The flood of Millennial homebuyers moving into the suburbs will meet with the harsh realities of today’s housing market and its unreasonably high prices.

Stories about rising rents and a dearth of affordable apartments for working–class renters has dominated the debate for years now over what to do about our nation’s dysfunctional housing market. 

As heartbreaking as the rental crisis is, though, it has overshadowed another big facet of the housing mess we are in: the decline of the middle-class, suburban starter home. 

It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time, in the decades immediately after World War II, this sort of home was the norm in suburbs across the country, including in Greater Boston. 

Today the newly constructed single-family home, especially in the suburbs of New Economy cities like Boston, is an almost exclusively a luxury product affordable only to the very well-off. 

Since the start of 2018 through early 2020, no new homes were built for sale under $500,000 within Route 128. 

“It’s like searching for a unicorn,” Steve Leavey, a broker at Berkshire Hathaway in Natick, of starter homes priced at less than a half a million dollars, told me.  “It doesn’t exist.” 

Reality Check, Incoming 

But thanks to COVID-19, the demise of the affordable starter home – and the need for not just more apartments, but also for smaller, more affordable single-family homes – may finally be poised to get the attention it deserves. 

The pandemic has sparked a mini–exodus of Millennials from their city tiny apartments and condominiums to the suburbs in search of single-family homes with a bit more space to kick back in, including a yard. 

Home prices in the suburbs, which were already sky-high, have gone on a tear, with the median price of a home in Massachusetts surging 10.6 percent through the first 10 months of the year, to $442,500, according to The Warren Group, publisher of this newspaper. 

The median single-family home price in the western and northern suburbs of Middlesex County weighed in at $615,000, for a 9.8 percent jump. 

As this wave of young families, in search of the relatively affordable subdivision they knew from their childhood years, runs headlong into the realities of suburban life in 2020, it maybe, just maybe, will ignite a badly needed debate over whatever happened to the affordable, middle-class single-family home. 

More than a few of these newcomers will quickly get a reality check, with the suburban starter home of today likely to be an old, small and grossly overpriced fixer-upper that no one else is ready to go massively into debt to buy. 

Maybe most of these new homeowners will simply hunker down and cross their fingers they will eventually get their money back – or even make a few bucks – as prices continue to move relentlessly higher. 

Production Plummeted 

But hopefully it will also spur some of these suburban newbies to join forces with their new neighbors to push their local select boards and town councils to get out of the business of being housing market obstructionists. 

At the heart of the issue is simple matter of supply and demand. On one hand, the state has added 1.2 million new residents since 1970 – for as total of just under 7 million in 2020. 

Leading the way – and helping bid up home prices – have been a legion of highly paid professionals drawn by the Boston area’s fast-growing tech, biotech and health care sectors, not to mention its universities. 

Yet the number of single-family homes built in the state each decade has plunged over the past few decades and is barely a third of what it was in the 1980s. 

Cities and towns across the state issued building permits for 182,154 single-family homes in the 1980s, U.S. Census Bureau stats show. 

That number dropped to 146,045 in the 1990s, 113,885 in the 2000s, and just 65,739 in the 2010s. 

The decline came as suburbs and towns across the Boston area began to push back against new development, including residential construction. 

Many communities embraced large-lot zoning of 1 acre or more, which limited, by design, the number of homes that could be built as well as the number of families with school-age children. 

Scott Van Voorhis

And the larger lots, in turn, all but ensured all new homes would be on the upper end of the price scale, turning the page on the more densely clustered subdivisions of middle–class homes of decades past. 

There’s no time machine that will take us back to the affordable, middle-class homes of yesteryear. 

But neither does that mean Massachusetts has to be this way forever. More homes on smaller lots would help lower prices, while also helping level out, at least a little, a grotesquely unequal housing market. 

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