This Is the City Where the Most Homes Are Rented

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 15, 10:30AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This Is the City Where the Most Homes Are Rented — © fizkes / iStock via Getty Images

The U.S. housing market has been transformed over the past two years. Across the nation, home prices have risen by about 20% year over year, according to the S&P Case-Shiller Index. In some cities, the figure is above 25%.

Among the triggers of the new housing market was low mortgage rates (which have recently disappeared). At less than 3%, they had been near an all-time low. People have been able to move into more expensive homes because of this.

Americans also have become more mobile, largely because of the “work from home” population that was created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tens of thousands of people have relocated from expensive coastal cities like New York and San Francisco to more affordable metros inland.

However, not everyone can afford to buy a home. Nationwide, 35.6% of housing units are rental properties.
[nativounit]
Young people are far more likely to rent homes than buy. Well over half of all renters in the United States are under the age of 35, whereas that age group accounts for less than 10% of homeowners.

Population density is a factor in the share of housing units that are occupied by renters. In highly urban areas, a large share of residents live in multistory rental buildings rather than single-family homes. The U.S. population density is 93 people per square mile. The majority of the places we considered have more than 10,000 people per square mile.

In a number of cities where a higher share of housing units are rentals, property is very expensive and many residents are priced out of the housing market. While rent also tends to be high in these places, renting is a considerably more affordable option.

The city where the most homes are rented is University (Hillsborough County), Florida. Here are the details:

Rental occupied housing units: 87.5%
Median rental cost: $940 (tied for 437th lowest)
Median home value: $91,900 (tied for 63rd lowest)
Median household income: $29,380 (sixth lowest)

Methodology: To determine the city with the highest share of renters, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed five-year estimates of the share of housing units that are occupied by renters from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 American Community Survey (ACS).

We used census “place” geographies, which is a category that includes incorporated legal entities and census-designated statistical entities. We defined cities based on a population threshold; that is, census places needed to have a population of at least 25,000 to be considered.

Cities were excluded if rental rates were not available in the 2020 ACS, if there were fewer than 1,000 housing units or if the sampling error associated with a city’s data was deemed too high.

The sampling error was defined as too high if the coefficient of variation (a statistical assessment of how reliable an estimate is) for a city’s rental rate was above 15% and greater than two standard deviations above the mean coefficient of variation for all cities’ rental rates. We similarly excluded cities that had a sampling error too high for their population, using the same definition.

Cities were ranked based on the percentage of housing units that are occupied by renters. To break ties, we used the number of housing units that are occupied by renters.

Additional information on median rental cost, median home value and median household income are also five-year estimates from the 2020 ACS.
[wallst_email_signup]
Click here to see all the cities where the most homes are rented.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.