Andrew Mikula

Housing policy wonks, including me, often frame Massachusetts’ housing challenges as fundamentally an issue of insufficient supply. The alternative to increasing supply – clamping down on housing demand – is rarely good for the economy, especially to the extent that demand is driven by job growth.

But there’s at least one way that public policy gooses local housing demand with no discernible economic benefit: requiring city staff to live in the municipality for which they work.

Several Massachusetts cities enforce such a policy for at least some workers, notably Boston, Brockton, Everett and Springfield. But it’s Boston that simultaneously has one of the strictest residency requirements and one of the most competitive housing markets in the state.

In general, Boston city workers are required to be residents by the time they start their job and produce “proof of residence” every year for the duration of their employment. That said, residency requirements are subject to collective bargaining, meaning that unionized city workers are usually allowed to live elsewhere after a certain length of service, often 10 years.

1 in 10 City Posts Vacant

But there’s no guarantee that city of Boston employees can truly afford to live in the city for any length of time. As of this writing, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston is $2,725. According to the city’s 2024 Employee Earnings Report, more than 41 percent of its employees would have to fork over more than half their income to pay that rent.

Another risk is that would-be job applicants simply don’t want to live in Boston, whether to be closer to family, closer to a spouse’s place of work, or in a better-performing public school district.

And while municipal jobs may offer a particularly stable source of income for some blue-collar workers, residency requirements may be a substantial deterrence for white-collar workers that have plenty of other employment options. In this vein, some observers have argued that residency requirements are especially concerning when applied to highly educated workers, such as IT staff, for whom it could be relatively easy to find a well-paying job in the private sector instead.

All this is to say that residency requirements may exacerbate (or may have helped create) the staffing shortages Boston is currently experiencing. A MassLive report released in March 2025 found that about 1 in every 10 city positions were vacant, including 550 at the Police Department and nearly 300 at the Transportation Department.

Rational Idea, Weak Evidence

The rationale for residency requirements is often that staffing large and bureaucratic city departments with denizens will help ensure accountability to community needs.

It’s a seemingly rational response to a long and sordid history of city governments partnering with both other governmental and private interests to seize property and displace residents in the name of economic development.

Like any former resident of the old West End will tell you, Boston has had its share of that sordid history.

But the evidence is very weak that residency requirements effectively facilitate governmental accountability to the community, especially for law enforcement.

One recent study even found that residency requirements for police officers were associated with a higher probability of fatal encounters between police and civilians. And outside of law enforcement, most academic research on the effects of residency requirements is several decades old, often framed as a response to the rampant white flight and urban decay of a bygone era.

Other Cities Abandoning Practice

The other main argument for residency requirements is that they improve the local economy by making it more likely that municipal staff will spend their paychecks in the city in which they work.

Empirical research on this topic is scant, and to paraphrase journalist Matthew Yglesias, micromanaging where people live isn’t the same as micromanaging where they spend their money, especially in an era of online shopping.

But even if there was more empirical evidence that resident employees spend more of their money locally, the effects on the tax base in particular are likely to be small in Boston. This is because the city is much more reliant on commercial property taxes and state aid than consumption-based taxes, which are projected to be about 6.4 percent of total revenues in FY 2026.

Moreover, other cities in the commonwealth have recently rethought their residency requirements.

In February 2025, Springfield extended the “grace period” during which new employees need to move to the city from one year after the start of employment to two years, citing the city’s housing crunch. And in 2024, New Bedford eliminated its residency requirement for employees entirely, largely because of recruiting difficulties.

These issues – both the housing shortage and municipal job vacancies – are pervasive problems in Boston, outweighing the largely theoretical basis for requiring employees to live there.

It’s time to end Boston’s 50-year experiment with employee residency requirements. With a fully staffed City Hall and a (modest but measurable) decrease in local housing demand, the remainder of Boston’s residents will be better off for it.

Andrew Mikula is the senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute in Boston.