A study made by SmartAsset, a personal finance website, revealed that New Orleans is the number one city for working creative types such as painters, musicians, choreographers, and architects. An article from Nola.com mentioned that New Orleans' cost of living is 98.4 percent of the national average and it has 161.1 creative workers for every 10,000 workers.
Although the city has dozens of "best of", the city is known as one of the worst places for health, affordability or rent, as reported in Gambit. Aside from the report from Gambit, an article from Curbed cited that the city have low wages, limited housing supply, and a lack of livable units.
Apartments in New Orleans are reasonable in price but the problem is more than 35 percent of the city's residents spend 50 percent or more of their salaries in rent, as an article from The Atlantic reported. The article cited an example wherein a one-bedroom apartment costs $1,400 while in San Francisco Bay, apartment units go for more than $3,000.
The article from The Atlantic added that the unemployment rate is about 6.3 percent, which is higher than the national average, and the weekly wages are about $980 which is lower than the national average. The article added that Louisiana is also one of only five states with no minimum wage law on the books.
Furthermore, the lack of units that are safe, clean, and generally livable is the problem. The article from Gambit reported that people seek rental assistance or look for someone to turn to while poor housing quality in the Fair Housing Action Center.
Kate Scott, assistant director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center said, "We do have a full caseload of housing discrimination - violations of the Fair Housing Act, filing HUD complaints or lawsuits on behalf of our clients to enforce their fair housing rights. But by far, the most types of phone calls we get are around housing affordability and poor quality of rental housing in the city and people not having any recourse for that."
The article added residents do not get a quality of life for what they're spending. According to the data collected by the Fair Housing Action Center, out of 62,000 rental properties, nearly 50,000 needed some major repair while thousands of other properties had mold, water leakage, rodents and other issue.
Since the apartments in New Orleans have reasonable price compared to San Francisco and New York, a separate article from Curbed suggested ten ways if ever someone has a plan to rent in New Orleans.
