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In a World of Shrinking Apartments, DC Rentals Got Bigger

  • February 24th 2023

by UrbanTurf Staff

HOWARD-RES.jpeg
A rendering of a new apartment development near Howard University. 

Apartments across the country continue to get smaller, but DC is bucking that trend. At least for now. 

A new study from RENTCafé found that DC renters gained an extra 9 square feet as a result of slightly larger apartments delivering over the last decade. 

"The tiny gain is definitely better than the situation in other large cities like Atlanta, Seattle and Nashville where new apartments shrunk by 40 to 70 square feet in the past decade," the study found. 

The excitement that DC is getting larger apartments is a bit overstated. Despite delivering more spacious units than other metro areas, the average size of 738 square feet for new rentals puts the city at 7th on list of smallest apartments in the U.S. Also, the average size of new units in the pipeline is just 670 square feet, well below the current average.

The data for this study is sourced from the Yardi Matrix and only counts units in buildings with at least 50 units.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/in_a_world_of_shrinking_apartments_dc_rentals_got_bigger/20671.

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