In the aftermath of the death of Boston University student Binland Lee in a fire at an Allston property in 2013, which became part of the focus of a Boston Globe investigative series last month, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced a crackdown on private landlords who crowd students into substandard and often dangerous rental properties. The city of Boston sent letters to 1,500 property owners who have been cited for at least one serious code violation in the past year, warning that inspectors are on the way.
But Walsh clearly understands that is only part of Boston’s housing problems. As reported in the Globe last week, he followed up with a call to increase production of middle-income housing in the city. Because of soaring land values in and near downtown, the focus will be on many of the city’s outlying neighborhoods, including Allston, Brighton and Dorchester, which have already seen an influx of investor-owners seeking the student trade.
Working families have been priced out of the neighborhoods in which many grew up, whether they want to rent or buy. The long-term cost of market disruption to those families may be impossible to calculate – and they’re the ones most likely to want to put down roots and build a life in the city.
Sheila Dillon, the city’s chief of housing and director of the Department of Neighborhood Development, will be leading an advisory group of developers, planners and affordable-housing advocates which will submit recommendations to Walsh in about five weeks. Dillon has been on the job since 2012. She formerly served as director of the Rental Assistance Bureau at the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development. Among the recommendations the current advisory group is likely to propose: modular housing and less-expensive building materials to lower construction costs; streamlining the permitting process; and allowance of taller buildings with smaller unit sizes.
The middle-income housing sector has structural challenges that make it more difficult to finance than high-end or low-end construction. Private funds are available for high-end projects; public funds and tax credit financing is available for the low end. It’s the middle class that’s adrift. During his 20-year tenure as mayor, Tom Menino tried repeatedly, without much success, to address the middle segment of the housing market.
Walsh may have better luck, because demand for housing has reached a fever pitch and because the abuses of investor-owned property in that middle segment – most visibly, student housing – have finally hit a nerve.
Walsh’s working-class roots, and his knowledge of and long-standing relationship with the construction trades, give him good grounding in the issue. He has the chance to turn the city’s housing crisis into opportunity. A housing crisis brought on by an economic boom contains more possibilities for remediation than one resulting from economic contraction and disinvestment. We’re in a national economic cycle now in which cities are desirable places to live again. It’s time to break out the toolbox to make sure that people at all income levels can envision Boston as part of their long-term future.
