Key Highlights
- Personal space during a pandemic is a desirable amenity
- RentCafe used data from Yardi Matrix to determine which cities offered renters the most and least personal space
Living in the midst of a pandemic with shelter-in-pace restrictions, every square inch of personal space is worth its weight in gold.
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RentCafe just released a new study that indicates which of the country’s 100 largest cities offers the most and least personal space to its occupants. RentCafe researchers divided the average size of a rental apartment by the average number of renters per household in buildings with 50 or more units in each city.
Data on household size came from US Census data and each of NYC’s five boroughs were regarded as individual “cities.”
Counter-intuitively, cities with the smallest average apartment sizes were not the cities where renters had the least personal space. Rather than unit size, cost and availability (or lack of availability) of rentals were determined which cities provided renters with the most and least personal space.
Least Personal Space
Aver. Sq’/Renter Aver. Sq’/Apt. Size
Santa Ana CA 292 859
Fremont CA 318 832
Queens NY 329 724
Chula Vista CA 340 869
Brooklyn NY 351 737
Anaheim CA 353 851
Hialeah FLA 356 830
Manhattan NY 393 747
El Paso TX 397 810
Los Angeles CA 412 791
Most Personal Space
Louisville KY 731 933
Winston-Salem NC 723 916
Omaha NB 689 924
Kansas City KS 685 898
Greensboro NC 685 938
Boise ID 678 903
Atlanta GA 677 976
Richmond VA 677 865
Raleigh NC 674 959
Memphis TN 671 919
Santa Ana has the least personal space of all the 100 largest cities in the US because it has an average of 2.9 renters living in its medium sized units. Newark NJ, on the other hand, averages only 1.7 renters per apartment in its smallest average apartment size of 697 square feet. Therefore, Newark with its smallest apartment size comes in 11th as the most crowded for renters because each renter “gets” 416 square feet of personal space.
As you can see from the above charts, eight of the ten cities with the least amount of personal space live in New York and California while North Carolina has three of the top ten cities where renters have the most personal space.
Thanks to RentCafe and The New York Times.
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