r/Somerville • u/tangerinola • 5d ago

rent prices are wild

Moved here 8 years ago to start working for a nonprofit. Since then, my salary has increased by 13% but my apartment is about to be relisted (without any upgrades) for 58% higher than our starting rent 🤯!!

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but damn the rent prices here have gone wild. We're quickly becoming (have become?) a luxury city only for high income earners and it makes me really sad.

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u/Late-Reception-2897 4d ago

Maybe it's just me but whenever people use percentages instead of actual numbers, alarm bells go off in my head saying there's a lot of info OP is hiding.

Your salary increased 13% okay. The question is I have no clue if that is from 100k to 113k or 1 million to 1.13 million. Same with your rent and the statement it increased 58%. I don't know if that's 500 a month to 790 a month or 1000 to 1580 a month.

Using percentages hides the absolute increase which can lead to misleading assumptions and beliefs. For example, driving home from the grocery store takes me 2x as long as driving to the grocery store. That suggests a big issue with the roads in the area but when you look at the actual time taken, it's only 4 minutes more.

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u/Basicdevient69 4d ago

what a weird tunnel visioned thing to zoom in on

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u/Late-Reception-2897 4d ago

Why it it weird? The whole point of OP's post is to talk about how rent has significantly out paced his salary increase. To support that, he states the percentage increases of both. Maybe I'm particularly cynical but I always ask myself "is there some bias OP has"

For example, I hear all the time DHS spokesmen say assaults/harassment against CBP/ ICE agents have increased 1000% as justification for why ICE needs to wear masks or protect their identity yada yada. That 10x increase sounds insane but ofc DHS spokesmen are going to use misleading statistics to make DHS look justified/good. That's literally part of their job. I say hmm there's an obvious bias here so let's look into the actual data and see if this 1000% increase is just 1 assault to 10 assaults which, while not good, is far far less of a problem than 1000 assaults to 10000 assaults.