The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington reached $2,100 this spring, according to real-estate listing site Zumper, making the DC region the nation’s fifth-most expensive metropolitan area for renters. The current figure, the site says, represents a 5 percent jump from the preceding quarter.
Of the data offered by Zumper, which do not cover the whole Washington area or even the entirety of the District itself, Georgetown is the priciest, with a median one-bedroom running $2,600 a month. Penn Quarter and Chinatown are not far behind, at $2,450 a month. Thirteen other neighborhoods measured by Zumper feature median monthly rents topping $2,000, and several more are close to that threshold. Prices drop off the further out the map goes from downtown DC, but even neighborhoods that were considered bargains a few years ago are now showing eye-popping rents, like Brookland, where the median one-bedroom goes for $1,900.
Nationally, Zumper found the highest median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, at $3,500. New York, Boston, and San Jose, California make up the rest of the top five. And the website also found that rents for two-bedroom units actually increased a bit faster over the most recent quarter, rising 5.4 percent to $2,920 across the region.
As with all real-estate-website heat maps, it’s necessary to mention that this represents just one company’s listings, and one that excludes much of the area, including almost everything east of the Anacostia River. Still, this map is just as good a piece of evidence as any showing how one-quarter of the District’s renters spend at least half their incomes on rent.
Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.
