The 6 Southern Cities That Are Quietly Becoming More Expensive for Single People
No matter where you live, you’ve probably noticed things have gotten more expensive over the past couple of years. Maybe it’s coffee, maybe it’s clothes — or maybe it’s entire cities. Earlier this week, I caught a CNBC article citing an annual report from The Economist called “The Carrie Bradshaw Index,” that showed some real changes are happening in cities nationwide.
No, the “Carrie Bradshaw Index” doesn’t have to do with where people buy the most designer shoes, or how many Americans have all-female friend groups consisting of exactly four people who fulfill different personality archetypes. The Carrie Bradshaw Index, as The Economist deems it, “ranks 100 of the country’s major cities by affordability for people who want to live alone.”
A city meets their definition of affordable if someone can rent a studio apartment there without roommates or a partner and, most importantly, without spending “more than 30% of their gross income on rent.” It found that several notable cities have now crossed the threshold into unaffordable.
Which U.S. Cities Are Becoming More Expensive to Live In for Single People?
To complete this report, The Economist used rental data to “[calculate] the salary needed to afford a typical studio apartment” in various cities across the country. The most recent data (this is the third year of this report) showed that 41 out of 100 cities qualified as “unaffordable,” and multiple cities that were deemed “affordable” per the Carrie Bradshaw Index last year are unfortunately no longer. Many of these cities exist in the South.
Memphis, Tennessee, had the “sharpest drop in affordability,” with average studio rents rising from $745 per month last year to almost $1,200. Both Houston and Dallas have joined Austin, Texas, in the “unaffordable” realm, and Durham and Raleigh, North Carolina, share this fate as well. Rounding out the list is Chattanooga (also in Tennessee) and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The 10 Most Affordable Cities for Single People
The Economist report’s conclusion isn’t the most optimistic. “Overall, we find that living solo has become more difficult in the past year,” they write. However, ranking 100 cities on rent affordability means you don’t just find out which ones are priciest. So, to offer a crumb of hope, here are the 10 most affordable cities for solo renters, per The Carrie Bradshaw Index.
- Wichita, Kansas
- Baton Rouge, Louisiana
- Lincoln, Nebraska
- De Moines, Iowa
- Akron, Ohio
- Tucson, Arizona
- Tulsa, Oklahoma
- St. Louis, Missouri
- Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Aurora, Colorado
Other cities that didn’t crack the top 10 but did become cheaper to live in include Tallahassee, Florida; Denver, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Knoxville, Tennessee. Times may be tough, but at least some prices are going down.