Study: It's harder to escape high rents in SF than in any city on earth

No surprise here: San Francisco's rents are among the tops in the world. No surprise here: San Francisco's rents are among the tops in the world. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 19 Caption Close Study: It's harder to escape high rents in SF than in any city on earth 1 / 19 Back to Gallery

It's no secret rent in San Francisco costs an arm and at least one leg as the West Coast city usually lands at the top of lists ranking the most expensive places to live in the nation.

But the highest rent in the entire world? Yes, that's where the city ranks according to a newly released chart put together by Aaron Ansel, chief growth officer at the financial advice site Walletwyse.

Ansel used data from Numbeo, a user-generated cost-of-living statistics website, to rank the average rent in 540 cities around the world, from lowest to highest and color coded by region.

San Francisco soars at the top with the average rent at $3,500 while Hamilton, Bermuda, comes in second at $3,400, Manhattan in third at $3,050 and San Jose in fourth at $2,500.

The average rent is hard to pin down in a city as a single, well-founded source of data doesn't exist and data-mining companies and rental websites often reach different outcomes.

While many rankings only look at the cost of rent for a specific apartment type inside the city center, Numbeo uses an index to calculate its average rents for cities, pulls together an average based on the cost to rent one-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments both inside and outside the city center.

While the cost of rent within city limits might actually be higher in some international cities such as Hong Kong and London compared to San Francisco, Ansel thinks SF lands at top of his list due to Numbeo's more comprehensive view of rent that also considers the people living in the greater metro area. Ansel found that the high prices sprawl out from the big city more in the Bay Area than in other major metropolitan areas.

"I think the big difference when you look at cost of living for a place like the Bay Area is that in most high cost cities like New York, if you go far enough out, you run into a drop in price," Ansel says. "The San Francisco Bay Area is not like that. You go 30 miles in any direction and you're still within that zone. Whereas a lot of these big cities are high price points surrounded by normal price points, San Francisco is an ultra-high price point surrounded by more high price points."

ALSO, Non-homeowners in SF could spend $2.5 million in rent by age 60

Ansel's ranking quickly went viral after he posted it on Reddit and he included a caveat regarding the data:

There's no a clear definition of "city," which leads me to think there are probably some discrepancies based on how the numbers are reported. It's possible that downtown high-rise apartments go for twice the rent listed, or if you live in the suburbs where large apartments rent for far less than the given number. This is part of why indices are really better for comparison-purposes than for locate-specific data.

In the Reddit thread, many commented on the high cost of rent in San Francisco and the surrounding suburbs.

"Living just south of San Francisco, near San Jose, I can confirm the entire Bay Area is absurd," wrote one. "Houses that would cost several hundred thousand dollars in somewhere like Ohio (I have family there) will cost upwards of $1.5 million."

"I live in Walnut Creek and pay 1850/mo for 500 sq feet studio and live by myself," another shared. "I am about 80 minutes door to door with my office in downtown SF, and I got a pretty sweet deal for living by myself."

Another commenter seeking a rental in London made the point that the prices drop dramatically outside the city center. "If you work near a central station you can get a place for around half the price that's a 20-min train journey away," the Reddit user said.