How many rooms for rent are available in the South End right now?
The shape of the housing here decides what a room actually is. The South End is the largest intact Victorian rowhouse district in the country, more than 300 acres of red brick bowfronts built between 1850 and 1873 on filled land, and almost all of it was later cut into flats. A room here is therefore a bedroom on somebody's floor of a rowhouse rather than a unit in a block. Right now 47 South End rooms are posted on Roomster, spread between the Tremont and Shawmut Avenue blocks, the Washington Street corridor and the squares off Massachusetts Avenue.
How much does a room for rent in the South End cost per month?
The middle of this market sits at $1,300 and $2,000 a month. Below that, the cheapest South End rooms start near $800, where the bedroom is small and the flat is already full; above it, about $2,250 buys a large room with the bills folded in. You can find rooms under $1,300 at the Massachusetts Avenue end and along Albany Street near the medical campus, which are the blocks furthest from Tremont Street and its restaurants. Ask what heat costs, because a parlour floor with tall windows and original radiators bills very differently from a modern building.
Can I find a room for rent near Boston Medical Center?
Yes, and it is the steadiest source of demand in the neighborhood. Boston Medical Center is a 514-bed academic hospital and the largest safety-net hospital in New England, sitting on the South End's southern edge with the Boston University medical campus beside it, where the schools of medicine, public health, dental medicine and graduate medical sciences all sit on the same few blocks. The wider health system employs more than 15,000 people. Rooms on Albany Street, East Concord Street and the Harrison Avenue blocks put that within a walk, which matters on a night shift.
What is renting a room in a South End rowhouse actually like?
The building type shapes daily life more than the neighborhood does. These houses were built as single-family homes with steep stoops, a raised parlour floor and a garden level below the street, so which floor your room sits on changes the light, the heat and the noise. A parlour-floor room has the tall windows and the ceiling height; a garden-level room is cooler, darker and usually cheaper; a top-floor room is the reverse. Very few of these houses have lifts. Ask which floor, which way the room faces, and how many people share the bathroom.
Are South End rooms for rent near the T, or will I be walking?
You will walk more than you ride, which most people here treat as the point. Back Bay and Massachusetts Avenue stations put the Orange Line at either end of the neighborhood, and Tufts Medical Center station at 750 Washington Street adds the Orange Line plus the Silver Line, where the SL4 runs from Nubian to South Station and the SL5 from Nubian to Downtown Crossing along Washington Street. Between those, most of the South End is a ten to fifteen minute walk from a platform, and the Back Bay end reaches the commuter rail directly.
What should I check before renting a room in the South End?
Ask about parking before anything else if you drive, because this neighborhood is an explicit exception to a citywide custom: space savers are banned here at all times, unlike most of Boston, because spaces on these narrow streets are scarce enough already. Anything left in the road can be removed. Then cover the usual ground for an old house: how heat is billed, whether you would join the lease or sublet from a tenant, and whether the bedroom is a proper room with a window rather than a parlour divided in two.