Renting and Leasing (Real Estate)

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    Rental Apartments Have Been Getting Smaller Over the Last Decade

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    The average size of new rental apartments has been getting smaller since 2015, but there are signs that the trend may have begun to reverse.If the living room in your apartment can’t fit a couch and a dining table, you’re not alone. Over the past decade, the average size of newly constructed rental apartments has shrunk by 22 square feet. The average size of a new rental unit is now a mere 908 square feet, according to a report from RentCafe.Researchers analyzed data on the size of new apartments in the 100 U.S. cities with the largest stock of rental buildings with at least 50 units. Newly built apartments were defined as those completed from 2015 through February 2025. Data was harvested from RentCafe’s parent company, Yardi, which surveys rental properties.A proliferation of studios and one-bedrooms is partly responsible for the downsizing. These units grew from 46 percent of what was built before 2015, to 53 percent in the years since.Driving the need for smaller apartments are an increasing number of young, professional singles and a related drop in marriage rates. With interest rates remaining stubbornly high, more of these singles are opting to rent rather than buy. Developers also have an incentive to build smaller units, which can boosts profits by leaving space for additional ones.Despite the decade-long downward trend in new apartment size, there’s been an uptick recently, with rentals gaining 17 square feet in the past two years. Even cities experiencing some of the worst housing shortages have seen notable gains.San Francisco, for one, had the second largest increase, with its average rental apartment growing by 59 square feet (about the size of a small patio) over the past decade. The New York borough of Queens wasn’t far behind, with the average rental growing by 39 square feet. New York’s most expensive boroughs, Manhattan and Brooklyn, also saw upticks.Still, in most major cities the average size of new rental apartments has fallen over the decade, including in Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Even Sun Belt metropolises such as Orlando and Wilmington, with traditionally large apartments, have seen an average reduction of 49 square feet.Shrinking ApartmentsThe average size of newly built rental apartments in the United States has been shrinking over the last decade, though there has been an uptick since 2023. More

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      3 Men Die in Fire in Overcrowded House in Queens

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      The house in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood had no working smoke detectors and was crammed with tenants, fire officials said.In a house on an affluent street in Queens, a tenant woke up early on Easter Sunday choking on black smoke.A fire had broken out on the first floor, where he lived in a cramped single room. “There were people screaming, jumping out the windows,” the tenant, Tony Rock, 40, said hours later. He described the scene in one word: “Hell.”Three men died in the fire, which started just after 1:30 a.m. on Chevy Chase Street in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood, a three-minute drive from the mansion where President Trump grew up.Firefighters arrived at the scene in less than four minutes, but the blaze ascended to the attic very quickly, fire officials said at a news conference on Sunday. The victims, men who were 45, 52 and 67 years old, died at the home, the police said. Eight other people were taken to area hospitals and were stable, the police said.The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation. But officials said that the house was overcrowded with people, with makeshift partition walls creating small rooms.Possessions also blocked the stairways, and there were too many extension cords, the fire commissioner, Robert S. Tucker, said at the news conference. There were no working smoke detectors, he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      $4,400 Rentals in Los Angeles

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      A Craftsman house near Culver City, a 1970s condo in West Hollywood and a 1920s bungalow in Hollywood.To provide a resource for those displaced by the Los Angeles fires, this edition of “What You Get” focuses on rentals rather than for-sale properties.Michael GoviaMichael GoviaMichael GoviaMichael GoviaMichael GoviaMichael GoviaMichael GoviaLos Angeles | $4,400A 1919 Craftsman house, on 0.1 acresThis three-bedroom, one-bathroom house is in a neighborhood south of Interstate 10, within a 15-minute drive of both Culver City and downtown Los Angeles. A public elementary school is three blocks away, and both West Adams and West Jefferson Avenues, nearby major thoroughfares, are lined with shopping and dining options, including a 24-hour hot dog and sandwich stand, a taqueria and a Creole restaurant.Rancho Cienega Recreation Center, with tennis courts, a pool, and a track, is a five-minute drive. The USC campus takes 15 minutes by car and LAX takes 25.Size: 1,344 square feetPrice per square foot: $3Indoors: Paved steps lead from the street to the red front door, which opens to the living room. The walls are painted teal with white trim, and original built-in bookshelves flank a gas fireplace with a black tile hearth. There’s a window above each bookshelf and a larger window faces the front yard. The home is available partially furnished.On the other side of the living room, through a wide doorway flanked by white columns, is the formal dining room. There’s a pass-through window to the kitchen, which has a white tile backsplash above granite counters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Residents of a Mobile Home Park Join Forces to Buy Their Community

