By Anna Helhoski | NerdWallet

If you rent your home in a major metro area, chances are you already know this hard truth: Your pay raises aren’t keeping up with your rent hikes.

A new analysis released on Tuesday by the rental website StreetEasy and its parent company Zillow found that rent growth has surpassed wage growth in 44 out of the 50 largest U.S. metros since before the pandemic. The report analyzed rental data from both company sites as well as wage growth data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What’s driving rent price growth? Nicole Bachaud, senior economist at Zillow, chalks it up to a combination of low inventory of homes for purchase, high costs of homeownership and few rentals available all putting pressure on the rental market. And it’s not just high prices keeping people in their rental homes — mortgage rates are also elevated, which increases the cost of buying a home.

“When we look at why we have so many renters and so much demand for rentals right now, it’s not for lack of people wanting to buy homes — it’s for the lack of ability to be able to buy homes,” says Bachaud. “There are no homes available to buy and the ones that are available are oftentimes unaffordable for the majority of potential buyers.”

What’s happening to rent in major cities?

The current state of the rental market in most major cities is the result of the pandemic’s impact on the overall housing market, says Bachaud.

At the start of the pandemic, she says, there was a ton of demand for homebuying due to low interest rates, but there weren’t enough homes available to purchase. That low inventory has stayed low. During the same period, the Federal Reserve hiked the federal funds rate, which pushed up mortgage rates. This heightened cost of homeownership has kept more people in the rental market, and until homebuying conditions improve, they’re likely to stay renters.

Biding your time in the rental market makes sense for a lot of people — and it’s the sensible thing to do on an individual level. The problem is that the more people who remain in a rental market with an existing inventory problem, the more pressure it puts on prices. When wages can’t keep up with the pace of rent growth, those rental markets become even more unaffordable. And that’s just what happened, according to the report: Nationwide, rents grew 30.4% from 2019 to 2023, about 1.5 times faster than wages, which grew 20.2%.

What are the most unaffordable metro areas?

“For the most part, in most of the country, wages have not been able to keep up with rent prices,” says Bachaud. “That is extremely true in Florida and in New York.”

Related Articles

How to know if your car is tracking you, risking higher insurance

Yes, you can balance homebuying and summer travel

Saving big when your cash stash is small

The best days to fly around the Fourth of July in 2024

Subscriptions are hard to cancel and easy to forget — by design

From 2019 to 2023, two metros in Florida saw huge disparities between wage growth and rent growth: Tampa (34.7 percentage point difference) and Miami (32.2 percentage point difference).

“During the past few years, we had a lot of people looking at what Florida has to offer with sunny weather, outdoor living, and it was relatively affordable compared to other and coastal areas,” says Bachaud. “That threw a lot of renters into that area, which has really kept a lot of the pressure on, on rents, for the past couple of years.”

When it comes to rent unaffordability, New York City leads the pack by a long shot. At the start of the pandemic, New York City was at the epicenter. As droves of renters left the city, rent prices dropped, but as soon as services and offices began to reopen, demand to rent and buy homes in the city skyrocketed — an upward trend that hasn’t slowed in recent years, says Bachaud.

From 2022 to 2023, New York City wages grew 1.2% as rents spiked 8.6% — that’s seven times as fast. The report cites record low vacancy rates and high demand for the spike in rent growth.

Bachaud says, “We have about seven times faster growth in rent in New York City, which is extremely problematic for New York renters who are trying to keep pace with these growing prices because they just do not have the income growth to sustain that.”

To add to this discouraging picture of rent affordability, three of the nation’s largest metro areas — Boston, Chicago and Memphis, Tennessee — actually saw wage growth decline from 2022 to 2023 even as rent prices climbed.

Some metros are seeing wages grow faster than rent

However, the rental affordability outlook isn’t all doom and gloom. From 2022 to 2023, Houston saw rents increase more slowly than wages (5.3 percentage point difference). Another Texas city, Austin, has also seen wages outpace rents (4.7 percentage point difference), largely due to new construction, says Bachaud.

“Austin has just been off the charts with new construction, both in the for-sale and the rental side,” she says. “And so that’s been really, really helpful for renters to kind of stay afloat in that area.”

Since 2019, six metro areas saw wages outstrip rents, including San Francisco and nearby San Jose — two of the most expensive metros in the country: a 5.8 percentage point difference in San Francisco and a 5.3 percentage point difference in San Jose.

“You may think San Francisco and San Jose are going to be the most unaffordable given they’re the highest priced, but incomes are very high in that area as well,” says Bachaud.

There are signs of a rental rate slowdown ahead for many other metro areas. When isolating for a one-year period, from 2022 to 2023, wages have increased faster than rents in 21 of the 44 major metro areas. The highest wage increases compared with rents in that period are in San Jose (5.8 percentage point difference); Houston (5.3 percentage point difference); and Raleigh, North Carolina (3.8 percentage point difference).

