Long-term renters can't leave these 10 U.S. metros. Realtor explains why

Renting was supposed to be temporary. For tens of millions of Americans, it has become permanent.

Across the U.S., a quiet version of the housing crisis plays out in kitchens and spreadsheets, as tenants in expensive cities run the numbers on moving and all conclude that staying put costs less. The math is brutal and simple. A household locked into a below-market lease in Brooklyn or Silver Lake is not lazy or complacent. It is rational. Moving means surrendering a rent the market will never offer again, and stepping into a new unit that could cost hundreds of dollars more each month.

This is the renter lock-in effect — a phenomenon that mirrors the mortgage lock-in that has paralyzed the for-sale market since interest rates started rising. Pandemic-era cheap borrowing made millions of homeowners reluctant to trade their low-rate mortgages for new ones at higher rates. A parallel logic now governs renters in high-cost metros: the longer you stay, the cheaper your unit is relative to the market, and the more financially ruinous it becomes to leave.

The typical long-term renter — defined as a household that has stayed in the same unit for at least five years — is a 55-year-old adult, living with one other person in a two-bedroom unit, earning a median household income of $48,500. The profile points to a population with limited financial cushion and few good options. Higher borrowing costs have pushed would-be buyers back into the rental market, increasing competition and driving up asking rents. Saving for a down payment has grown harder. The cycle reinforces itself.

Long-term renters make up about 36% of all renter households nationally, according to a Realtor.com analysis of 2024 American Community Survey data across the 100 largest metros. Their geographic distribution is anything but random. They cluster in the country's most expensive anchor cities and in the secondary markets that absorbed their overflow.

Realtor locates the 10 metros where long-term renters are most concentrated.

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More than half of all renter households in the New York-Newark metro — 53.3% more precisely — have been in their current unit for at least five years. That's the highest share among the 100 largest metros in the country. Decades of rent stabilization and rent control policies have kept millions of tenants in below-market units they cannot afford to vacate. The city's median asking rent hit $2,894 in February, the second-highest among the top 50 metros, according to Realtor.com's monthly rental report. A tenant paying $1,800 a month in a stabilized Brooklyn apartment faces an unbridgeable gap between their current lease and what the open market would offer.

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At 49.6%, Los Angeles has the second-highest long-term renter share in the country, and its mechanics are nearly identical to New York's. Rent control has preserved below-market leases across much of the city, locking tenants into apartments they can no longer afford to leave even if they wanted to. The city's median asking rent stood at $2,768 in February. For renters paying well below that figure, the lease they hold is a financial asset — one they surrender the moment they sign a new one.

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Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, and Ventura sit just far enough from Los Angeles to have once offered meaningful relief. Renters priced out of L.A. and the Bay Area headed here in significant numbers, and 49.5% of the metro's renter households have now been in place for at least five years. Rents followed the arrivals upward. What began as a refuge became a sort of purgatory for tenants who relocated for affordability and now find that the cost of moving outweighs the cost of staying.

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Fresno drew renters fleeing the coastal metros, and 49.3% of its renter households qualify as long-term. The city's position in California's Central Valley made it look like a viable escape route from L.A. and Bay Area prices. But rents rose as the population grew, and the city now scores below the national affordability benchmark. A local renter forced to move to a market-rate unit within the same metro area would likely face severe financial strain. The escape hatch has closed.

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Stockton carries a 47.9% long-term renter share, and its story closely mirrors Fresno's. Tenants who fled the Bay Area's extreme costs landed here, found rents they could manage, and stayed. Then rents climbed. Realtor.com's analysis found that an average of 39.2% of renter households across the top 10 long-term renter metros would face severe affordability challenges — rent consuming more than 50% of income — if forced to move to a new unit at fair market rent in the same area. Stockton's renters are well acquainted with the math.

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At 44.7%, Bakersfield's long-term renter share tells the same overflow story as Fresno and Stockton, with one additional layer: Family renters, or married couples or parents living with children, are heavily concentrated here as well. Bakersfield's share of family renter households is among the highest in the country at 60.6%. That means many of the long-term renters staying put are not single adults but entire families managing housing costs on incomes that leave little margin for error.

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The Riverside metro, which stretches into San Bernardino County, became a destination for renters pushed east out of Los Angeles as housing costs spread across Southern California. Its long-term renter share stands at 44.5%. Like the other California overflow markets, Riverside absorbed demand and then took on the price increases that followed. Renters who sought relief are now among the most financially exposed in the region, staying in place because moving within the same metro would cost them more than they can afford.

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Providence and Warwick have a long-term renter share of roughly 44%. Since Boston lacks the rent stabilization that has kept New York tenants in place for decades, its extreme housing costs pushed renters toward Rhode Island, where prices were comparatively manageable. Then Providence rents rose. Tenants who relocated for affordability found themselves stuck again, unable to afford Boston and increasingly unable to afford moving elsewhere. Both Rhode Island and Massachusetts are now actively debating rent stabilization legislation in response.

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Worcester mirrors Providence in both cause and effect. Renters priced out of Boston's core moved west to Worcester, where lower rents once offered a real alternative. As of the latest data, roughly 44% of Worcester's renter households have been in their current unit for at least five years. The corridor between Boston and Providence has effectively become a zone of trapped mobility — a stretch of the Northeast where tenants who once moved in search of affordability have run out of places to move again.

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In the East Coast's other overflow corridor, Bridgeport's long-term renter share sits at 43%. The city attracted households fleeing New York's prohibitive costs, and the pattern repeated itself: relative affordability attracted demand, demand pushed up rents, and renters who arrived hoping to escape the lock-in effect found themselves inside a new version of it. A large share of Bridgeport's renter households would face rent-to-income ratios above 50% if forced to move at prevailing market rates.