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      The residents are the first in the state of Maine to successfully utilize a new law making it easier for them to compete with investors and gain ownership of the land their homes sit on.Manufactured houses, widely known as mobile homes, are one of the most affordable options for homeownership in the United States, but they typically come with a big risk: You own the house; you don’t own the lot it sits on.That has made mobile home parks ripe targets for investors, who buy communities and then increase the lot rents to boost profits. It’s a massive industry: manufactured homes account for approximately one in 10 new single-family homes in the United States, according to a 2023 report by the Manufactured Housing Institute trade organization.To curb investor involvement, the state of Maine ushered in a new law last year that requires mobile home park owners to give advance notice to residents if they intend to sell, giving the community members a chance to buy it themselves.Linnhaven Mobile Home Center is a community of nearly 300 occupied homes in Brunswick.Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesNow, it’s the largest resident-owned community in Maine.Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesOn Oct. 10, the residents of Linnhaven Mobile Home Center, a community of nearly 300 occupied homes in Brunswick, became the first to succeed in utilizing the new law. They paid $26.3 million to buy the property from their landlord by cobbling together loans and grants from several sources, including the state and the town of Brunswick.Now, it’s the largest resident-owned community in Maine, giving hope to other owners of manufactured homes. Several other states also have similar laws in place, including Connecticut and New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Stay Cool Indoors During the Heat Wave

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      Summer officially starts on Thursday, and this season is predicted to be hotter than normal — a heat wave across the country this week is expected to affect millions of Americans. In New York, the temperature is forecast to reach 96 degrees by Friday. On Monday, Chicago hit a record-breaking 97 degrees.More than just uncomfortable, the heat can be dangerous and at worst deadly, and it’s only becoming more of a threat with climate change causing rising temperatures. Prolonged exposure to or physical exertion in excessive heat can cause heatstroke, according to the Mayo Clinic. Starting Tuesday, cooling centers — indoor, air-conditioned spaces for public use — will be open during the day in New York. The city’s fire department is also turning some fire hydrants into water sprinklers. If you’re staying at home, here’s what you can do to stay as cool as possible indoors, whether you have an AC or not.What’s the ideal temperature for your home?While you should do what feels most comfortable for you, Carrier, an air-conditioner manufacturer, suggests on its website that 72 degrees is the generally accepted “comfortable indoor temperature for many people.” It continues, “It strikes a good balance between comfort and energy efficiency, making it a popular choice for residential settings.”If you’re away from your home, set your thermostat for higher than usual to save energy and to prevent your AC unit from potentially busting. At night, because heat can disrupt sleep, 60 to 67 degrees is recommended by the Cleveland Clinic.How do you keep your furry friends safe?It depends on the animal, and its size and type, but pets are generally less tolerant of higher temperatures than humans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Housing Costs Cool, but Remain a Source of Concern

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      Overall inflation cooled sharply last month, but one of the most important categories of consumer prices — housing — remained stubborn.Housing costs, as measured in the Consumer Price Index, were up 5.4 percent in May from a year earlier. That was the smallest increase in more than two years, down from a peak rate of more than 8 percent in 2023.But on a month-to-month basis, housing costs were up 0.4 percent in May for the second month in a row, defying forecasters’ hopes for a continued slowdown. Over the past three months, shelter costs have risen at an annual rate of 5.2 percent.Housing is by far the largest monthly expense for most families, and therefore also weighs heavily in inflation calculations, accounting for more than a third of the Consumer Price Index. That means it will be hard for the Federal Reserve to bring inflation fully under control as long as housing costs continue to rise at their recent rate. Before the pandemic, the shelter index rose at a rate of about 3.5 percent per year.Forecasters have been expecting housing inflation to cool because data from private companies like Zillow and Apartment List have shown rents rising more slowly or even falling outright in some parts of the country. (Inflation measures use rent data to calculate housing costs for both renters and homeowners.)The rent index used in the Consumer Price Index tends to move more slowly than the private-sector measures because of methodological and conceptual differences. The private measures, for example, include rents for homes only when they turn over to new tenants; the government’s measure tries to capture monthly expenses for all renters, including those who renew their leases.Still, economists have been surprised by how long the gap between the measures has persisted. Some of them have begun to worry that the pandemic, demographic shifts or other forces might have caused changes in the housing market that would keep housing inflation — at least as measured in the Consumer Price Index — elevated for an extended period.Adding to that concern: Private-sector rent measures have shown signs of picking up again recently as a boom in new apartment construction has faded.“I think that the multifamily market will see continued rents decelerate, but we won’t see rents declining nationally,” said Ivy Zelman, co-founder of Zelman and Associates, a housing research firm. More

