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I don't believe average rent was $500 in 1990. In 1995 I was paying $450 per month to sleep on a couch in someone's house. I eventually saved enough for all of the moving expenses and managed to get a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in a terrible part of town for $485. When I found a roommate I moved to a better part of town and our two bedroom apartment was $700 per month. That was like 1996. This was all in a fairly affordable city. So pardon my suspicion, but I think this post is creating a rosier past than the one we lived through. Also, minimum wage was $4.25 an hour everywhere. Now it's $15-$20 per hour in most major cities. Overall I think the poor are making more comparatively, but the middle class are worse off, and it's a shrinking economic status group.
My 2007 apartment was $475. It is now $1,485.
Rents were fairlyish stable until the housing market crash.
That apartment was $790 in 2010. The rent hike was a long time ago, and since then it has just more or less been following inflation/gouging patterns seen elsewhere.
I will acknowledge that shit went crazy after covid too. My rent went up 22% in two years, and house prices were going up hundreds of thousands of dollars within a year.
Yeah that's true. I was lucky enough to have gotten a mortgage right before covid so I haven't personal experience on rent hikes as a result, I recognize.
It finally pushed us to get serious about buying, and we bought a home at the end of last year. We were feeling like we'd never be able to afford a house, but we made it happen! We had to move an hour outside of the city, but we still made it happen.
Quick Google for the Census Bureau only turns up median rather than mean:
Median is probably a better value here since it's going to reduce outlier effects.
Looks to me that median rent in most states in 1990 was closer to $300-400 per month than $500.
$620 for California, which is where I was. I guess some parts of the country are way cheaper, even though I was in a city that was considered affordable in California.