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Where to find a deal on a one-bedroom apartment in Boston

Median monthly rents in some neighborhoods—including Dorchester and Jamaica Plain—are significantly lower than in others, a late summer report says

Apartment buildings in Boston, including a red-brick one. Shutterstock

Boston has some of the highest apartment rents in the nation overall compared with other major U.S. cities, according to various reports. A new report from real estate listings and research site Zumper shows that some parts of the city are more expensive than others—a lot more expensive.

The Zumper report tracked median one-bedroom rents in vacant and available apartments in its database as of the tail end of the summer, so it’s a pretty good snapshot of the market neighborhood by neighborhood.

The most expensive areas were clustered in and around downtown. The median one-bedroom rent in South Boston, for instance, was $3,000 a month and the median in Back Bay was $2,800 a month. In Downtown proper, it was $3,425.

The farther out a tenant gets, the less expensive it gets. Places such as Jamaica Plain ($2,000 a month), Dorchester ($1,900 a month), and Roslindale ($1,800) were not only less expensive than those neighborhoods closer to downtown—they were also below the overall Boston one-bedroom median of $2,500.

There is a gray cloud in this. Though less expensive, median one-bedroom rents have increased since the spring in some of these areas. The median was up 12 percent, for instance, in both Dorchester and Roslindale, according to Zumper.

There are myriad reasons for Boston’s high rents, including the wider region’s patchwork of zoning regulations and job growth that has long outpaced apartment construction. What’d you think? Will things cool in the fall?