Updated Boston Apartment Price Maps

January 29th, 2013
housing, map
In June 2011 I made a map of Boston-area apartment prices. I've made an updated version: $/room, $/bedroom. As before the data comes from the (awesome) site padmapper, which means it's pretty close to all Boston-area apartments currently on the market.

6/2011 1/2013
per room
per bedroom

This is a different time of year (note to self: repeat in June) so I don't know how much of the change is seasonal. Last time I had 4471 listings with an average of $767/room and $1141/bedroom, now I have 3405 listings with an average of $895/room and $1314/bedroom. This is a much greater increase than inflation: the CPI in June 2011 was 225.922 while the December 2012 one was 229.594, so you would expect $767/room then to turn into $780/room now instead of the $895 we actually see.

(The code is on github.)

Update 2013-01-31: Someone was wondering if combining different sized apartments into one map might be misleading. So I made a version that's just two-bedroom apartments. (That's the most common size, at 986 listings.)

Update 2013-02-01: Someone adapted my code and made maps for Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago, and Detroit.

Update 2013-02-02: I regenerated the maps after manually cleaning up some bad data.

Update 2013-02-09: I made ones for Atlanta and Baltimore. Someone else made one for Washington DC.

Referenced in: Apartment Prices Over Time

Comment via: google plus, facebook, r/boston, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

LLMs roleplay characters

I. I’m going to talk about the persona selection model, which in my opinion is one of the most important concepts to understand if you want to understand large language models’ psychology.

via Thing of Things May 1, 2026

You should try contra dancing

a story of middle school Ben • a not-very-illuminating description of the mechanics • flow, joy, and community • the antidote to the rest of life • how to try contra

via benkuhn.net April 24, 2026

On AI writing in 2026

I use AI to write a little bit: I ask it for high level feedback on blog post drafts, make mechanical edits, and sometimes use it to brainstorm options for wording at a paragraph level. It’s unusual that I accept its wording or changes without modificatio…

via Home April 16, 2026

more     (via openring)