Transcription
The housing affordability crisis in the US is a huge problem, but it seems to be the worst in cities that are the least car dependent. Well, today I'm going to dig into the latest data and try to find some diamonds in the rough. And I'll count down the 10 US metro areas that give you the most walkability, bikeability, and public transit for your housing dollar.
And if you follow this channel, you've seen me do lists like this by city. But today's a little different because I do find the metropolitan area, meaning the core city and its suburbs to be a more appropriate unit of analysis for most things. I've made this point a few times, but comparing cities, can be a bit apples and oranges. Like in my Houston video, I made the point that the city that exists inside the 610 loop has much more density, walkability, and bike ability, and a lot more transit supply than areas that are still inside the city proper, but outside the 610 loop. I mean, areas that were annexed into Houston more recently, but in many other metro areas would still be separate jurisdictions. So today I'm circumventing the whole apples and oranges thing which I think penalizes certain cities unfairly and gives other cities too much credit. So the way I'm doing this is by evaluating everything at the metropolitan area level.
Criteria and methodology. I needed some kind of cut point to analyze this. And what I went with was to even be considered your metro area has to have a team in one of the big five men's or big two women's professional sports leagues. So, including MLS gets me Austin, NWSL gets me Louisville, and the WNBA doesn't get me anything because even though the state of Connecticut has several metropolitan statistical areas, the Connecticut Sun doesn't play anywhere near any of them. So, someone who knows the WNBA well needs to explain to me what the Connecticut Sun business model is.
What I measured. I care about walking, biking, and transit because I just believe that everything that's good about cities flows from those things. The local economy, the culture, the food, all of it is downstream of how well a place functions when a lot of people want to be in the same space at the same time, which is kind of my working definition of what urbanism is. If there's other stuff you personally care about, like whether there's a ballet company or whether there's like a NASCAR track nearby, you can mentally adjust this list accordingly. So, I wanted my own scores for walkability, bikeability, and transitability. I like to get at the demand side and the supply side because they're both important to the prevailing transportation culture of a region. For the demand side, it's American Community Survey data 2023 commuting characteristics. And for the supply side, I use the National Transit Database and aggregated service data from all providers for each metro area.
Walk score and bike score a bit trickier. You can get them at the city level, not the metro area. So, I did some extra Excel wrangling to aggregate for each metro area, weighting the walk score and bike score ratings for the core cities and suburbs by population to get an overall metro area score. I normalized each of those six metrics to a scale of 0 to 100. So, what you get is an urbanism score with a maximum possible 600 points. And finally, I got a brand new data set from Dwely that gives me the median rent for each metro area by rental type. So, I'm using median rent for a one-bedroom apartment and putting that in the denominator so I can see how much urbanism I'm getting for my housing dollar for each metro area. The data is pretty fresh, May 2025. And part of what's fun here is prices have been going in different directions in different regions for a variety of reasons related to demand and supply. So some of the cities I mentioned today are going to be familiar from previous lists of undervalued places, but some of them are going to be brand new. And as always, there's no right answer to this kind of question. Everybody's got their own personal matrix of wants and needs. But what I think I've got here is at least a good starting point for I don't know like pondering your next move.
Okay, preliminary is done. Let's get into it.
10. The Milwaukee Waca Metropolitan Statistical Area shows up here because the median rent for a one-bedroom is around 1,000 bucks and the aggregate numbers for walking are pretty good. And keep in mind, 600 is a maximum possible score, but the median for the 44 qualifying metro areas I looked at was in the 140s. So, southeast Wisconsin is a pretty strong value. By the way, one thing I like about doing this kind of analysis is it becomes kind of a target list of cities I want to go visit. And I haven't been to Milwaukee in years, so maybe it's time.
9. I was not expecting the greater Boston area to be anywhere near this kind of list, but it is on its own. Boston is way too expensive to show up here, but one of the lessons for today is that these older northeast cities have less expensive suburbs that have compact urban form as well. And not just Cambridge. You can drop into a suburb like Lynn and it's not going to be Boston level urbanism, but compared to the major suburbs of most US cities, it's actually very good. So already we're on notice that this list is going to include less expensive metro areas that punch above their weight and pricier metros that just do a lot of things at a very high level.
