Miami surpasses Chicago for pricey rents during first quarter: report

There’s no doubt Miami is becoming a costly place to live, and a new report shows rents here have recently outgrown even the Windy City.

The report, authored by listing service Zumper, shows Miami has become the eighth-most expensive city to rent a home in the United States in the first quarter of 2016, passing Chicago, which fell to the No. 9 spot.

Of all Miami’s neighborhoods, the median price to rent a one-bedroom apartment during the first quarter was $1,900 a month. That rate grew by 8.6 percent year-over-year.

If you go by the advice that rent should take up 30 percent of your income, a single renter would have to make $76,000 annually to afford it — after taxes. For comparison, county numbers show Miami-Dade’s median income is much lower at $41,913 annually.

Two-bedroom units in Miami also commanded a high median rent of $2,900 per month during the first quarter — a rate that spiked 12.3 percent year-over-year.

Even neighborhoods like Little Haiti are becoming unaffordable: median rent there for a one-bedroom is $1,200, and the rapidly redeveloping Upper East Side has a median of $1,650 per month.

As always, Miami’s most expensive rental neighborhood is the exclusive Fisher Island, where one-bedrooms go for a whopping $4,700 a month. On the flipside, Miami’s cheapest neighborhood is Brownsville where median rents stood at $650 a month during the first quarter.

While Miami is quickly rising through the ranks of pricey places to live, it’s nowhere near as cost-prohibitive as San Francisco, the country’s most expensive rental market. That city has even eclipsed New York with median rental rates of $3,590 a month for a one-bedroom.

Check out the full map below:

(Click to enlarge)