Atlanta — unlike Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle — has not priced recent graduates out of the housing market, according to data newly provided to the Washington Post.
HotPads, a rental website, estimated the median rent per person in select neighborhoods in metro areas across the country; it then used Census data to provide a picture of the average gross salaries for workers ages 22-30, with college degrees, in various jobs.
All of that to answer: Which cities are and are not the most affordable for millennials? And where are the neighborhoods where more than a third (or more than half) or someone's gross salary is going to rent? In Atlanta, there are no such neighborhoods.
But that doesn't mean they're all cheap: Midtown, downtown and Inman Park all have median per-person rents of at least $950, according to HotPads' map of Atlanta neighborhoods based on their data.
Indeed, midtown is just under the cut for one mesure of affordability, with an average of 29 percent of someone's gross salary going toward rent, averaged over all occupations.
This data bears out broadly as well: Metro Atlanta renters paid an average $77 more in January than a year earlier, per the AJC's Christopher Seward, with an average rent of $962. According to one market research firm, that's the seventh-highest effective rent growth among major national markets; and it reflects demand that continues to exceed supply.
It was an issue debated at some length in a recent pair of columns, over on the AJC's Atlanta Forward blog.
"Expect Atlanta apartment rental rates to continue their upward march for years to come," Frank K. Norton Jr. wrote.
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