The rising cost of housing is crushing many Americans, and for renters in big metro areas,

it's been getting worse. Like in New York City, where the median rent has reached almost $3,500 a month.

But just north of the city, beyond its expensive brownstones and six-floor walk-ups,

there's a suburb of about $85,000 that's found a way to keep rent steady.

New Rochelle.

The New Rochelle rental market is one of the kind of bastions of relative affordability in the notoriously expensive New York City

metro area. That's our colleague Rebecca Pichotto. She covers real estate. She says that rents in

New York City are up 26 percent since 2020. But in New Rochelle, rents have climbed just 1.6% in the same period.

So Rebecca went to New Rochelle to try to understand why.

When you get off the train in New Rochelle, you see construction sites sort of everywhere.

You can see kind of the new supply coming on, you know, before your very eyes, these empty lots with cranes and the emerging skyline

of New Rochelle is very visible.

So what does that tell you about why the rents are the way they are in New Rochelle?

It's not a super magic secret formula.

They built more housing.

And as a result, as that new supply came online, rents fell.

It sounds simple, but as it's become a little bit easier said than done in many cities across the

country, but New Rochelle prioritized development. And as a result, you know, they made it faster, cheaper, and easier for developers to build, and that brought a lot of

new supply to the city.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday,

August 20th.

Coming up on the show, how the city of New Rochelle reinvent on a building spree, its population was falling. Businesses were closing,

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