Even though the median cost of a single-family home in D.C. keeps ticking up, the prices for rental apartments are falling in nearly every corner of the city.

The drop is driven primarily by price reductions in “Class A” apartments — newly-built units that have more luxurious amenities: Think buildings like The Apollo on H St. NE, or The Hepburn in Kalorama. As of October, the average rent for apartments like these dropped from $2,669 to $2,387 per month.

Those reductions are driven primarily by vacancies, as the pandemic prompted many of the people who might live in these buildings, like middle- and upper-middle-class workers and college students, to move out of the city altogether. (“There is a crisis in leasing,” Randi Marshall, an executive at local trade group Apartment and Office Building Association, told me in August.)

While rents as a whole are down by a more modest percentage across the city, certain neighborhoods have seen striking drops in Class A rental prices, according to research conducted by real estate consulting firm Delta Associates.

Shaw, for example, has seen an average 16.2% drop in rental prices, while neighboring Dupont and Logan Circle saw a roughly 10.6% drop. The Southwest Waterfront and Navy Yard neighborhoods have also been particularly affected, with 12.8% and 11.9% drops, respectively.

Many of these neighborhoods have been the focus of significant new mixed-use development in recent years, much of which includes the kind of above-market-rate housing that has seen the highest rates of vacancy during the pandemic. The vacancy rate in Southwest, for example, is near 12%, while Capitol Riverfront/Navy Yard is about 9%, per Delta Associates. (One exception is Shaw –– even though it has seen a staggering 16.2% drop in rent prices, it has a vacancy rate of only 5.7%, which is higher than the city’s average but lower than many other neighborhoods.)

Using neighborhood rent data compiled by Delta Associates, DCist/WAMU cross-referenced these neighborhood boundaries with census tracts (some of which do not perfectly align) to create a heat map of rent prices in D.C. That map, embedded below, helps show which neighborhoods in the city have seen the biggest drops in rental prices, and relatedly, have seen the highest vacancy rates.

“In most of the neighborhoods that we track, rents are down in the double digits,” says William Rich, president of Delta Associates, which surveyed a sample of 37,000 Class A apartments in the third quarter of 2020. “There are a few exceptions — upper Northwest, for example, rents there decreased [by 3.6%]. Also, in the Northeast, part of the District’s rents decreased by 8.8%, which is still a significant decrease, but not as significant as we found in other submarkets.”

He adds: “Primarily, rents decreased more in the more densely built up area of downtown and the surrounding submarkets. But as you go further from the core of the city, rents — while still declining — didn’t drop as significantly.”

By the first quarter of 2020, rents as a whole had increased in D.C. since this time last year. But by the time the pandemic rolled around, that changed.

“We noticed a decrease starting in the second quarter” of 2020, Rich says. “Those rent decreases became pronounced in the third quarter, when rents decreased by 10.7 percent.”

Of course, tenants who live in buildings that are trying to lure new residents in with lower rates might not see those benefits.

Stephanie Bastek, an organizer with tenant advocacy group Stomp Out Slumlords, says organizers have frequently come across buildings whose managers are offering one to three months’ worth of free rent to new tenants without offering any rent forgiveness to current residents, many of whom are struggling to pay in the face of pandemic-related job instability.

“Thus far the effect on current tenants is mostly to enrage them,” Bastek says, “not offer less rent at all.”