
2014’s Most and Least Expensive Metros - gphil
http://blog.kwelia.com/2015/01/06/2014s-most-and-least-expensive-metros/
======
rocky1138
Should add "US" to this title.

2014's Most and Least Expensive US Metros.

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wyck
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.

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gphil
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.

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

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

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vmarsy
The maps they provide are pretty cool:
[https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Houston-
Sugar%20La...](https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Houston-Sugar%20Land-
Baytown,%20TX)

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

~~~
gphil
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.

~~~
vmarsy
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...](https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Helena-
West%20Helena,%20AR)

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!

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Retric
$/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...](http://www.equityapartments.com/new-york/new-york-city-
apartments/midtown/west-54th-apartments.aspx)

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

~~~
gphil
> 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.

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tempestn
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.)

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jqm
[https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-
Oa...](https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oakland-
Fremont,%20CA)

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.

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sinemetu11
I imagine NY would be much pricier if Long Island was left out.

~~~
cjf4
Perhaps, but Long Island is definitely not what I'd call inexpensive.

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jareds
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.

~~~
lost-theory
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?

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mathattack
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...](https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oakland-
Fremont,%20CA)

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

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

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te_chris
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.

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kingnothing
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.

~~~
gphil
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...](https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oakland-
Fremont,%20CA)

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

~~~
jzwinck
Right, because it goes to
[https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Coeur%20d](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.

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

;)

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hga
Joplin born and retired to here ^_^.

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

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.

~~~
kendallpark
> 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.

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mikerichards
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.

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kendallpark
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.

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serve_yay
Boy oh boy those charts. :(

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

