This is a Tableau visualization showing Median 1 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom prices and Per Capita Income for the 25 most populous cities in the United States.The Apartment Prices were scraped from Jan 23-25, 2023 Zumper 1 Bed, 1 Bath Apartment Listings (See code), and Per Capita Income were taken from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/205618/per-capita-income-in-the-top-20-most-populated-cities-in-the-us/ .

It should be noted that the apartment data is from January 2023 while the Per Capita Income was calculated using 2020 U.S. Census data (which is the most recent comprehensive US income public data). It should also be noted that the Per Capita Incomes represents the average income earned per person in a geographical region, and serves only as an estimate for the average income for residents.

The complete Web Scraping, Data Analysis and Tableau code can be found in the Github Repo: https://github.com/jrongtt/ApartmentDashboardFor those interested, I also created a Tableau dashboard that includes a geographic heat map of the median apartment prices: https://jrongtt.github.io/tab.html .

Oh man NYC /SD/Boston is painful.

I feel like median income would have been a better comparison…. Median rent and average income seems like a strange choice

Median Income Data only exists for Median Household income (at least reliable data I could find). So because I assumed one person would live in a one bedroom apartment, and median household income often represents more than one earning resident I chose Average Income to estimate the income per one person.

In the future I may investigate using median household then normalize by the number of workers per household. This might be more representative of a median income, but requires more statistical analysis.

It would be cool to have two versions of this graph, one in descending order of per capita income (like this one), and one in descending order of median rent.

And another one with the difference

Man I love San Diego but it is depressing

It would be interesting to see this displayed as a rent vs. income scatterplot.

This, is a good idea! I think I'll make one

It should also be noted, before anyone gets frustrated, that this list is based off of the population of the city and isn't related to the population of the metro areas the cities might reside in.

I see data like this and always wonder why Denver isn't considered HCOL.

It’s the method they used. Median rent vs avg salary. Probably because there dataset has a max income of 100 or 200k. If you there you know salaries are often much higher than thst

Boston data doesn't look right to me for income. I wonder if the datasets are counting all of the same people. The rent looks right though, its absurd here. No land and too many NIMBYs

I think the main concern here is how astronomically positively skewed average income is. Because of this median and mean are going to differ considerably but the median will more closely represent more people.

Also, if they have the data to calculate average individual income they necessarily have the data to calculate median individual income (because they are the same data).

Edit: typo

Who can actually afford to live there? But here in Europe, there are some cities as well that seem unaffordable. I knew a guy, who lived with his gf in London, and they paid 70% of their combined income in rent. You couldn’t even afford a car that way.

TIL: with a few exceptions, no matter where you live, roughly half of your income is going to rent.