Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Cheap Rent Cities in the U.S.

There’s a silver lining to this housing price decline in the U.S. if you’re a renter or a buyer: cheaper prices to get in either way. If you live in Manhattan though, going from $3,000 to $2,950 for a studio apartment isn’t much help. Get away from the coasts, however, and there are lots of cheap places to live. Today the Wall Street Journal ran a chart of the most expensive and least expensive cities to rent an apartment in the top-100 markets. The average cost after including all apartment sizes was a staggering $2,720 in New York, but quickly drops to $1,760 in San Francisco and $1,590 in Boston.

It’s the other end that’s interesting though. Below are the lowest 10 markets, where the average rent is only $470 to $600. I’ve been to most of these places. While they won’t knock your socks off with all-night clubs and 7-figure job ads, most have got good restaurants, some worthwhile attractions, and plenty of outdoor nature activities a short drive away. Some of them, like Lexington and Chattanooga, are fantastic places for a family vacation, so I would assume they’d be pretty good places to raise a family too. (Or for Lexington, try mixing that with some boozing and horse race gambling.) When you’re paying $500 or $600 a month in rent, you can fly away out of the country a lot more too. Bottom 10, cheapest at the top.

Wichita, KS
Oklahoma City
Tulsa, OK
Knoxville, TN
Dayton, OH
Chattanooga, TN
Greenville, SC
Lexington, KY
Louisville, KY
Little Rock, AR

By the way, the house in this photo is not for rent—or for sale either. It’s “the space house” in Chattanooga and the photo comes from this Chattanooga Real Estate blog.