Are rising downtown Columbia rents outside millennials’ budgets?

An increasingly vibrant downtown Columbia beckons young professionals, with a true live-work-play lifestyle that’s continuing to evolve.

Closeness to the city center, including his beloved University of South Carolina campus and his new job at the S.C. State House, is a key factor for 22-year-old Michael Parks as he prepares to rent his first adult home, a century-old University Hill house he’ll share with roommates.

“It would feel really foreign for me to move miles away from campus and commute to work every morning,” said Parks, who will work as an assistant to Gov. Henry McMaster after graduating from the University of South Carolina this weekend. “I think the downtown area has the synergy that young people are looking for. As a young professional, I’m not going to move out in Lexington by myself. I want to be where the young people are. You want to be around others that are like you.”

But there’s an increasingly higher price to pay to call yourself a downtown Columbia resident, as rents grow with the area’s popularity. And, if you want to live downtown, you might not be able to live alone.

Typical downtown apartment rents appear to have climbed around $100 over the past five years, with two-bedroom rents in the city center now ranging from about $1,000 to $1,900 a month.

With many recent college grads and young professionals juggling first-time bills and student loan payments on starting salaries, some find themselves balancing champagne tastes with water budgets.

“I wanted to live on Main Street, but it’s just so expensive, so that was just not going to be a possibility for me,” said Andersen Cook, a 25-year-old working for a state agency. After living for several months with a roommate in an apartment off Garners Ferry Road, she recently moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Cottontown, just north of downtown, where she pays roughly $600 a month in rent.

If downtown dreams are out of reach for now, downtown Columbia’s outskirt neighborhoods – think Cottontown, Shandon, Rosewood, Forest Acres and West Columbia – offer an appealing rental alternative for many young professionals like Cook.

For instance, a thousand bucks could get you 800 square feet and one bedroom in a Vista apartment – or an extra bedroom and extra 200 square feet just across the river in West Columbia.

In Elmwood Park, you could rent a one-bedroom apartment above a garage for half the price of the same-sized space in the Vista or Main Street.

You could pay anywhere from $1,200 to $1,900 for two bedrooms downtown or less than $900 about 4 miles away, off Broad River Road, which is decidedly not downtown. Or, for the same price as a Main Street view from a two-bedroom apartment, you could rent a three-bedroom house – with a yard and driveway – in Rosewood or Forest Acres.

“For people who work downtown or are getting jobs, there’s more options than a high-rise in the middle of Columbia,” said Eric Munday, a sales and property manager for Columbia’s Hubbard Bowers, which manages rentals ranging from the city center to a number of surrounding communities. “There are a lot of great areas in Columbia if you take the time to look around.”

But, yes, you’d have to drive to have fun on Main.

Tevin Spruill looked just across the Congaree River from downtown, to the city of Cayce, where he’ll move into an apartment with roommates after graduating from Benedict College next weekend.

He came to Columbia, “the big city,” from “a small country town” in Georgia. And has no plans to move far from the city now, even as he prepares to start a social work job an hour away in Clinton before beginning graduate school at USC.

“In the city, there’s a lot of opportunity,” Spruill said. And, as an adult, there’s a lot of responsibility, he said, including new bills to pay.

“If you graduate college and now have a house bill to pay, you need to put that before going out with your friends,” Spruill said. “With me having to pay a phone bill, having to pay a car note, I had to look for (an apartment) that’s more economical for me.”

A mixture of undergraduates, grad students and young professionals live at the pay-by-the-bedroom Cayce Cove apartments, where Spruill will be living. Paying for a room there runs $200 to $300 less than the cost of living alone in most one-bedroom, market-rate apartments in the city center.

Still, it’s not much cheaper than splitting the cost of some downtown two-bedroom units.

Though downtown rents have gone up in recent years – “like any good city in the Carolinas” – “they haven’t skyrocketed,” said Tim Hose, president of Charlotte-based Synco Properties, which manages the nearly 200 Capitol Places apartments spread along Columbia’s Main Street.

Zillow, the popular housing search website, estimates the median rent for two-bedroom units in the greater Columbia area at around $850. But downtown two-bedroom rents can top that by anywhere from $200 to $1,000.

Even so, “$1,000 a month will still get a nice apartment in downtown Columbia,” Hose said. “If you make $36,000-$40,000, you can still afford a nice little place downtown.”

Some, like Cook, have found they can get many of the perks of downtown convenience for less money by looking just a few miles away.

“I can walk pretty much anywhere. Even to walk to the downtown Main Street area from here is really doable,” she said of her Cottontown apartment, located in a carriage house set back from the street behind two other houses.

She walks to Fireflies baseball games and the Soda City market. She’s a member at the Nickelodeon Theatre and the Columbia Museum of Art on Main Street, where she gets discounted admissions. And to save a little more in her budget, she doesn’t have cable or internet service, choosing instead to read and watch movies and stay active in the downtown scene.

Her neighborhood is ideal for young professionals, she said. And as she considers potentially buying a home in her near future, she’s got her eye on similar areas.

But just as affordable rentals can be hard to find on a young budget, so can houses for sale, she’s finding.

“I’m kind of looking more on the fringes of where I want to live rather than in exactly the same neighborhood, and I’m also looking at places that are smaller than I would necessarily want to live,” Cook said. “I’m not making tons of money, and I do have a lot of student debt. It makes it more difficult.”

This story was originally published May 6, 2017 at 12:02 PM with the headline "Are rising downtown Columbia rents outside millennials’ budgets?."