NYC Data Science Academy| Blog
Bootcamps
Lifetime Job Support Available Financing Available
Bootcamps
Data Science with Machine Learning Flagship ๐Ÿ† Data Analytics Bootcamp Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp New Release ๐ŸŽ‰
Free Lesson
Intro to Data Science New Release ๐ŸŽ‰
Find Inspiration
Find Alumni with Similar Background
Job Outlook
Occupational Outlook Graduate Outcomes Must See ๐Ÿ”ฅ
Alumni
Success Stories Testimonials Alumni Directory Alumni Exclusive Study Program
Courses
View Bundled Courses
Financing Available
Bootcamp Prep Popular ๐Ÿ”ฅ Data Science Mastery Data Science Launchpad with Python View AI Courses Generative AI for Everyone New ๐ŸŽ‰ Generative AI for Finance New ๐ŸŽ‰ Generative AI for Marketing New ๐ŸŽ‰
Bundle Up
Learn More and Save More
Combination of data science courses.
View Data Science Courses
Beginner
Introductory Python
Intermediate
Data Science Python: Data Analysis and Visualization Popular ๐Ÿ”ฅ Data Science R: Data Analysis and Visualization
Advanced
Data Science Python: Machine Learning Popular ๐Ÿ”ฅ Data Science R: Machine Learning Designing and Implementing Production MLOps New ๐ŸŽ‰ Natural Language Processing for Production (NLP) New ๐ŸŽ‰
Find Inspiration
Get Course Recommendation Must Try ๐Ÿ’Ž An Ultimate Guide to Become a Data Scientist
For Companies
For Companies
Corporate Offerings Hiring Partners Candidate Portfolio Hire Our Graduates
Students Work
Students Work
All Posts Capstone Data Visualization Machine Learning Python Projects R Projects
Tutorials
About
About
About Us Accreditation Contact Us Join Us FAQ Webinars Subscription An Ultimate Guide to
Become a Data Scientist
    Login
NYC Data Science Acedemy
Bootcamps
Courses
Students Work
About
Bootcamps
Bootcamps
Data Science with Machine Learning Flagship
Data Analytics Bootcamp
Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp New Release ๐ŸŽ‰
Free Lessons
Intro to Data Science New Release ๐ŸŽ‰
Find Inspiration
Find Alumni with Similar Background
Job Outlook
Occupational Outlook
Graduate Outcomes Must See ๐Ÿ”ฅ
Alumni
Success Stories
Testimonials
Alumni Directory
Alumni Exclusive Study Program
Courses
Bundles
financing available
View All Bundles
Bootcamp Prep
Data Science Mastery
Data Science Launchpad with Python NEW!
View AI Courses
Generative AI for Everyone
Generative AI for Finance
Generative AI for Marketing
View Data Science Courses
View All Professional Development Courses
Beginner
Introductory Python
Intermediate
Python: Data Analysis and Visualization
R: Data Analysis and Visualization
Advanced
Python: Machine Learning
R: Machine Learning
Designing and Implementing Production MLOps
Natural Language Processing for Production (NLP)
For Companies
Corporate Offerings
Hiring Partners
Candidate Portfolio
Hire Our Graduates
Students Work
All Posts
Capstone
Data Visualization
Machine Learning
Python Projects
R Projects
About
Accreditation
About Us
Contact Us
Join Us
FAQ
Webinars
Subscription
An Ultimate Guide to Become a Data Scientist
Tutorials
Data Analytics
  • Learn Pandas
  • Learn NumPy
  • Learn SciPy
  • Learn Matplotlib
Machine Learning
  • Boosting
  • Random Forest
  • Linear Regression
  • Decision Tree
  • PCA
Interview by Companies
  • JPMC
  • Google
  • Facebook
Artificial Intelligence
  • Learn Generative AI
  • Learn ChatGPT-3.5
  • Learn ChatGPT-4
  • Learn Google Bard
Coding
  • Learn Python
  • Learn SQL
  • Learn MySQL
  • Learn NoSQL
  • Learn PySpark
  • Learn PyTorch
Interview Questions
  • Python Hard
  • R Easy
  • R Hard
  • SQL Easy
  • SQL Hard
  • Python Easy
Data Science Blog > R > A Relocation Guidebook for Data Scientists and More

A Relocation Guidebook for Data Scientists and More

Amy Tzu-Yu Chen
Posted on Jul 22, 2016

Contributed by Amy Tzu-Yu Chen. Amy is currently in the NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program taking place between July 5th to September 23rd, 2016. This post is based on her first class project - R  Visualization (due on the 2nd week of the program).

