A new study has ranked Washington, D.C. as the fourth most expensive city to live in, with a cost of living listed 53% higher than the national average. The study was conducted by ApartmentList, a website that helps people find their new homes.
ApartmentList helps people find apartments in different cities while providing resources to help renters find their next home, such as a rent calculator and research articles that analyze rent rates nationwide. The site determines the cost of living by comparing housing, utilities, transportation, health care and groceries. They analyzed these six components and compared them to the national average. According to the reports, San Francisco, New York, and Anaheim are the top three most expensive cities to live in the U.S.
Compared to the national average, the District is 144% higher in housing, 18% in utilities, 10% in transportation, 5% in groceries and 19% in miscellaneous goods and services, and 5% lower in healthcare, according to the Cost of Living Index.
“D.C. is certainly among the most expensive, and that is just simply because we haven’t been building enough new housing to keep up with demand,“ said Chris Salviati, a housing economist at ApartmentList, said in an interview for a WTOPnews article. “That’s something that has been going on for quite some time now, and so prices have really risen to a point that can [be] problematic for a lot of households.”
This may cause concern for upperclassmen Howard University students struggling to find housing. Since only first and second-year students are guaranteed housing, students said it makes it harder to find affordable housing in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. According to Apartment List, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is currently $1,752.
According to Howard’s Campus Master Planning for real estate development, there are only a total of 5,095 beds available on campus and 700 beds available for off-campus housing. During the 2021-2022 academic year Howard’s total enrollment was 8,964 undergraduate students.
Nevaeh Powell, a rising junior, is among many upperclassmen worrying about the upcoming stresses of finding housing. “There’s not that many options,” she said. “I think there’s two options: Mazza [GrandMarc] and Wish [Woodley Park]. I want to say there’s some things that are positive and negative about both off campus…[Another problem is] not being able to find scholarships where we can afford off campus housing.”
With D.C. being listed as the fourth most expensive city to live in, college students will need help finding affordable housing.