Something strange has been happening this year in Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Denver: In some of the nation’s most expensive places to live, rents have fallen, offering residents a rare reprieve.
But not in Boston.
For all the challenges facing Boston’s economy right now — cuts at universities and research labs, sluggish job growth, people moving away — rents both in the city and the broader metropolitan area have defied economic gravity, either rising modestly or remaining flat year over year, depending on which numbers you look at. And while other markets have seen an influx of new construction driving rents downward, that hasn’t been nearly as much the case here.
In other words, while rents fall elsewhere, even in higher-cost cities where prices have historically been stubborn, Boston’s housing market is so out of whack that it’s in a class largely by itself.
“There are two big factors at work here: People really want to live in Boston, and the Boston area has one of the largest housing shortages in the country,” said Adam Guren, an associate professor of economics at Boston University. “Those two things together make it pretty difficult for rents to go down.”
By multiple measures, rents have ticked up here lately. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Boston in June was $2,524, according to the rental listing website Apartment List, which estimates rents based on census data and a formula calculated from the company’s listings. That was slightly up from $2,498 in June 2025. In the broader region, rents remained flat year over year.
Real estate website Zillow, which calculates rents based on its own listings and tends to skew toward higher-end buildings, estimated rents in Boston climbed 2.9 percent from June 2025 to June 2026, and 2.6 percent in the Greater Boston metropolitan area. That is in keeping with the longstanding trend around here: Rents have been on a steady upward march for decades, with the exception of the pandemic years, when they fell briefly before the rental market caught fire.
But cracks have begun to appear in the region’s economy. The local biotech industry is faltering, and so are the universities that prop up much of what makes the region tick. Elevated inflation and runaway living costs have put a damper on things, too.
Some have speculated that a weakened local economy could help nudge rents down. That has happened in some other markets, including some of Boston’s high-cost peer cities.
In Los Angeles, for instance, overall rents were down 1.4 percent through July, according to Apartment List. In Washington, D.C., and Seattle, they were down 2.7 percent. And rents dipped 0.6 percent in San Diego.
The other dynamic driving rents downward elsewhere: a surge in housing production.
Many places saw big upticks in building permits for new multifamily housing in 2021 and 2022, projects that have finished construction and opened in the last year or so. That has helped drive up inventory in many places that have long had significant housing shortages.
There may be no bigger example of that than Austin, Texas. The city added roughly 120,000 units between 2015 and 2024, and rents there have been dropping steadily, down nearly 8 percent between July 2023 and July 2024, according to Apartment List, and 3.8 percent in the last year.
To be sure, Greater Boston saw a boost in construction too: State officials have said Massachusetts added 34,500 homes in 2025, a huge increase from the annual average.
That helps, but not enough to bring rents down. Other places have built more, and Greater Boston faces a bigger shortage.
“Boston has seen a lot more units coming online relative to its own historical benchmark,” said Chris Salviati, chief economist at Apartment List. “But relative to the Austins and Phoenixes of the world, where you’ve seen meaningful reductions in the cost of rent, it’s nowhere near that level.”
It’s hard to argue that rents going up is a good thing, said Salviati. It is a symptom of the city’s extreme shortage of homes, and it makes living here extremely difficult for renters, especially low- and middle-income families.
But it does reflect the strength of Boston’s economy. Even with some signs that the rental market has weakened slightly in some student neighborhoods such as Brighton and Brookline, overall demand to live in Boston is still high.
Boston is in a select group of expensive cities — including New York City and San Francisco — with alluring local industries and universities where demand to live is so strong and homes so few that housing costs continue to rise regardless of local and national economic swings.
In New York, rents were up 3.4 percent year over year in July. And in San Francisco, bolstered by an AI boom, they’ve soared 23 percent in the last year above levels that were already the highest of any big city in the country.
It would take a sustained period of significantly increased housing production, perhaps coupled with a worsening downturn, for rents here to fall, said Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow.
That does not appear to be in cards right now. Permits for new homes have fallen steeply since 2022 — 2023 and 2024 were the slowest years for new construction in Boston since the Great Recession — meaning few new apartments will come online over the next several years.
“The fact remains that there is a massive housing deficit in the Boston area that is ultimately driving up rents,” said Divounguy. “That shortage built up over many, many years of underbuilding, and it is going to take sustained effort to build out of it and bring costs down.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.