You may also explore this project via R Code, RMarkdown, and presentation.

Introduction

If you are a data scientist and you are offered a job in another city - or if your current employer asks you to relocate - would you make the move? Many may happily accept the offer and begin a new chapter of their life. Others may struggle to write down a comprehensive cost benefit analysis to avoid making a mistake. It is possible to use data visualization to quickly compare and contrast living standards and make an informed choice in a few simple steps.

Job Market for Data Scientists

The first thing for jobseekers to consider is whether their potential new city offers abundant career opportunities. This is also important for people who are transferred by their current employer because they will want to ensure they are still in demand in their new city. This analysis provides an overview of the job market for data scientists by searching the keyword "data scientist" on major job hunting websites including LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor. As of July 13, 2016, the top six cities with the best career outlook for data scientists are San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, San Jose, Boston, and Seattle. Congratulations if any of these cities is on your list for consideration.

Living Expense

Once you are certain about career opportunities in the new destination, the next step is to consider another practical factor: cost of living. We will consider the top six cities with the most data scientist job opportunities in the following graphics. Numeo, an online user contributed database of living expenses, publishes rankings of living expense levels for cities and countries worldwide, which can be used to estimate and compare cost of living. Numeo breaks down living expenses into several categories of indices including cost of living (e.g., restaurants, groceries) and rent. Note that cost of living index only includes the prices of goods and services and excludes rent.Cost of Living

Based on published Numeo data it is easy to compare and contrast cost of living and rent levels in the selected six cities. New York City earns 100 points in both cost of living and rent indices. Interestingly, NYC is not the most expensive city among all candidates in terms of rent. San Francisco's rent index is 125, which is 25% higher than that of NYC. A San Franciscan may spend slightly less for goods and services than a New Yorker, but he/she will likely need to pay much higher rent. In fact, one can observe the same pattern of discrepancies between cost of living and rent in other cities. San Jose ranked No.3 in rent, but the cost of living is lower than other five candidate cities. Seattle's rent index is only half of that of San Francisco yet its cost of living index exceeds those of San Jose and Boston. To summarize, it is important to consider both cost of living and rent levels as meaningful factors as they are not necessarily consistent.

Data Source: Numeo is the Worldโ€™s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. It provides current and timely information on world living expenses. Standard of living is divided into various categories of index including cost of living, rent, restaurant, and groceries etc.

Rent Comparison

No matter where you choose to live, housing expense eats up a large portion of your income. This section discusses both the current rental prices as well as the 2015-2016 rental market trends in four of the six cities. After reading this analysis, you will not only know whether relocation is a practical decision, but also have a general idea about what type of room to look for in the new city.

The chosen datasets for this section are Zillow's Rent Index. Zillow is an online real estate database company that publishes up-to-date rent data for public use. The datasets comprise median rent for each room type in geographic regions across the United States. Zillow uses room type as the main grouping attribute to ensure the data are unaffected by mix of homes. Also, the company tracks rents from a consistent pool of houses, which makes the time-based comparisons of rent more valid. I have decided to include only one bedroom, two bedroom, and three bedroom apartments in this discussion for two reasons. First, Zillow has complete datasets with no missing values for these types of apartments. Second, the selected room types are probably the most common choice for a city's newcomer.

Total Rent Price

The graph below shows the rankings of median rental prices for all room types.  The cities rank from most to least expensive are:  San Francisco, San Jose, New York City, and Seattle. This is mostly consistent with the ranking of Numeo's rent index except that San Jose has higher median rents than NYC for all room types. Seattle is the only place where you can easily find rent an apartment of any room type for less than $2,000 a month and you may not easily find a good apartment for less than this in the other three cities.

22

Rent Price per Square Foot

Information about rent price per square foot is more useful for one to estimate the real cost per person and decide the best value by room type in the new city. The ranking of median price per square foot by city is consistent for one and two bedrooms but varies for three bedrooms. One can more easily observe trends in the rental market in the below chart since it is on a per unit basis. For instance, the trend that rental prices in NYC and San Jose are merging becomes apparent in this graph. 

Screen Shot 2016-07-22 at 09.00.36

San Francisco

You should think twice about relocating to San Francisco if you care about sharing an apartment with others since one bedroom prices are so high. The rent level in San Francisco is the highest and it continues to rise for all room types. Although it seems that the rent for one bedroom and two bedroom apartments had stabilized in the first five months of 2016, the price you have to pay to get a smaller apartment is going to be much higher than other three cities. The least expensive choice is to share a three bedroom apartment with others. However, the price for three bedroom apartments is increasing at a relatively fast rate, which is a trend we can observe in all four cities.

