This article isn't 100% pertinent to the local apartment construction boom, but couldn't think of a better place for it.
The article mostly covers rapidly rising rents in the markets where you'd expect it (SF, Silicon Valley, etc.), but also gives some percentages for other cities.
The crazy part, and the part most of us will want to dig into is this:Rents jumped 15.4 percent in the San Francisco area to a median monthly cost of $3,031, an increased mirrored by San Jose where prices were up 14.5 percent to $3,187 a month. Rents climbed 10.5 percent in Denver to $1,817 a month. Kansas City also notched a substantial 8.5 percent gain to $1,204 a month.
Anyone have any theories? Bad/incomplete data? In the last year, MSP added thousands of new units, all of them at the very top of the market. In fact, it seems every new large apartment complex that came online last year was reaching for the top (LPM, Nic on 5th, Lime, Track 29, Elan, etc.) Those 5 buildings alone represent a huge share of the new apartments that hit the market, even when you factor in St. Paul and the suburbs.Still, tenants are catching a break elsewhere. In Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., rents rose by less than 2.2 percent. Rents in Minnesota’s Twin Cities area ticked up a mere 0.1 percent this past year to $1,501.
TBH, it seems mathematically impossible that average rent effectively did not increase. If someone wants to claim that average rents at existing buildings didn't rise, I could maybe buy that. But to claim the average rent in the metro didn't go up at all is pretty suspicious, given all the new construction. Without a doubt, average rents in Minneapolis (proper) are rising some. For the metrowide average rent to stay completely flat, rents in the burbs would need to have fallen, to offset Mpls' increases.