As the US continues to battle the coronavirus pandemic even as states reopen, large cities with high costs of living may be losing their appeal.
During the pandemic, more than 420,000 people left New York City for places like the Hamptons and upstate New York. Houses are flying off the market in the suburbs of Connecticut and New York. The pandemic has accelerated the trend of people fleeing cities for less dense areas with lower costs of living, as Business Insider's Aria Bendix recently reported.
New York isn't the only major city that saw an exodus. Rents in the San Francisco Bay Area plummeted in May as tech workers left the city and many wealthy residents bought homes in wine country. As Business Insider's Aria Bendix recently reported, large cities may be losing their allure as high-paying jobs transition to remote work and urban amenities are closed or limited — and that's not to mention the high cost of living.
In many US cities, the average worker has to work far more than 40 hours per week to pay for a typical apartment. Self Financial, a Texas-based financial technology company, has compiled the US cities where residents have to work the most hours just to pay their rent. The report is based on data from Zillow, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
To figure out the number of weekly work hours needed to afford rent, Self Financial assumed that residents would work 52 weeks per year and spend no more than 28% of their gross income on rent. For this list, Business Insider focused on large metro areas with at least 1 million residents.
A metro area's cost of living is not always representative of the cost of living in its largest city. In the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area, for example, Self found fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment to be $1,613 — far lower than Manhattan's average one-bedroom rental price of $3,841 in April 2020.
Here are the US metro areas where the typical worker has the hardest time affording rent.