The recovery from the housing crash has been spread unevenly among Massachusetts’ cities and towns, but metro Boston cities like Cambridge and Somerville have received a double helping of price growth – and, in the past few years, a wave of new supply, with millions of square feet of new construction currently in the pipeline. But a look beneath the numbers suggests that underneath the sunshine, the squeeze is on, and it’s middle-class families who are the lemons.

Cambridge, with plethora of renowned universities and booming tech scene, has long been a student mecca, and an especially desirable address for many buyers. But while the city as a whole has seen steady growth, the number of families residing there has been in steady decline: According to the most recent Census figures, in 2010, the number of families in the city dropped by nearly 40 percent from its peak in the 1950s.

The current recovery may finally complete crash, hollowing out the city’s middle class, as home prices surge beyond all but the fattest pockets.

Statewide, median single-family home prices have not yet recovered from their 2005 peak – through July 2005, the median single-family home price in the Bay State was $355,000, while this past July, it was $335,000. Cambridge, however, has seen single-family prices simply skyrocket in the past 10 years. According to the most recent sales data from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, the median single-family price in Cambridge through July 2014 was $1.25 million, nearly double July 2005’s $665,000.

“We’ve seen the working class getting pushed out in the ’50s and ’60s; now the middle class is getting pushed out,” said Richard Krushnic, a member of the Cambridge Resident’s Alliance (CRA), an activist group which wants to slow down development in the city.

Much More Multifamily

The huge spike in single-family home values has not quite been replicated on the multifamily side. (Condo prices in Cambridge are up 37.8 percent from their 2005 peak, compared to 11.1 percent for condos statewide.) That’s a reflection of the fact that plenty of supply has been hitting the market. Cambridge has several huge new projects currently at various stages of completion near the Alewife Brook parkway and at NorthPoint, the former railyards in East Cambridge.

But little of the new supply is aimed at families: Of 244 units at 165 Cambridgepark Drive, near Alewife, only nine are three-bedroom. The Residences at Fresh Pond, a 429-unit development, are all one- and two-bedroom, as are the 300-plus completed units at NorthPoint. (Another 350 units out of a the 2,7000 called for by the project’s master plan are currently under construction, of which the developer has pledged that “some” would be three-bedroom units.)

The CRA is pushing for several solutions, including an increase in inclusionary zoning requirements so that 25 percent of newly constructed units would have to be affordable, including 5 percent reserved middle-income residents, and calling upon the city itself to spend its own funds to develop more middle income housing.

But Cambridge’s current stringent affordable housing laws – the city already sets aside 11.5 percent of units as affordable under the current inclusionary zoning requirement – have done little to stem the tide.

Cambridge’s problems exemplify an issues that’s becoming a concern across much of the Greater Boston area, said Brenda Clement, executive director of the Citizen’s Housing a Planning Association (CHAPA).

“The market needs to work for everybody. Cambridge has become, very quickly, a dumbbell community, with very low-income individuals and very high-income individuals. That’s not a sign of a good, healthy economy,” Clement remarked in a recent meeting of Boston housing activists.

But, Clement told Banker & Tradesman, Cambridge is far from the only community where the sparsity of middle income housing is a concern. The issue has come up several times in recent regional meetings CHAPA’s held with community members, and CHAPA is planning to create a working group in order to discuss solutions.

Email: csullivan@thewarrengroup.com