8. The Twin Cities. One thing here is I think on previous videos in this genre, I've only weighted biking at half of what I did for walking and transit. And today I just decided, you know, biking is hugely important to me personally. It's part of my everyday life. But even if it wasn't, streets that are bikable or scooterable or whatever are just better streets and you're going to have a better culture around urban living. Anyway, Twin Cities okay on walkability and transit, but besides having very reasonable median rents regionwide, it's really biking that puts it on this list.
7. Perennial affordable urbanism favorite, St. Louis. Second least expensive metro area on this list. Only Oklahoma City has a lower median one-bedroom rent. And spoiler alert, OKC is not going to show up today. I've highlighted lots of cool urban neighborhoods in St. Louis proper in other videos. Since we're talking metro areas, let's get a bit outside the city. Like anywhere, the suburbs are a mixed bag, but let's check out one that's along the metro line. Clayton, really solid, walkable downtown, density around the transit station. Eh, I'd look in the city proper for housing personally, but everybody has their thing. Another one for you to investigate.
6. Buffalo, New York. You know, I went to Edmonton, Alberta a couple months ago. Not really knowing what to expect. Buffalo, around the same size as Edmonton, also has some pretty tough winters, also has a below grade light rail line that runs through the center of the city. I'd definitely be interested in ground truthing this. This isn't the first one in my undervalued list Buffalo shown up on. It's another northeastern US city that's still got some of its original fabric. I'd probably stick with Buffalo proper because it's going to be pretty affordable, but there are some interesting suburbs out here, too.
5. Chicagoland, where I actually am going later this month. First time since I started the channel. So, windy city content coming soon. Metro areawide median one-bedroom rent 1385. Not as inexpensive as St. Louis or Buffalo or Milwaukee. Kind of middle of the road for the 44 metro areas I looked at, but Chicagoland is well above the median in every category I looked at. Not sure if I'll get out to the suburbs when I visit in late September, but several have featured in other videos I've done. A lot of them have good transit access, so you can settle down in a lot of different places in Northeast Illinois and enjoy a pretty good quality of urban life for a reasonable price.
For Pittsburgh, I did a whole video on location earlier this year where I looked at walkable neighborhoods and what the prevailing home values are in each. And what I found is still absolutely crazy to me. I used Zillow home value index for that one, but in the Dwely data, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom in greater Pittsburgh is just a hair under $900. I did ground truth a lot of locations in the city proper and yeah, you can live in a lot of fantastic neighborhoods for a pretty reasonable price. Also, in that video, I asked you guys to call your state senators so we can get transit funding passed. Maybe not enough of you have Republican state senators because still not getting done. So, Pittsburgh, unfortunately, probably slips down this list once some of those service cuts go into effect.
Likewise, number three, Greater Philadelphia. We'll see how the SEPTA funding situation plays out, but things are very grim right now. Philly, a perennial entry on these kinds of lists. Really strong on biking, walking, and transit across the board. Honestly, a very similar profile to Chicagoland, just slightly less expensive and a bit better on walkability. Suburbs are a little hit or miss, which is true just about anywhere, but the Delaware Valley has some gems, so you've got a lot of choices here. Philly very high on the list of cities I haven't managed to get to since I started the channel. We'll see if I can make something happen in 2026.
Okay, top two coming up. And if you're guessing along at home, all I can say is good luck because these are two that I just absolutely did not see coming. But I will talk about the rationale for why they showed up where they did. Also, I'll give you a couple honorables and a couple dishonorables which I think will help put this whole list into perspective.
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Honorable mentions. I'll give you two that just missed the cut. Number 12 is the DMV. It does well in this analysis for a lot of the same reasons greater Boston does. Actually lower prevailing rents in the greater DC area, but in the census data, it had about half the biking and walking commute mode split that greater Boston had. So, it just misses the cut. And 11, pretty shocking, the San Francisco Oakland metro area. Second most expensive out of the 44, just behind San Jose Silicon Valley. Strong numbers across the board and the highest bike mode split of all the metro areas I looked at. Mind you, that number is just 1.7%, but remember, we're talking about metro area wide here. The mode share is going to be a lot higher in San Francisco and several locations in the East Bay.
I kind of hate to give out dishonorable mentions because I really am an enjoyer of all cities, but number 43 is Charlotte, aka the sprawl capital of the US. You can definitely find neighborhoods here where you can live a high quality of life without a car. It just gets pretty dire out away from the city center and the light rail corridor. And number 44, Nashville. Again, there are spots in the city with nice urban fabric, but regionwide bike mode share of 0.1%. Worst on this list. Eh, biking is old technology. Anyway, Nashville has much more innovative ideas.
