$1,500 A Month Gets Chicago Renters Less Than 650 Square Feet
By Mae Rice in News on Jul 21, 2016 4:37PM
We have long known that the rent in Chicago is too dang high. But let's put that aside for a second. Let's assume everyone has $1,500 a month for rent. Now, a new study from rental service Rentcafe reports, there's a new problem: our apartment will be too dang small. Apparently, $1,500 in Chicago rents you 641 square feet—which means space is at roughly as much of a premium here as it is in Seattle and San Diego.
In this infographic, RentCafe illustrates how many square feet you can rent for $1,500 in the 30 biggest cities in the U.S. Their findings are based on the average price-per-square-foot in complexes with 50+ units in each city, and draws on data from Yardi Matrix.
(Satisfyingly, the squares in the infographic are to scale.)
Chicago doesn't have it quite as bad as New York, the most cramped city in our fair nation, where $1,500 gets you just 271 square feet. (Space is even scarcer there than in San Francisco, even though in SF, if you'll recall, people are living in literal boxes.) Still, Chicago is much more cramped than Memphis, where $1,500 gets you 1,948 square feet. And just a stone's throw away from us, in Indianapolis, Chicagoans could rent 1,724 square feet with $1,500 a month—more than double what we can rent here.
Of course, there are a few things RentCafe's study doesn't account for. For one, it doesn't factor in the IRL range of apartments available in each city. As RentCafe notes, it's hard to find real 271-square-foot apartments in Manhattan, though they would hypothetically be affordable. Likewise, the study assumes space is renters' number one concern, when really there are tons of metrics to evaluate an apartment on before you rent it: location, cuteness, how normal the landlord is, visibility and/or shamelessness of bugs, etc. This isn't the full, pungent story of renting in Chicago—but it sure does explain those waves of claustrophobia that sometimes hit in the night.