by Jacquelyn Thayer

Assessments of the housing market are a valid and popular component of real estate journalism, providing perhaps the most fundamental of insights into a metro region’s cost of living and future prospects. But they fail to present a comprehensive picture for the 65% of young adults–including couples and new families–who remain more likely to rent a unit than purchase a home, whether due to financial constraints, a preference for urban living, or a need for the relative flexibility afforded by year-to-year leases.

Recent college graduates and twenty- and thirtysomethings making their first big professional transitions may be swayed by reports of boom cities–growth metros where industry is thriving, housing is affordable, and cultural life is on the rise. Given the increasingly outrageous cost-of-living in the Bay Area, New York City and other long-prized professional destinations, it’s little wonder that millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z may be drawn to a holy grail of housing.

But what such reports often fail to address comprehensively is the compatibility between affordable housing, extensive employment and a wider range of job sectors than a select few growth industries.

So for a closer look at this cross-section of concerns, we’ve compiled existing public data on rental rates and occupations for 28 dominant and rising U.S. metro regions. The 64 occupations covered here include highly skilled professions with geographically-constrained market value; media jobs; regionally-specific fields (pity the political scientist working outside of Washington D.C.); and the most highly-concentrated occupation for each metro. Blank cells indicate a lack of data on that occupation for the region.

Methodology:

Apartment List maintains a thorough database of median apartment rental rates in over 1,000 cities, towns and suburbs across the United States. Communities within major metropolitan areas are classified individually. At time of writing, the most recent such ranking was that for March 2018. To determine the median rental rate for all communities within a metro, communities were sorted according to the US Census Bureau’s definition of those metro areas. In metros where rental data was available for five or fewer communities within that region, rendering a median relatively uninformative, we provide only the rental data for the principal city or cities. Rental rates for the most expensive community within a larger metro, as well as for the city proper, are further offered as a point of comparison; perhaps unsurprisingly, city medians tend to skew lower than those of their suburban counterparts.

Projected % Change of Employment and Job Gains for 2018 are derived from the United States Conference of Mayors’ 2017 annual report on U.S. Metro Economies, Gross Metropolitan Product and Employment 2016, which provides the most recent and widest-scale assessment of overall employment outlook for U.S. metro regions. This data is presented to indicate general rate of growth and opportunity in the cities covered here.

Finally, all data on Occupation and Location Quotient by metro comes from May 2017’s Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Location Quotient (LQ) refers to the prevalence of a given occupation within a metropolitan area relative to other metropolitan areas, with any number above 1.00 signifying a higher-than-average density of existing jobs and job opportunities in that occupational field. An occupation with an exceptionally high LQ may employ far fewer individuals than other occupations in that region, but it indicates positive geographic opportunity for those in pursuit of that occupation.