Building owners might have an easier time selling their apartment units to renters in the Twin Cities than in other Midwest locations: A new study ranks Minneapolis as the best city in the Midwest for renters to live in 2023. The same study ranked Saint Paul as the ninth-best Midwest city for renters.
RentCafe recently published its 2023 list of the best U.S. cities for renters. Charleston, South Carolina, ranked as the best city on the list, followed by Plano, Texas, and Scottsdale, Arizona.
Midwest cities don’t rank high on RentCafe’s 2023 list. The top three cities for renters in the Midwest are Minneapolis; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Lincoln, Nebraska. Minneapolis, though, ranks just 21st overall in RentCafe’s survey, while Ann Arbor ranked 34th and Lincoln, Nebraska, came in at the 48th spot.
RentCafe doesn’t consider Tennessee part of the Midwest. But two cities in this state ranked high for renters: Nashville came in at the 22nd spot, while Knoxville pulled in the 49th slot.
Why do Minneapolis and Ann Arbor lead the pack in the Midwest? RentCafe said that Minneapolis ranks 12th in the United States in the survey’s “cost of living and housing” category, with a lower-than-average cost of living and a high share of high-end apartments.
Ann Arbor ranks 19th in the “local economy” category and 16th in “quality of life.” RentCafe says that Ann Arbor, in part because of the University of Michigan, boasts one of the largest shares of educated residents and a healthy job growth rate.
For its 2023 list, RentCafe looked at U.S. cities that had an apartment stock of at least 10,000 units. In all, RentCafe analyzed 136 cities for its list. To determine the best cities for renters, RentCafe’s analytics team created a composite index to compare metropolitan areas across three main categories: cost of living and housing, local economy and quality of life.
The South performed the best in RentCafe’s rankings, notching 36 of the top 50 spots in the 2023 list. Cities such as Miami and Orlando ranked high, as did smaller communities such as Asheville, North Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Plano, Texas.
Filling the last two of the list’s top-five spots were Atlanta, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina. Each of the top-five cities ranked high when it came to qualify of life and their local economies, performing especially well when it came to job growth.
In addition to Minneapolis, Ann Arbor and Lincoln, other cities ranking high in the Midwest were Madison, Wisconsin, which was ranked as the fourth-best Midwest city for renters by RentCafe; Bloomington, Indiana (5th); Kansas City, Missouri (7th); Omaha, Nebraska (8th); Saint Paul, Minnesota (9th); and Des Moines, Iowa (10th).