Rent growth is slowing even if inflation data doesn’t show it yet

Even if rents are outpacing wages, the rental market is stabilizing. “We’re seeing rents return to normal levels of growth,” says Bachaud. “Last year, rents grew 3.4% — it’s a lot lower than when it was 20% or 30%.”

New multifamily construction will likely be a big part of the price slowdown. “Adding more rental availability is going to take a lot of that pressure off of the demand for things, and we’re going to have more opportunities for rentals coming up shortly in the future,” she says.

A year ago, Zillow predicted that inflation data, namely the consumer price index, would soon start to show rent prices cooling off. Due to the nature of rental leases, there’s typically a 12- to 15-month lag in how current rents are reflected in inflation data. So that hasn’t happened yet.

“While we’re seeing things slowing down and getting back to normal, we still do have positive rent growth,” says Bachaud. “That doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon, we’re just kind of back in the normal range. And so we kind of expect, hopefully within the next couple of months, to see that translating into inflation, as well.”

Anna Helhoski writes for NerdWallet. Email: anna@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @AnnaHelhoski.

The article Rent Growth Outstrips Wages in Most U.S. Metros, New Report Shows originally appeared on NerdWallet.

The University of St. Thomas men’s hockey team is moving to the National Collegiate Hockey Conference, becoming the 10th member of the NCHC starting in the 2026-27 season.

The Tommies will continue to play in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association for the next two seasons. They have been a member of the CCHA since moving from Division III competition to Division I in 2021.

“The NCHC is among the premier conferences in all of college hockey and we are thrilled to announce our membership in 2026. The move aligns with our institutional and athletics trajectory and places the Tommies with the other Summit League hockey-playing members competing in the conference,” Tommies director of athletics Phil Esten said in a statement.  “We are enthusiastic about the new strategic opportunities this will bring our University and department as we will bring new rivalries to St. Paul and compete in expanded markets nationally.”

Formed in 2011, the NCHC is one of the most competitive men’s hockey leagues in the country. The league has produced six NCAA champions since 2016, including Denver in 2024. At least one NCHC team has qualified for the Frozen Four in nine of the past 10 seasons, with multiple teams qualifying in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2021.

Current members are Colorado College, Denver, Miami (Ohio), Minnesota Duluth, North Dakota, Nebraska Omaha, St. Cloud State and Western Michigan. Arizona State will become the NCHC’s ninth member on July 1 and begin conference competition in the fall..

Last season, the Tommies earned their first victory over a top-10 ranked opponent, upending future NCHC foe St. Cloud State 5-4 in the season opener. St. Thomas went on to record its best season ever, finishing second in the CCHA during the 2023-24 regular season.

Related Articles

Letters: A big new stadium with no new parking at St. Thomas?

University of St. Thomas to cut 26 staff positions, leave 30 open positions unfilled

St. Thomas neighbors appeal site plan approved for new D1 hockey, basketball arena

Men’s basketball: St. Thomas defense comes through in victory over South Dakota

By ANNIE MA (AP Education Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled Brown v. Board of Education, taught in most every American classroom — still stands.

But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.

The intense segregation by race is linked to socioeconomic conditions: Schools where students of color compose more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to be located in low-income areas. That in turn has resounding academic consequences: Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes.

Efforts to slow or reverse the increasing separation of American schools have stalled. Court cases slowly have chipped away at the dream outlined in the case of Brown v. Board, leaving fewer and fewer tools in the hands of districts to integrate schools by the early 2000s.

The arc of the moral universe, in this case, does not seem to be bending toward justice.

“School integration exists as little more than an idea in America right now, a little more than a memory,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “It’s actually an idea that a pretty good majority of Americans think is a good idea. But that’s all.”

MORE THAN JUST DIVERSE SCHOOLS

The dream of Brown was never as simple as diversity. It was about equality, and the opportunity that came with it.

From the beginning, funding and integration have been inseparable.

“Whiter schools and districts have more resources, and that is wrong,” said Ary Amerikaner, a former Obama administration official and the founder of Brown’s Promise. “But it is a reality. And that undermines opportunity for students of color, and it undermines our future democracy.”

We remember Brown v. Board as the end of segregated schools in the United States. But stating values does not, alone, change reality. Though the case was decided in 1954, it was followed by more than a decade of delay and avoidance before school districts began to meaningfully allow Black students to enter white schools.

It took further court rulings, monitoring and enforcement to bring a short-lived era of integration to hundreds of school districts. For the students who took part in those desegregation programs, their life trajectory changed — the more years spent in integrated schools, the better Black children fared on measures like educational attainment, graduation rates, health, and earning potential, with no adverse effects on white children.

For a brief period, it seemed the country recognized the deeper remedies required. “All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Swann v. Mecklenburg, a 1971 decision that upheld the use of busing to integrate schools in North Carolina. “But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation.”

