A year ago, a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Austin listed for around $1,650 a month. Today, a comparable unit in the same neighborhood can be had for closer to $1,550, and often with a month of free rent thrown in. That kind of price cut would have been laughable during the pandemic-era bidding wars. Now it is routine.
Austin’s year-over-year asking rents have dropped by nearly 6 percent, according to Apartment List’s national rent estimates through spring 2026, placing it among the fastest-falling major markets in the country. Other Sun Belt metros, including San Antonio, Phoenix, Jacksonville, and Raleigh, are following a similar trajectory, with declines ranging from roughly 2 to 5 percent year over year.
But renters in the Midwest and Northeast are living through the opposite experience. In Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee, and Hartford, asking rents have climbed by varying degrees over the past 12 months, per the same Apartment List data, with increases in those cities averaging around 5 percent. The gap between these two Americas of renting is now wide enough to reshape where people choose to live, and it traces back to a single variable: how much housing each region decided to build when demand was surging.
A flood of new apartments is resetting Sun Belt prices
The divergence starts with building permits. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey shows that Sun Belt metros authorized enormous volumes of multifamily housing during 2022, 2023, and into 2024. Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, and Jacksonville led the nation in new apartment permits per capita, responding to years of rapid population growth and double-digit rent spikes that made development highly profitable…