About a year ago I made a map of the price
per bedroom of Boston-area apartments. In some ways that's useful and
easy to think about: "how much does it cost to get a bedroom?" is a
decent approximation for "how much does it cost to live there?".
Recently, however, some people pointed out that it's trying to model
something that's not very consistent. A three bedroom apartment is
about the same cost to the landlord as two one-bedroom apartments,
while my original map matched them at 1:3. The original map also
doesn't distinguish one-bedrooms and studios: they're both counted as
having one bedroom.
I've rerun the calculation for price per room, assuming each apartment
has one more room than the advertised number of bedrooms: 1 for
studios, 2 for one-bedrooms, etc. The revised map:
I also made an interactive
zoomable version.
I'd like to update this with 2012 data, but the data import process was dependent on an
undocumented part of the padmapper api, which has changed.
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