Miami Is the Most Expensive City in America for Millennials to Rent

It's common knowledge that Miami's rent prices are outrageously out of whack with what Miamians make, but, hey, here's another turd feather to stick in our city's hat of shameful inequality and developer greed. Turns out Miami is the worst city in the entire United States for millennials to rent. Yep, we're number one at something! 

The latest factoid comes from real-estate website Zillow via Bloomberg News and is somewhat similar to the analysis published by another real-estate website, Trulia, which found that Miami is the third worst city for recent college grads looking to rent. 

This analysis, however, looked at the percentage of homes on the rental market that millennials, based on their average income in the city, simply can't afford. Affordability was defined as having to spend no more than 30 percent of monthly household income on rent. 

Turns out the average millennial is priced out of 92 percent of the rental properties on the Miami market, meaning they're scrambling for a scant 8 percent of available units. 

That's horrible news for a city that likes to pretend it prides itself on cultural and artistic innovation and has a delusional hard-on to someday be some sort of tech hub. Though, maybe it is good news for Miami's large swath of creepy baby-boomers who just wanna "help" the young kids out, but we digress. 

This, however, isn't a surprise. 

Earlier this year, we also found that Miami leads the nation in millennials who still live at their parents' home, and this new statistic only makes the Miami Herald's proclamation in its op-ed pages earlier this year that "downtown Miami [is] a magnet for millennials" look even more like a sad, out-of-touch joke. 

We also know that rents are widely unaffordable for just about everyone who actually lives and works full-time in Miami, not just millennials. 

“We are experiencing what we have called the national rental crisis,” Svenja Gudell, senior director of economic research at Zillow, tells Bloomberg. “Rents keep going up and incomes do not, especially at the bottom and the middle class, and so people have to spend more and more of their monthly income on rent.”

The rest of the top four is rounded out by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

Yes, three cities where young adults are routinely told not to move because those places are so expensive and have so little opportunities for decent work are on the list, yet somehow Miami is worse than all of them for rent affordability and income. 

Of course, there are two ways to fix this problem: attract higher-paying industries or install rent controls. City leaders don't seem to have much of a workable plan to do either.