Some East Boston residents are calling for the city to further rein in a relatively muted upzoning plan in the name of preventing higher home prices. But such a strategy isn’t likely to get them the results they want.
As Steve Adams reports in this week’s issue, Boston Planning & Development Agency officials are proposing to rationalize the neighborhood’s zoning mess – over half its 5,600-plus residential properties are nonconforming. But that new plan’s proposal to let the area’s last enclaves of single-family homes densify has stirred opposition.
“The neighborhood feels exhausted that they have to fight individual projects at various levels,” District 1 City Councilor Gabriela Coletta said. “They want a plan for development to have predictability, and that is a talking point that I’ve heard from developers as well.”
Unfortunately, the kind of “predictability” those residents seem to want is a prediction that no change will happen, at all.
For the moment, let’s aside the NIMBY attitude displayed in fliers a neighborhood group has put up decrying additional density in largely single- and two-family neighborhoods like Orient Heights and declaring that “solving the city’s housing crisis is not East Boston’s responsibility.”
Residents say they are also worried about losing family-sized homes at affordable prices. But time and time again, we’ve seen that restricting development, as these residents call for, only turns a limited supply of homes into a scarce commodity whose price jumps through the roof, accordingly.
The South End, South Boston and Charlestown offer cautionary tales. Those neighborhoods, relatively transit-rich despite lacking the city’s best-performing subway line, saw home values skyrocket when waves of Millennials hit homebuying age flooded the area looking for somewhere to put down roots. But instead of adding new homes to cater to these buyers, developers had to fight tooth and nail to add even a few units on a lot.
The cause? Simple math. If renovating and flipping an existing building doesn’t require an uncertain and lengthy zoning approvals process, and if plenty of people are willing to bid against each other for what homes do exist in a neighborhood and push prices up, the safer way for a developer to make money is to avoid building new units.
So, if barring new development puts a neighborhood’s housing market in a pressure cooker, would allowing developers to build freely – within reason – be any different when new-build condominiums in East Boston are selling for $700,000 or more? In a word, yes.
From Auckland, New Zealand to Minneapolis, cities that rezoned for substantially more growth in the last 10 years saw home price increases and rents stabilize or even come down modestly.
We’ll still have to do more than rezone aggressively to shrink home prices, but those lower prices won’t appear out of thin air if we don’t rezone.
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