For generations, students in Greater Boston have banded together to rent properties that were originally built as working-class family housing, leading to tension between the student and working classes.
“The Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2014-2015: Fixing an Out-of-Sync Housing Market,” authored by the Boston Foundation, contains some data that should not surprise us, but its interpretation is relatively new; it highlights shifting demographic news.
(Disclosure: The study incorporates data from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.)
Student renters blew up the market like an algae bloom in the 1960s. Male college students in the 1960s could get a draft deferment from serving in Vietnam as long as they were in college. Colleges admitted more and more students for whom there was no dorm space. One could say that the riparian waters of the Charles turned algae-green – with money for private landlords.
What goes around, comes around. Now, aging Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), long past draft age, are pushing yet another regional economic algae bloom, vying with Millennials (born 1980-2000), who now outnumber them, for approximately the same kind of housing stock that’s in short supply in Greater Boston.
Fifty years ago it was a shortage of dorm space for the Baby Boomers. Today, it’s that cute little condo, preferably all on one level. Baby Boomers often seek to stay where they have lived their adult lives, but as the Boston Foundation study notes, there’s apparently no “there” there for Boomers. It’s been that way since Baby Boomers hit the public school system.
Town leadership apparently thought the young families would move out of town, so didn’t allocate resources to schools until it became apparent that those families weren’t moving. So we entered an era of split school days (half for middle school, half for high school) in order to accommodate all the kids that towns thought (hoped?) would have moved out by then.
Too bad. What about today’s working class families? The current Boston Foundation study found that cost-burdened renters, spending more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, rose from 39 percent in 2000 to 50 percent in 2014-2015. Twenty-five percent now spend half of their gross income on rent, up from 18 percent in 2000, the study says.
Workers who must live in lower-priced outer towns rely on a well-established transit system to get them from home to job. The hourly employees who staff hospitals, restaurants and retail stores – not to mention supporting the region’s tourist trade – need reliable public transit to get to work. Without them, our hospitals won’t work, our chichi restaurants will become bedlam and our tourists will be on their own with their guidebooks and their GPSs.
In Greater Boston, if we don’t connect the housing needs of the hourly workers, students and the housing wants of the people old enough to be their grandparents, we’re sunk as a region. We’ve got a limited window to appeal to the wishes of both.