In apartment buildings across the U.S., rents were slightly lower in June and July than they were a year earlier. But in South Carolina they have kept on rising.
Several cities and counties in the Palmetto State have seen among the highest rent increases in America during the past three years, according to data compiled by Apartment List.
Mount Pleasant, notably, has seen a larger hike in median rent than all but five of 545 cities included in the data.
Rock Hill was close behind with the nation’s 12th-highest rent increase among cities since the summer of 2020.
How much of an increase? Rents soared 47 percent in Mount Pleasant and 46 percent in Rock Hill over those 36 months.
Kim Thompson relocated from Pennsylvania to Mount Pleasant for a new job in 2021. The 51-year-old optician can walk to work from her small apartment at Riviera at Seaside, near the Isle of Palms Connector, but fears that rising rent will force her to move.
“My neighbor just moved out because they raised her rent,” she said. “My co-workers live in Summerville and Goose Creek.”
Thompson has reason to worry. She’s paying $1,460 monthly plus utilities for a 575-square-foot studio apartment. The least expensive advertised monthly rent for a similar apartment in her complex was $1,713 on Aug. 9.
Her lease doesn’t renew until March, but she’s already exploring options.
“Every year is a worry,” Thompson said. “Every year it will obviously go up, not down.”
The Riviera at Seaside Farm apartments in Mount Pleasant. File/Brad Nettles/Staff
Apartment List doesn’t track studio apartment rents, but for a two-bedroom unit in Mount Pleasant the median rent hit $2,262 in July according to the company’s data. The median is the point where half are higher and half are lower.
Nationally, rents were down year over year in 67 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, according to Apartment List’s latest report. In South Carolina’s largest cities, rents went up.
Apartment List’s data is based on rental listings on the company’s website plus U.S. Census Bureau estimates, and is among the private sources used by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to calculate fair market rents. In South Carolina the Apartment List data is based on more than 800 apartment complexes in 10 cities.
As of July, rents in most South Carolina cities covered by the data were higher than the year before. Myrtle Beach and Mauldin were exceptions, with year-over-year declines, but rents in both cities have increased sharply since mid-2020.
During the last three years Charleston, Myrtle Beach and North Charleston were all in the top 20 percent of cities for rent increases, up more than 35 percent in each.
Large and ongoing increases in South Carolina’s population, driven primarily by people moving from other states, are a key driver of demand for housing. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, South Carolina was one of the fastest-growing states in the nation.
At the same time, a spike in home prices and mortgage interest rates have kept potential homebuyers in apartments.
Of 47 states covered by Apartment List’s data, South Carolina had the third-largest increase in rents during the last three years — up 35 percent — behind New Mexico and Florida.
“The places rents went up tremendously, the highest levels of rent growth, were cities in the Southeastern U.S. that became hotbeds of internal migration,” said Rob Warnock, senior research associate at Apartment List. “Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, those are states where just about everywhere got a lot more expensive.”
Of the 10 South Carolina cities Apartment List monitors, the lowest three-year rent increase was 28 percent, in Spartanburg, and the highest was Mount Pleasant’s 47 percent.
Spartanburg has become a high-growth area, along with Greenville and smaller towns nearby such as Greer and Simpsonville. In July, year-over-year rents in South Carolina increased the most in Spartanburg and Simpsonville, followed by North Charleston.
Josh Dix is the government affairs director for the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors and chairman of Charleston County’s affordable housing task force. He said supply and demand explain most of the increases, and noted that Mount Pleasant has prohibited new apartment building construction since 2016.
“Obviously, the demand-and-supply issue is pretty straightforward,” he said. “We’re not building for future demand.”
The Atlantic Beach House apartment complex in Mount Pleasant opened in 2023, but spurred controversy when first approved years earlier. Mount Pleasant has prohibited new apartment developments since 2016. Warren L. Wise/Staff
Across the Cooper River, the city of Charleston has allowed large new apartment buildings to march up the peninsula, but rents in the city have only gone up as the city’s population continues to grow. Charleston ranked 77th for the highest three-year rent increases.
The demand for apartments has increased partly because the flow of new residents moving from other states has not abated, and partly because potential homebuyers have found ownership unaffordable.
“You just keep them (renters) on that hamster wheel because there is no opportunity,” said Dix.
“We keep seeing developments that say ‘starting at $500,000’ or ‘starting at $700,000’ and that’s not affordable,” he said. “The first-time homebuyer opportunity is really being eliminated from the market.”
Dix said that easing local development regulations and speeding permitting could help. Both are things the real estate industry has long wanted, but Dix said they could also help address the supply side of the rental market.
Of the 545 cities covered by Apartment List’s data, just four had median rents that were lower in July than they were three years ago. They were: Oakland and San Francisco, Calif.; Lake Charles, La.; and Minneapolis, Minn.
Minneapolis made national news for adopting a plan to eliminate single-family home zoning in early 2018, throwing the door open to duplexes and triplexes where only single houses had been allowed across the city.
Minneapolis has also spent heavily on affordable housing, adopted inclusionary zoning rules to require some developments to include affordable housing and set minimum — rather than maximum — height limits in urban areas.
“No place in the U.S. has put inflation in the rearview mirror quite as fast as Minneapolis,” said a Bloomberg News story Aug. 9, noting that housing costs account for about one-third of the consumer-price index that measures inflation.
As of July, median rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis was $1,101, one dollar less than in Spartanburg.
But in Minneapolis, rents were lower in July than the year before — or three years before in the time of COVID — while in Spartanburg rents are rising, with July rents nearly 7 percent higher than a year earlier.