But not long after, another series of court decisions would unwind those outcomes. Fifty years ago, in Milliken v. Bradley, the court struck down a plan for integrating Detroit public schools across school district lines. The ruling undermined desegregation efforts in the north and Midwest, where small districts allowed white families to escape integration.

Other decisions followed. In Freeman v. Pitts, the court ruled resegregation from private choice and demographic shifts could not be monitored by the court. More than 200 districts were released from court-monitored desegregation plans. By 2007, when the court ruled in Parents Involved v. Seattle Public Schools, even voluntary integration plans could no longer consider assigning students on the basis of race.

“If you have the tools taken away from you … by the Supreme Court, then you really don’t have a whole lot of tools,” said Stephan Blanford, a former Seattle Public Schools board member.

ONE DISTRICT AS A MICROCOSM

The arc of history is clear in the city where the landmark Swann busing case originated.

At its peak, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was considered such a success at integrating classrooms and closing the gap between Black and white students that educators around the country came to tour the district. Today, more than 20 years after a court ruling overturned busing students on the basis of race, CMS is the most segregated district in North Carolina.

While there are no laws that keep kids siloed by race and income, in so many schools that is the reality.

Charlotte’s sprawling, complex busing plan brought Black and white students into the same schools — and by extension, made white children’s resources available to Black students for the first time. The district’s integration program ended when white families sued after their children did not get their top choice of school placement in a lottery that considered race.

Instead, the district created a school assignment process that said diversity “will be based on the family’s decisions.” It left the families of Mecklenburg County, some of whom have always had better choices than others, on their own. In the first year of the district’s choice program, Black families were more likely to try to use the choice plan to pick an alternative school. They were also more likely to get none of the magnet schools they wanted.

In the decades that followed, the district re-segregated. Years of busing had unwound the segregated makeup of the schools, but the underlying disparities and residential segregation had been left untouched.

Charlotte is a place where the divide between affluence and poverty, and the clear racial lines that mirror it, are so stark that people who live there refer to the city in two parts — the well-off “wedge” and the poorer “crescent.” How could anything other than an explicit consideration of those conditions ever hope to ameliorate them?

Solutions to segregated schools exist in this context, often relying on individual families to make choices that are limited by their circumstances. Magnet schools and inter-district transfers — two common policies that may create great individual opportunities — are limited and will always leave some students behind.

Wherever you look, families are divided in how they view integration. For white and affluent families, it can exist as a noble idea, one filled with self-reflection. But for families of color or poor families — those with less of a safety net — the point of integration often is to place their children somewhere better.

Efforts to integrate schools can take two paths, Stefan Lallinger, executive director of Next100, a public policy think tank, says. They either fight around the margins, creating slightly less segregated spaces, or they address the problem head on, which in many parts of the country would mean tackling boundaries deliberately drawn to separate rich from poor.

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD IN A SYSTEM THAT RESISTS?

Amerikaner and Saba Bireda founded Brown’s Promise on the idea of bridging the divide between funding and integration, leveraging state courts to obtain the tools the Supreme Court has taken away from districts.

Their strategy has some precedence. In Connecticut, a 1989 lawsuit in state court resulted in the creation of an inter-district transfer program, which allows students in Hartford to transfer into suburban schools and magnet programs, breaking up concentrations of poverty and racially isolated schools.

“This country had to be moved to integration,” Bireda said. “And unfortunately, 70 years later, we feel like we still need litigation. We need the push of the courts.”

More recent lawsuits have taken place in New Jersey and in Minnesota. In 2015, Alex Cruz-Guzman became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools. Cruz-Guzman immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a teenager. As a parent, he noticed his children’s schools consisted almost entirely of other Latino students. When he tried to place them in more integrated schools, the family faced long waitlists.

The case wound its way through court for nearly a decade, almost reaching a settlement in the legislature before that bill failed to pass.

Cruz-Guzman recalls people asking why he would join a case that likely would not resolve in time to benefit his own children, who struggled with learning English for a time in predominantly Latino schools. To him, the arc of the case is about the kids whose lives could change in the future.

“It’s not only my kids. My grandkids will benefit from it,” he says. “People for generations will benefit.”

How far those legal cases can reach remains to be seen. Actual solutions are imperfect. But integration is something this country has tried before, and while it lasted, by many measures, it worked.

Anniversaries are moments to stop and contemplate. Seventy years after Brown, the work towards achieving its vision remains unfinished. Where there are no perfect, easy answers, what other choice is there besides trying imperfect pathways that bring about an increasingly diverse country somewhere closer to the promise of Brown?

“What’s the alternative?” Bireda said. “We are headed towards a country that is going to be majority people of color. … We can be a strong multiracial democracy, but we cannot be that if we continue to allow most children in the United States not to go to school with children who are from different backgrounds.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.