not city.

Nouning an adjective doesn't help much. I've always heard "metro area" anyway, not just "metro".

The maps they provide are pretty cool: https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Houston-Sugar%20La...

but switching the city in the list doesn't work for me, I can't see the median income or median income / median apartment rent either (I tried on Firefox and Chrome on Fedora)

To go to interesting cities I had to enter them manually in the URL

Not good! I'm looking into this, sorry.

Edit: This should be fixed now. Anyone, please let me know if you're still having issues.

I can switch cities, but I don't understand why I have to. Is it not possible to show everything all at once on the map?

Thanks, I'm now using Firefox on Windows 8.1 and it works fine, I'll check for Fedora tomorrow.

However I tried a random city : Helena-West Helena, AR https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Helena-West%20Hele...

and it says "Uh-oh! Looks like we don't have enough data for this MSA yet. Please try another selection." , fine, but the problem is the list of cities has now disappeared.

As ars commented, in the future if you could have something that finds out in which area you are currently looking, and loads automatically the data for the area, that would be even better!

Nice compliment to home sales info from Trulia... http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/

In the SF map, what's in the Contra Costa county subdivision over on the right side that makes rent there more than double it's surrounds? Rent there is comparable to the heart of SF.

$/sqf is a poor measure of rental costs. Because a 400sf apartment in NY is not 1/2 of the cost of a 800sf apartment in NY.

EX: from the same complex. http://www.equityapartments.com/new-york/new-york-city-apart...

  418 sqft	from $2,920 = 6.9$/sf
  727 sqft	from $3,490 = 4.8$/sf

> Because a 400sf apartment in NY is not 1/2 of the cost of a 800sf apartment in NY.

OP here. This is true, but given its flaws this measure is still the industry standard for benchmarking various markets in rental housing. We actually seek to rectify this problem by creating market rent estimates based on a rental's detailed attributes in our product.

This is true, but what's strange is the curve bends back. There are so few 3 or 4BR apartments, that the per sq foot goes higher with bigger apartments. (Before leaving, we were paying ~6 per sf for a 2BR in the UWS zoned for a crappy school)

It would be great to see comparable sale prices to calculate price to rent ratios. Looking at those rents, and considering the drop in prices since 2008, it looks like a great time to be a landlord. (At least from my perspective in Canada.)

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oa...

Roswell, NM >> "Uh-oh! Looks like we don't have enough data for this MSA yet. Please try another selection" (no surprise). >> Click Back >> Cool! they must have an API so I can build my own app... (page displays only JSON data from original CA map).

Firefox 34.05, Slackware.

I imagine NY would be much pricier if Long Island was left out.

Perhaps, but Long Island is definitely not what I'd call inexpensive.

Where does Detroit rank on this? Since there is not a text list to go with the images and I'm totally blind I can not tell.

It's not on the list. The least expensive metros range from $0.50/sqft to $0.65/sqft and Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI is $0.94/sqft. That metro area is larger than just the city of Detroit itself though, which is probably what you're curious about?

Some of those rental prices are downright depressing. Until you realize you're paying more than the average.

Very interesting heat maps.

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oa...

The names of the cities in the charts on the y-axis are cut off.

Oops, I thought this was going to be about transit systems :P

Oxnard? Really? I drove through there in January on holiday in the US and I've never seen a more depressing town in my life.

Where do these prices come from? a 1,000 sq ft apartment in San Francisco would be great to find for $2,500 a month.

The data is not only San Francisco proper, it's the entire "San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA" MSA. There's a lot of variation within that:

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oa...

If you zoom in, much of the city is over $4 per square foot, some almost $5. That seems more realistic. I wonder how rent control gets factored in.

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oa...

Site breaks on Coeur d'Alene, ID. It reverts back to San Francisco.

Right, because it goes to https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Coeur%20d i.e. it chops off the "apostrophe" and everything after. URL escaping gone wrong, I guess.

I'd hardly call Branson or Joplin "metropolitan."

;)

Joplin born and retired to here ^_^.

It's a official Census Metropolitan Statistical Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joplin,_Missouri_metropolitan_...

Joplin itself isn't that big (~55K residents, although population doubles during the day), but the 3 county metro area is estimated at 207,488 for 2013, more than half of that in Jasper Country, which most of Joplin is in.

And commuting isn't exactly a tough proposition in this area.

> And commuting isn't exactly a tough proposition in this area.

I can see that having a certain appeal.

One of the things I love about St. Louis is the relatively low amount of traffic relative to the metro's size.

I guess you're not going 270 north in the morning and south in the evening. I hear 40 and 70 coming out of and going into St. Charles is no picnic either. 44 always seems to flow though.

44 and 55 all day, baby. 40 is only rough around Forest Park and 270 during rush hour. And when I say rough, I mean 5-10 minute delay. Which isn't much compared to other cities.

I went to college in Chicago. There's a magnitude order of difference between traffic here and traffic there.

St. Louis businesses are pretty distributed between the city and county so there isn't a huge downtown rush in the mornings and evenings. The most traffic you'll see downtown is when the Cards are playing.

Boy oh boy those charts. :(

gphil you should give much more space to the names of the cities. You have plenty of room.

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