Gas Prices Drive Demand For Downtown Dwellings

Sick of filling up the tank for 60 bucks? Considering a place near work downtown and tossing the car keys?

Prepare to pay higher rents as more like-minded apartment dwellers flock to urban digs.

Nationwide, rents near job centers and mass transit are rising faster than other areas, according to New York-based real estate research firm Reis Inc. The trend is strongest in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Portland, Ore.

In downtown San Diego, for example, rents have jumped 15 percent in the past year to between $2,400 and $2,600 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, said Greg Neuman, owner of Neuman & Neuman Prudential Realty.

Young renters and empty nesters want to walk to work or drive against rush-hour traffic to save time and gas.

If they live a half hour or an hour away, "they could rent the same apartment for $800," Neuman said, "but they're now spending an hour commute and another $700 to $800 a month on gas."

In urban New York and New Jersey, Kamson Corp.'s apartments are filling up and pushing rents higher, while its suburban ones in Pennsylvania can't hold on to tenants.

"We're finding people asking more questions about mass transit, what kind of services there are in the immediate area," said Mike Beirne, Kamson's executive vice president.

Some apartment owners are including maps on their Web sites and brochures showing where amenities and public transportation are. Others are advertising their so-called walkability score from www.walkscore.com, a site that calculates how close an address is to businesses and amenities. Some landlords are giving gas cards to new tenants and offering discounted parking to those with hybrid cars.

Looking for bargain rents downtown? Try Miami, where a glut of condos left over from the housing boom are turning into rentals and flooding the market. Renters have more choices and more power to negotiate deals.

"Because landlords are motivated, rents are negotiable here," said Paul Sasseville, a real estate agent at Esslinger Wooten Maxwell. Some landlords, he said, will offer design changes, like swapping carpet for hardwood floors, to lock in a tenant for two years.

Renters there have been moving downtown for a few years already as traffic backed up around South Florida. The city has the sixth-worst commute in the country, according to Census data.

"People wanted to get more hours into their life," Sasseville said. "That started being an impact right before gas prices started to increase."

Now gas prices have become just another reason for renters to skip out on the suburbs and settle in the city.

Not surprisingly, many cities also are showing increases in public transit ridership this year, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

The suburban exodus is "both a function of traffic and congestion, spiced up by $4 a gallon gas," said John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute.

Americans spend more than 100 hours commuting each year, but all-time-high gas prices are forcing Americans to change their smog-producing habits.

If gas prices stay high, renters will need the money they save on dumping their cars to pay for that pricey apartment by the subway. But they can still feel good about being green.