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      Millions of New Yorkers Wait to Hear How Much Their Rent Will Go Up

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      The Rent Guidelines Board will cast a preliminary vote on the level of rent increases that tenants in New York City’s one million stabilized apartments will face.The NewsOfficials in New York City will soon decide how much rents are allowed to go up across nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments.A nine-member panel, the Rent Guidelines Board, will probably vote on Tuesday evening to back modest increases. The preliminary vote may endorse a range of possible increases with a final vote on a specific number slated for later this spring. Any increase would affect leases beginning on Oct. 1.Tenants and landlords often clash at the annual vote to decide how much the rent on stabilized apartments can climb. Anna Watts for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The rent vote affects a lot of people.The nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city are home to roughly a quarter of the population. Many of those apartments remain relatively affordable: The rent on a median, rent-stabilized unit is about $1,500, compared with $2,000 for the median, market-rate unit, city data shows.The annual vote is something of a microcosm of the fraught discourse around New York City’s housing crisis. Board meetings in recent years have been interrupted by protests.The panel’s decision aims to balance the interests of landlords and tenants. The vote, however, is a major source of tension between the opposing sides, with advocates for tenants calling for rents to be frozen or reduced every year and supporters of landlords calling for larger increases.Many landlords cast the board’s vote as existential. In 2019, the State Legislature eliminated many of the ways to raise rents on rent-stabilized units, including the so-called vacancy bonus, which allowed increases of up to 20 percent when a tenant moved out.The increases that the board approves, landlords say, are the only practical way to make enough money to maintain a rent-stabilized apartment. Many landlords say they are leaving units vacant because the increases haven’t been high enough in recent years to cover the cost of needed renovations and repairs.BackgroundThe board is appointed by the mayor, and its vote tends to reflect the priorities of City Hall. Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was more of an advocate for tenants, the board barely allowed any increases.During the tenure of Mayor Eric Adams, the board has backed increases every year, though costs of property ownership have also jumped significantly. Last year, the board allowed increases of 3 percent on one-year leases. On two-year leases, the board allowed increases of 2.75 percent on the first year and 3.2 percent on the second year.In 2022, the board allowed increases of 3.25 percent on one-year leases and 5 percent on two-year leases.What’s Next? The final vote.The board usually takes a second vote, which is final, a few weeks after the preliminary vote. In the interim, the board will likely be lobbied heavily by advocates for tenants and landlords and public officials. More

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      Why It’s So Expensive to Live in Phoenix

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      In the five years since they began their life together in the desert sprawl of greater Phoenix, Devon Lawrence and Eren Mendoza have bounced from one itinerant home to another.They have camped alongside a freeway off-ramp, using a gas station sink as their bath and a plastic tarp as their refuge from the relentless sun. They have slept on an air mattress in a friend’s living room. For the last two years, they have crammed into rooms at motels, paying as much as $650 a week.Ms. Mendoza and Mr. Lawrence are both 32, and both have jobs. She works at a supermarket deli counter. He stocks shelves at a convenience store. Together, they earn about $3,500 a month. Yet they have been stymied in their reach for a modest dream: They cannot find an affordable home in a safe neighborhood in Phoenix, where rents have roughly doubled over the last decade.“These prices are just wild,” Ms. Mendoza said. “It’s pretty much all anybody talks about. The fact that a dual income can’t support us is insanity.”The impossible arithmetic of housing is a potent source of economic anxiety in Phoenix, and in many major American cities — a reality that could influence control of the White House.Devon Lawrence and Eren Mendoza earn about $3,500 a month together, but they have been unable to find affordable housing in Phoenix.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More