New York City

NYC can finally shed the label of the most expensive city in the United States; at least, for a moment. The median rents for all room types are all less than San Francisco and San Jose. From the beginning of 2016, one can observe increasing rent prices for all room types. The rent level in NYC is on the whole increasing and is converging to the rent level of San Jose. The most economic choice if you want to relocate to NYC is most likely two bedroom apartments since three bedroom apartments have the highest price per square foot among all cities.

San Jose

The rents for one bedroom and two bedroom apartments in San Jose briefly surpassed San Francisco last summer, but San Francisco returned to No. 1 towards the end of 2015. The rent levels for one bedroom and two bedroom apartments stabilized in 2016, but the price for three bedroom apartments is increasing. If San Jose is your next destination, you can consider renting a two bedroom or even one bedroom apartment since the rent price has been decreasing since the end of 2015.

Seattle

Seattle can easily win the contest of having the best value apartments. The prices for all types of apartments are notably cheaper than Bay Area and NYC. Although the rental prices had been constantly increasing in the past year and a half, it would most likely take a while before it reach the level of the other candidate cities.

Best Time to Move?

In addition to all living expense comparisons, you may wonder what would be the best time of a year to move. In this graph, you are seeing the number of maximum and minimum rent occurrences for each room type in the 12 cities with most data scientist job vacancies from 2011 to 2016. For example, if the lowest median rent for one bedroom apartments in Los Angeles in 2013 occurred in January, then January gets one point in the minimum occurrence plot. As one can see from the graph, January may be the best time of a year to relocate. In contrast, you may risk signing a relatively more expensive lease in May.best time

Data Source: Zillow is an online real estate database company who provides free up-to-date real estate data for public use by consumers, media, analysts, and academics.

Conclusion

Things to Consider

  • SF, NYC, DC, San Jose, Boston, and Seattle have most data scientist jobs, so you may consider relocation for better career outlook
  • Cost of living standards may not be consistent with cost of renting an apartment, so  be sure to consider both factors when you choose a destination
  • Although living in a 3-bedroom apartment has the lowest rent per sqft, the overall price level is steadily increasing in NYC, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle
  • In terms of rent, NYC is not as expensive as San Jose and SF. However, rents in NYC and San Jose are converging

Final Tips

  • NYC and San Jose: 2-bedroom apartment has the best value
  • SF: 3-bedroom apartment has the best value
  • Seattle: your best destination to save money! Although the rent has been increasing, it is still ~66% less expensive than the Bay Area and NYC
  • Relocate in January to get the best deal and avoid signing your lease just before summer

About Author

Amy Tzu-Yu Chen

Amy Tzu-Yu Chen is a recent college graduate who earned her BS in Statistics with three minors in German, Japanese, and Urban/Regional Studies from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a statistician, she is deeply passionate about...
View all posts by Amy Tzu-Yu Chen >

Leave a Comment

Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

No comments found.

View Posts by Categories

All Posts 2399 posts
AI 7 posts
AI Agent 2 posts
AI-based hotel recommendation 1 posts
AIForGood 1 posts
Alumni 60 posts
Animated Maps 1 posts
APIs 41 posts
Artificial Intelligence 2 posts
Artificial Intelligence 2 posts
AWS 13 posts
Banking 1 posts
Big Data 50 posts
Branch Analysis 1 posts
Capstone 206 posts
Career Education 7 posts
CLIP 1 posts
Community 72 posts
Congestion Zone 1 posts
Content Recommendation 1 posts
Cosine SImilarity 1 posts
Data Analysis 5 posts
Data Engineering 1 posts
Data Engineering 3 posts
Data Science 7 posts
Data Science News and Sharing 73 posts
Data Visualization 324 posts
Events 5 posts
Featured 37 posts
Function calling 1 posts
FutureTech 1 posts
Generative AI 5 posts
Hadoop 13 posts
Image Classification 1 posts
Innovation 2 posts
Kmeans Cluster 1 posts
LLM 6 posts
Machine Learning 364 posts
Marketing 1 posts
Meetup 144 posts
MLOPs 1 posts
Model Deployment 1 posts
Nagamas69 1 posts
NLP 1 posts
OpenAI 5 posts
OpenNYC Data 1 posts
pySpark 1 posts
Python 16 posts
Python 458 posts
Python data analysis 4 posts
Python Shiny 2 posts
R 404 posts
R Data Analysis 1 posts
R Shiny 560 posts
R Visualization 445 posts
RAG 1 posts
RoBERTa 1 posts
semantic rearch 2 posts
Spark 17 posts
SQL 1 posts
Streamlit 2 posts
Student Works 1687 posts
Tableau 12 posts
TensorFlow 3 posts
Traffic 1 posts
User Preference Modeling 1 posts
Vector database 2 posts
Web Scraping 483 posts
wukong138 1 posts

