Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced Monday her administration is putting $200,000 into a new pilot program called SHORE-UP aimed at helping seniors stay in their homes long enough to access affordable housing units.
The program will subsidize the rents, mortgage payments and other housing costs so qualifying lower-income seniors will only have to pay 30 percent of their income on housing while waiting for a spot to open up in existing private affordable housing and public housing developments.
Wu’s office said the Boston Housing Authority currently counts around 11,000 seniors as tenants, but another 10,000 or so sit on the BHA’s waitlists. The authority funds another 4,000 units of private affordable housing set aside for seniors and people with disabilities, and maintains about 3,000 of its own units set aside for these two renter classes.
The city says when older adults face even a short period of homelessness, they are at risk of falling into a “spiral of negative physical and mental health impacts”
“For many years, we have seen long-time residents, now senior friends and neighbors, being forced out of their homes after a new owner doubles the rent or a spouse passes away, leaving only one income,” Linda Freeman, of the Mass Senior Action Council’s Boston chapter, said in a statement provided by Wu’s office.
The SHORE-UP pilot program was born out of the city’s new anti-displacement plan.
The program comes as city homeowners face ballooning tax bills from the steep appreciation in home prices during the pandemic, the simultaneous collapse of downtown office tower values and a trailing off in new development.
Wu’s office said in Monday’s announcement that 21 percent of city residents age 65 and over live below the poverty line, and 35 percent of senior-led households spend more than half their income on housing, whether that’s rental payments or mortgage and insurance payments.
Wu previously sought special dispensation from state legislators to raise Boston’s commercial property tax rates higher than their statutory maximum to compensate, but failed to secure support in the state Senate thanks to intense lobbying from business groups.
