'Just puts a damper on life': Median rent costs hit record high in Milwaukee metro

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- It has never cost so much to rent an apartment in the Milwaukee area. A new report released this week found Milwaukee is one of three Midwestern cities to set record-high median rent costs.

According to an analysis by Realtor.com, the median price for renting an apartment with two or fewer bedrooms in the Milwaukee metro area was $1,671 in April. Minneapolis ($1,529) and Indianapolis ($1,334) also hit record highs according to the review. 

For Milwaukee, the median cost represented a 3.8% increase from last spring. Shonie L., who only wanted to give her last name initial, said she and her husband, Rob, have felt that increase. It's been an aggravating housing search, and rising rent costs haven't helped.

"It impacts your day-to-day, so now, it's like I have less money for recreation, I have less money to just have fun and take care of myself," she said. "Because, obviously, rent and the bills and the priorities come first, so it just puts a damper on life in general, and it makes it feel like you're literally just working to pay rent, and that's it."

John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University, said two of the most proven ways of getting rent prices to fall are increasing housing supply and declining populations. The latter, he said, is obviously undesirable because of the impact that'd have on businesses and schools.

"Building more housing is pretty much the only thing that seems to work," Johnson said. "It's a supply-and-demand issue."

Johnson added Milwaukee's supply-and-demand balance has fallen even further out of whack because rising real estate prices and interest rates have held back young families that, historically, would've owned a house in this market by now.

"Milwaukee, for a long time, has been a city where if you knew you were going to stay in Milwaukee for quite a few years, it was cheaper for you to buy a house in most cases than to keep renting, and it was sort of common knowledge," Johnson said. "A landlord couldn't raise rents too much or people would just leave and buy a house. Now, there are fewer houses on the market, at all, and the prices are much higher for the houses that do get listed."

Even for people who have succeeded in their house hunt, there were plenty of frustrations along the way.

Trevor Tomczak, who recently bought a Lower East Side duplex, said he often lost out to corporations that swooped in with offers on multi-unit houses he couldn't possibly match.

"People were coming in $30,000, $40,000 [all] cash over what I was coming in at," Tomczak said. "So, it took me nine months to find a place."

Rising rents, however, are not universal. Austin, Las Vegas and Nashville are among the metro areas where the median rent has fallen since last spring. Austin and Nashville have both seen median rent declines of more than 8% over the past year.

Johnson cautioned there can be different factors affecting rent prices from one city to another, and it's hard to draw overly broad conclusions from just one year of data. At the same time, the same factors always seem to be part of the story.

"Austin is particularly famous for having built a lot of housing over the past few years," Johnson said.

Shonie noted it'll take time to build more housing, so that won't be an immediate solution in their quest to either buy a home or find more reasonable rent prices.

"I literally have a friend right now that's moving out of a house they like because the rent went up $500," she said. "I just feel like that is crazy."