A tale of two tech cities
https://crossborders.io/insights/a-tale-of-two-tech-cities

HOW TO CREDIT
Source: CrossBorders, "A tale of two tech cities", 1 November 2026, using the Zillow Observed Rent Index and US Census Bureau data. Data Provided by Zillow Group. https://crossborders.io/insights/a-tale-of-two-tech-cities

TERMS
Use these charts in your article, no need to ask. Please link to this story as the source. Wherever the rent figures appear, keep the line "Data Provided by Zillow Group", which Zillow's Terms of Use require, without Zillow's logo. In print, credit CrossBorders and Zillow.
The rent data belongs to Zillow and follows its Terms of Use, so these files carry our calculated changes and not its monthly series, which you can download from Zillow Research. The photos, and figures the story credits to other sources, belong to their owners.

FINDINGS YOU CAN QUOTE
- Asking rents in the Austin metro were 10.8% below their Aug 2022 peak in Sep 2026, the furthest of any US metro of a million people or more.
- Asking rents in the San Francisco metro reached a record $3,445 in Sep 2026, up 11.8% in a year. In the city itself they were $4,784, up 26.4%.
- Since Sep 2023, asking rents changed -6.6% in the Austin metro and +19.7% in the San Francisco metro, the lowest and highest of 47 big metros.
- Austin gained 119k renter households from 2019 to 2025 and permitted 116k apartments from 2020 to 2025. Homes empty and for rent went from 21k in 2019 to 10k in 2021 and 37k in 2025.
- Austin permitted 29.5 apartments per 100 renters in 2019 to 2023, the most of any big metro. The San Francisco metro permitted 4.7.
- Across 47 big metros, those that permitted more apartments per renter in 2019 to 2023 had softer asking rents from Sep 2023 to Sep 2026 (r = -0.66, p < 0.001; -0.59 without Austin). That is a correlation, not proof of cause.
- The city of San Francisco, on 47 square miles of land, permitted 10,489 apartments in 2019 to 2023. The city of Seattle, on 84 square miles with fewer people, permitted 35,763.

ONE THING TO KEEP STRAIGHT
These are asking rents for metro areas, in dollars, not what every renter pays. None of this shows what caused what.

DATA
Rent: Data Provided by Zillow Group. Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), smoothed, all homes plus multifamily, metro and city, Dec 2019 to Sep 2026; these are asking rents. The files carry our changes calculated from it, not Zillow's monthly series. People and housing: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 1-year estimates (renter households B25003, homes empty and for rent B25004) and Building Permits Survey. CrossBorders calculated the changes, the medians and the correlation. every-big-metro.csv lists all 56 metros.

QUESTIONS, CORRECTIONS OR ANOTHER CUT OF THE DATA: elliot@crossborders.io
