A new ranking of the country's most expensive cities has Hartford sitting top the list, ahead of places like New York and Los Angeles.
U.S. News and World Report's "Most Expensive Places to Live in the U.S." ranked Hartford number one ahead of New York, New Haven, Miami and Los Angeles. But real estate prices weren’t the only factor used to calculate how costly it was to live in each city, according to a reporter who worked on the list.
U.S. News Reporter Erika Giovanetti said she took a holistic view of the data.
"We are looking at incomes as well as housing costs. Hartford ranked at the very top of our list for the percentage of income that is spent on housing,” Giovanetti said. “So that's really the driver behind what makes Hartford the most expensive place to live.”
According to a recent analysis by the Connecticut advocacy group Partnership for Strong Communities, more than half of renters in Hartford are considered to be cost-burdened, because they spend 30% or more of their income on housing.
Giovanetti said U.S. News and World Report relied on data from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Census Bureau and its own public survey on best places to live rankings for 2024-25. The data also focused on cities, not metro areas, which would have included data from surrounding suburbs.
“Hartford ranked as the number one most expensive city for three main reasons: low incomes, high cost of living and poor price parity. And price parity is the comparative costs of living when you're looking across different cities,” Giovanetti said.
The cost of living in Hartford is higher than the national average, she said, and goods and services are more expensive there than they are in other cities.
That, coupled with lower incomes, led to the Connecticut cities of Hartford and New Haven ranking in the top five most expensive places to live.
“In the job market category, Hartford did not rank very well. The unemployment rate is about double the national average,” Giovanetti said.
The rankings came out of another list Giovanetti worked on that highlighted the best places to live, which sought to guide people who are considering buying a home or moving to a new location.
“Another factor to think about when you're looking at the expense isn't just the high demand, high cost, but also the job market of the place where you're looking to live, the income that you can expect to bring in, and the stability that you'll have with unemployment,” she said. “Hartford just didn't perform as well.”
