“It’s dehumanizing,” Meadows said. “Truly the worst period of my life. Every place I saw online was off the market within a day. I felt hopeful.”
These days, he has a room in a shared apartment in Jamaica Plain. But her anxiety about her next move, which she feels she must do because of a conflict with a roommate, is creeping back into Boston’s traditional apartment hunting season, which is even more intense than last year.
While rents have cooled in many US cities as the pandemic eases, they are accelerating in Boston. Job vacancies are on the decline, reaching historic lows in 2021.
There are many reasons why. Rising interest rates have slowed the home buying market, leaving more people renting. And that in turn reduces the supply of available units, as new construction slows. Turnover is also down, as tenants tired of moving during the pandemic choose to stay in their current place.
“What we’re seeing now, unfortunately, is a return to normal,” said Chris Salviati, a senior economist at rental website Apartment List. “We saw rents fall for the first time in a long time at the start of the pandemic, but the reality is that Boston is so undersupplied that even with the broader slowdown we’re seeing in the housing market, rents will remain only. climbing.”
All that means that finding an apartment here – at any price – has become a very painful task.
Sara Feldman, for one, has given up on finding something better. An instructor at Harvard University, Feldman has spent the last five years in a shared living collaborative with four other people in Cambridge and, while the rent is cheap, he is confined to a single room. He couldn’t help but think of his old place in central Illinois, a 1,500-square-foot apartment that cost $1,050 a month.
The search for a new apartment within commuting distance of Harvard this year only made him more discouraged. Everything is small, or out of the way, and too expensive.
“All the places I see on the market would be financially suicidal for me,” said Feldman, 43. “There are no good options.”
This is how it feels for more people. While rents in the Boston area have long been high, they have historically not risen as quickly as in some other markets, and that has often been the case during the pandemic. Cities like Tampa, for example, have seen rents balloon nearly 40 percent over the past three years, according to Apartment Listing data, more than double the rate in Boston.
But over the past year, as rental markets nationwide have begun to cool, rents in Greater Boston have continued to rise: up 6 percent since March 2022, outpacing the national average. That puts the median rent for a one-bedroom in Boston at $2,011, according to Apartment List, making it one of the most expensive rental markets in the country, on par with New York City and San Francisco.
It’s driven by the same dynamic that drove home prices so high: too much demand for too little supply.
Greater Boston’s vacancy rate, a measure of how many apartments in the region are unrented, was at 0.49 percent, down from 0.59 percent last year, according to BostonPads.
A healthy vacancy rate, says Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of BostonPads, will be somewhere around 6 percent. Vacancies peaked at about 9 percent in 2020 as people left Greater Boston, but have otherwise been below 6 percent for years.
“That tells you how difficult it is today,” Salpoglou said. “Many people stay in their same apartment because they don’t want to risk the market. And that means there are so few vacancies that those apartments that do come on the market go for higher prices. It’s a crazy cycle. Almost broke the wheel.”
It can be especially intense this time of year, as rentals begin to hit the market before the infamous moving day of Sept. 1 of Boston, where somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the city’s leases are flipped.
Having so many housing markets at once means that the competition to find a place is immense. Listings disappear in days. Facebook groups for apartment hunters have become a free-for-all. And securing a place becomes a matter of who is willing to put up the money first.
“It’s like you’re in a race to be the first to send a down payment for apartments that have been listed for a day or two, sometimes places people haven’t even toured,” said Sam Downes, a 27-year- old transport engineer. “Honestly, it’s like a second job.”
Downes is trying to avoid re-entering the rental market for that exact reason, but it can’t be avoided this year.
This summer he plans to move out of the apartment in Roslindale where he has lived since 2020, and has spent more time than he can count sifting through Zillow listings and talking to real estate brokers in his search.
“It’s getting pretty tiring,” he said.
And there is no end in sight. Salviati, the Apartment List economist, said the only thing that could take some pressure off Greater Boston’s rental market in the short term is lower interest rates, which could encourage more people to buy. houses instead of rent. But it’s anyone’s guess when that might happen.
In the meantime, finding an apartment will continue to be difficult. And not all will prevail.
Gabriela Benavides Jaramillo, 23, moved to Boston five years ago to study at Berklee College of Music. After graduating last year, he wanted to stay to contribute to the city’s music scene and live near friends.
But it shouldn’t be. After what felt like an endless search, he gave up a few months ago, and moved to Florida to temporarily stay with family. Now, he’s thinking about a graduate degree, and he’s hesitant to attend a school in Boston.
“There’s no guarantee I’ll find a place” to live, Jarmillo said. “Boston seems like a hazard.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @andrewnbrinker.
