The absence of a state tracking system for affordable apartments means that hundreds are likely sitting vacant across Greater Boston, a new report says.

At a time when rents are at all-time highs and apartments so scarce as to spark tenant bidding wars, here are a pair of shocking facts. 

First, literally “hundreds” of subsidized apartments are likely sitting vacant in the suburbs, even as waiting lists for affordable urban rentals stretch for miles. 

And second, there is no one in state government who can answer simple questions like how many subsidized apartments are there in the suburbs, what the rents are, and how many are sitting vacant right now. 

That’s the verdict from Katherine Levine Einstein, an associate professor of political science at Boston University and one of the authors of a big new Boston Foundation report on the region’s housing woes. 

“What was more shocking is that the state doesn’t keep track of some of the information we thought was really valuable,” Levine Einstein said.   

State Hasn’t Stepped Up 

The Boston University professor’s estimate stems from the vacancies in subsidized rentals the she found when examining 11 suburban housing projects as part of her research for the Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2022. 

Amid an epic housing crunch, subsidized apartments with below-market rents were vacant and languishing as recently as this summer in Kingston, Bellingham, Scituate, Plymouth and Shrewsbury, among other communities, according to the report. 

But Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer, a fellow BU associate professor, were foiled in their efforts to build a more detailed picture of the subsidized housing market in the suburbs, one that could help explain why so many units appear to be empty or underused. 

While one developer was cooperative, others were not inclined to open their books, even if they had built new apartment buildings with help from various state affordable housing initiatives. 

Suburbs’ rules that give preference to locals in affordable housing lotteries are helping keep “hundreds” of these units vacant, researchers say.

It turns out there is no single agency or office in state government that tracks the development of all subsidized apartments and condos in the state, and there appears to be no centralized tracking of what apartments are available and how long they have been vacant for, she said. 

The revelation that significant numbers of subsidized apartments sitting vacant in the suburbs comes as waiting lists for affordable units in Boston and other urban areas number in the thousands and even tens of thousands. 

As many as 17,000 people were on the wait list for openings in Allston-Brighton Community Development Corp.’s roster of 500 subsidized units as of 2020, the report found. 

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that a nonprofit has stepped into the gap to create a sort of Zillow for affordable housing lotteries. But during a panel discussion during the Boston Foundation report’s launch, Housing Navigator Executive Director Jennifer Gilbert made it clear it takes an enormous and probably unsustainable amount of work for her team to assemble all this information. 

Not-So-Affordable Apartments 

However, all those empty subsidized apartments in the suburbs can’t just be blamed on bad marketing. 

Many units are simply too expensive for renters struggling to get by on modest paychecks, and too distant from public transportation as well, according to the Boston Foundation report. 

Under the affordability guidelines under which many subsidized units are built in the ’burbs, one-bedroom units can easily rent in the $2,000-a-month range. Add a bedroom or two, and it goes up from there, experts say. 

One local housing director noted town leaders, when reviewing project proposals, don’t always ask enough questions about what the rents on the affordable apartments actually will be. 

Scott Van Voorhis

And for developers, the ability to dig deeper and offer even lower rents is limited by the time-consuming slog needed to get through the local approval process and the sky-high price of buildable sites. 

But the restrictions towns are putting on who can actually rent these subsidized units may also be playing a role. 

A growing number of towns are insisting that new rental and condo developments be filled with smaller units restricted to people 55 and older, which excludes families with children, BU’s Levine Einstein said. 

And most of these overwhelmingly white suburbs can use local preferences to ensure units are reserved for their own residents, even if there is not enough demand in town to fill them. 

“To some extent, the towns in some places may be getting exactly what they want,” said Levine Einstein, the BU professor. “They don’t want to build housing for people who recently experienced homelessness.” 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.