Back to it.
2. The Portland, Oregon metro region. I had to double and triple check these numbers because Portland has lots of good urbanist qualities, but doesn't have a reputation as an affordable place. So, a couple reasons Portland Metro shows up here. One is biking, the highest regional bike mode share outside the Bay Area, and it actually came in number one on bike score rating. Not just because Portland itself rates the highest of any core city tied with Minneapolis, but the suburbs are often pretty good, too. Hillsboro, the epicenter of the region's silicon forest, bike score rating of 72, and other suburbs rate pretty well, too. And the median one-bedroom rental just under $1,400. You kind of wonder if in some ways Portland renters are benefiting from bad publicity driving down demand, although also maybe from recent zoning changes that are helping to add supply, which I've talked about in a recent video. Bottom line though, you're getting above average walkability and transit and elite biking for the US at least for middle of the pack rental prices.
1. The tri-state area. Now, it may surprise you to see New York at the top of any list that deals with affordability. And including all the suburbs of the tri-state area does bring down the median price of a one-bedroom quite a bit. But it is still the third most expensive metro area after San Francisco and San Jose. Here's the thing, though. The walking and biking are way above average, not just for the city, but there are suburbs all over New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut that have good walk score ratings. And there's not a single other metro area in the US that's even close when it comes to transit supply or transit ridership. And you can say, well, this isn't really fair. New York is such an outlier on this stuff and it really skews the analysis. And my response to that is, yeah, New York is a massive outlier, and that's kind of the whole point. So, you don't have to spend your whole income on a shoe box in Williamsburg. You can get a one-bedroom in like the Hudson Valley. You can still have good transit access into the city when you need it. And if you're the type of person who likes to have good access to the great outdoors, maybe that's your sweet spot.
This comes back to a theme I talk about a lot on this channel. Not only can cities and nature coexist side by side, having compact, dense cities and limiting urban sprawl is an important way of keeping the wilderness wild and keeping ecosystems healthy. And this is where my friends at Planet Wild come in. Planet Wild is a global community of people who care deeply about the planet and want to give back to nature. And their approach is very cool. Every month they team up with a new partner organization on a different mission to bring back endangered species, support oceans and aquatic life or re-seed ancient forests and restore biodiversity. All of this is funded by a community of nature enthusiasts just like you and me. Think of it as crowdfunding for nature. And as a member of Planet Wild, you get a video report every month that you can find right here on YouTube. So, there's a very visual accountability piece to what they do, and it really gives you a chance to see how the contributions from your membership are making a difference out in the world. Planet Wild is very thoughtful about how they select their projects. You know that I am very big on selection criteria, and so are they. Theirs includes things like transformative potential, measurable outcomes, likelihood of lasting impact, and transparency of partner organizations. Here's an example. Their project in August of this year in the Baltic Sea region involved rescuing seal pups, raising them in a safe place, and returning them to the wild with the aim of restoring the seal population as factors such as climate change continue to endanger the seals. Like all of Planet Wild's video reports, this one goes deep on explaining the problem, how your contributions are helping make a difference, examples of measurable early success, and very important, this one has some extremely cute baby seal footage. I'm a member myself because Planet Wild is about restoring ecosystems and being a good steward of the planet, which if you follow what I talk about on this channel, is very much in line with the values of low impact urban living. The best time to start restoring habitats and increasing biodiversity was, I don't know, before the industrial revolution. But the second best time is right now. And as a special gift, the first 100 of you will get your first month of a Planet Wild membership for free. So scan the QR code right here on screen or use my custom link down in the description to become a Planet Wild member or use my code nerd29 later. There's no set price for membership. You give the amount that feels right for you and you can cancel anytime. And what I encourage right now is for you to go watch the baby seal mission report. The work Planet Wild does with its partner organizations is enabled by supporters like you. It's really very inspiring stuff and in a time where it seems like nobody is ever doing the right thing for the planet, it is really refreshing to see people still doing important work.
And that's all I've got. Thanks for joining today and thanks as always to the patrons whose direct support really allows me to grow in a way that I can sustain and that won't drive me absolutely nuts. I might take next week off. There's just kind of a lot going on. But in any case, keep the great topic suggestions coming. I'll be back with a new episode soon enough and I'll see you then.