Good news for America’s renters.

That’s something I don’t say very often.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so downcast when it comes to the plight of non-homeowners. There’s a certain freedom that goes along with renting (every lease renewal date’s an opportunity to choose a different adventure), and you’re spared the God-awful hassle of having to foot the bill in the event something critical — like, say, an HVAC unit — goes on the permanent fritz.

More generally, I often envy late-twenty and early-thirty somethings with good-paying jobs renting luxury apartments in big cities, where they cavort around and pretend to be rich on the back of a mostly liquid nest egg that’d otherwise be locked up as home equity, accessible only via an eight-handle HELOC.

That said, some (all) of my envy in that regard’s related to the youth and the cavorting, not to the renting which carries with it a psychological burden you don’t notice until it’s gone, which is to say until you buy a home.

Anyway, here’s the good news I promised: The median rent in America’s the lowest since February of 2022, according to Apartment List data at “just” $1,367.

As the figure reminds you (not that renters needed a reminder), “low” is a relative term. On the eve of the pandemic, the median rent overall was $1,150. At the peak, in 2022, it was $1,450.

In absolute terms, that’s not a lot of money — i.e., just $300 — but it’s a huge percentage increase and let’s face it: If your rent has a “1” as the first digit, $300 is probably a meaningful sum of money to you.

The chart gives you a sense of the ongoing rent deflation, and also of the extent to which it’s far too little, far too late. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is why bouts of runaway inflation are so disastrous, even if they don’t last very long: You’re almost never going to get enough in the way of outright deflation on the other side to erase the mark, which’ll prove indelible.

The figure below, from the same Apartment List data set, shows you the national vacancy rate.

At 7.2%, it’s perched at an all-time record in figures back to 2017.

“We’re past the peak of a multifamily construction surge, but a healthy supply of new units are still hitting the market and colliding with sluggish demand, causing vacancies to continue trending up,” an editorial published this week noted.

Needless to say, there’s a ton of regional variation. Rents are lower in 29 out of 54 metro areas with a population of at least a million. The annual declines, Apartment List noted, are concentrated in the South, as pandemic boom trends reverse.

In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where the affordability crisis is most acute, prices are still trending higher “despite the winter slowdown.”