Our Recent Popular Posts

AI 4 AI: ChatGPT Unifies My Blog Posts
by Vinod Chugani
Dec 18, 2022
Meet Your Machine Learning Mentors: Kyle Gallatin
by Vivian Zhang
Nov 4, 2020
NICU Admissions and CCHD: Predicting Based on Data Analysis
by Paul Lee, Aron Berke, Bee Kim, Bettina Meier and Ira Villar
Jan 7, 2020

View Posts by Tags

#python #trainwithnycdsa 2019 2020 Revenue 3-points agriculture air quality airbnb airline alcohol Alex Baransky algorithm alumni Alumni Interview Alumni Reviews Alumni Spotlight alumni story Alumnus ames dataset ames housing dataset apartment rent API Application artist aws bank loans beautiful soup Best Bootcamp Best Data Science 2019 Best Data Science Bootcamp Best Data Science Bootcamp 2020 Best Ranked Big Data Book Launch Book-Signing bootcamp Bootcamp Alumni Bootcamp Prep boston safety Bundles cake recipe California Cancer Research capstone car price Career Career Day ChatGPT citibike classic cars classpass clustering Coding Course Demo Course Report covid 19 credit credit card crime frequency crops D3.js data data analysis Data Analyst data analytics data for tripadvisor reviews data science Data Science Academy Data Science Bootcamp Data science jobs Data Science Reviews Data Scientist Data Scientist Jobs data visualization database Deep Learning Demo Day Discount disney dplyr drug data e-commerce economy employee employee burnout employer networking environment feature engineering Finance Financial Data Science fitness studio Flask flight delay football gbm Get Hired ggplot2 googleVis H20 Hadoop hallmark holiday movie happiness healthcare frauds higgs boson Hiring hiring partner events Hiring Partners hotels housing housing data housing predictions housing price hy-vee Income industry Industry Experts Injuries Instructor Blog Instructor Interview insurance italki Job Job Placement Jobs Jon Krohn JP Morgan Chase Kaggle Kickstarter las vegas airport lasso regression Lead Data Scienctist Lead Data Scientist leaflet league linear regression Logistic Regression machine learning Maps market matplotlib Medical Research Meet the team meetup methal health miami beach movie music Napoli NBA netflix Networking neural network Neural networks New Courses NHL nlp NYC NYC Data Science nyc data science academy NYC Open Data nyc property NYCDSA NYCDSA Alumni Online Online Bootcamp Online Training Open Data painter pandas Part-time performance phoenix pollutants Portfolio Development precision measurement prediction Prework Programming public safety PwC python Python Data Analysis python machine learning python scrapy python web scraping python webscraping Python Workshop R R Data Analysis R language R Programming R Shiny r studio R Visualization R Workshop R-bloggers random forest Ranking recommendation recommendation system regression Remote remote data science bootcamp Scrapy scrapy visualization seaborn seafood type Selenium sentiment analysis sentiment classification Shiny Shiny Dashboard Spark Special Special Summer Sports statistics streaming Student Interview Student Showcase SVM Switchup Tableau teachers team team performance TensorFlow Testimonial tf-idf Top Data Science Bootcamp Top manufacturing companies Transfers tweets twitter videos visualization wallstreet wallstreetbets web scraping Weekend Course What to expect whiskey whiskeyadvocate wildfire word cloud word2vec XGBoost yelp youtube trending ZORI

NYC Data Science Academy

NYC Data Science Academy teaches data science, trains companies and their employees to better profit from data, excels at big data project consulting, and connects trained Data Scientists to our industry.

NYC Data Science Academy is licensed by New York State Education Department.

Get detailed curriculum information about our
amazing bootcamp!

Please enter a valid email address
Sign up completed. Thank you!

Offerings

  • HOME
  • DATA SCIENCE BOOTCAMP
  • ONLINE DATA SCIENCE BOOTCAMP
  • Professional Development Courses
  • CORPORATE OFFERINGS
  • HIRING PARTNERS
  • About

  • About Us
  • Alumni
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • Contact Us
  • Refund Policy
  • Join Us
  • SOCIAL MEDIA

    ยฉ 2025 NYC Data Science Academy
    All rights reserved. | Site Map
    Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
    Bootcamp Application