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A new study from listings portal Zillow has sought to quantify the effects of a decade or more of under-building in the nation’s housing markets by estimating how many families are doubled-up – or worse – in apartments.
The study calculated the number of families and single renters each major metro area in America that were living with other families and roommates in the same unit because they weren’t able to afford their own home.
In Greater Boston, the study concluded that there were 5.7 families living like this per available apartment, while it pegged that figure as 3.5 in the Worcester metro and 2.6 in Springfield and the Pioneer Valley. For Boston, that means the region should have 184,200 more renter households living on their own than it does right now, in a metro area that has nearly 725,000 renter-occupied housing units, according to the Census Bureau.
Nation-wide, of the families that are doubling up, 68 percent had an annual income of $35,000 or less.
“The U.S. housing market is like a high-stakes version of the game musical chairs,” Orphe Divounguy, senior economist at Zillow, said in a statement. “There are simply not enough homes for millions of people. Unless we address the shortage of smaller, more-affordable, starter-type homes, we risk leaving families without a seat – and it will only get worse over time.”
To solve this problem, researchers, the real estate industry and a some of the state’s political leaders say the state needs to build more housing, and must loosen suburbs’ restrictive zoning laws to do so. But numerous local officials and some local voters oppose these changes, calling them a dilution of traditional local control over land use and fearing increases in demand for local services like schools.
Zillow’s report also sought to quantify this gap. In Massachusetts’ three biggest metro areas, alone, the study found that the Greater Boston was missing 152,000 homes, the Worcester metro 17,000 and the Springfield area around 7,000.
That estimate gave Boston the fourth-biggest housing deficit among the dozens of metro areas in Zillow’s study, right after San Francisco (162,000 homes short), Los Angeles (334,000 homes missing) and New York City (376,000 homes short).
