iStock illustration
Towns and cities in the Boston metro’s inner core have only given developers the green light to build half as many homes as local officials say they need by 2030, according to The Boston Foundation’s annual Greater Boston Housing Report Card.
Building permit data analyzed as part of the report shows only 46,738 homes had been permitted in Boston and 14 other nearby communities between 2015 and 2022, a number that includes on part of the ongoing severe slowdown in apartment construction across the wider Boston area.
This level of production helped put Massachusetts near the bottom for housing production nation-wide, with only 2.5 homes permitted per 1,000 residents in 2022, behind states like Mississippi, North Dakota and New Hampshire. Washington, D.C. permitted 11.5 homes per 1,000 residents last year, the Report Card says.
“The past year has unfortunately offered more of the all-too-familiar story of high prices, low vacancy rates, and systems and regulations that are keeping thousands of homeseekers – particularly non-White families – from accessing affordable rental housing and homeownership opportunities,” M. Lee Pelton, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation, said in a statement. “Simply put, until we address many of these issues, we will continue to struggle to close racial wealth gaps, to the detriment of our entire region.”
The 15 communities’ mayors and city managers that make up the Metro Mayors Coalition had declared in a 2018 press conference that their communities needed to produce 185,000 new homes between 2015 and 2030 to meet demand for housing and accommodate a high level of economic growth; estimates by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council put the necessary production level at 154,000 new homes by 2030 across the larger Boston metro. To keep up with the Metro Mayors Coalition’s pace, 90,000 new units would have needed to be permitted by now, twice what the actual figures are, the Report Card notes.
The declaration came a year before one of the best financing environments for multifamily development in decades kicked off – one which came to a screeching halt over the last 15 months as the Federal Reserve rapidly raised its benchmark interest rate to a level not seen since mid-2007 in the face of severe inflation. The construction pipeline in Greater Boston is equal to to 1.5 percent of the overall supply of apartments on the market, the lowest such share in the country outside of New York and Los Angeles, CBRE reported last week, as developers struggle to afford today’s elevated construction and land costs on top of financing costs that have roughly doubled since 2021.
Also unable to afford things? Greater Boston’s renters, who face vacancy rates lower than many other major American metro areas according to the Report Card, and aspiring homebuyers – thanks in large part to the lack of housing production, the report’s authors argue.
The Greater Boston Housing Report Card found that 49 percent of area renters pay more than 30 percent of their income towards housing expenses, and 1 in 4 put over half their income towards that, with Black and Latino renters and renters of all races who make less than $75,0000 a years hit the hardest by a wide margin.
Four in 5 renters making less than $50,000 per year paid over 30 percent of their income towards housing last year, the report found, with those making between $50,000 and $75,000 per year close behind. For renters who made over $75,000, only 20 percent were in this same situation, albeit up 9 percentage points from 2019. Geographically, rent burden is highest in North Shore and South Shore communities and lowest in Greater Boston’s affluent western suburbs.
Citing data from listings portal Zillow, the report’s authors say the median rent in Greater Boston was up 5.7 percent year-over-year in August, although its rate of increase had slowed substantially from a December 2021 high of 13.3 percent. Boston has the fourth-highest rents in the nation, the report found, with even a historically working-class city like Lowell registering a monthly median rent of $2,200 in September, the lowest of all ZIP codes covered in the report.
To deal with the high cost of housing, renters are increasingly crowding into apartments meant for fewer people, the Report Card’s authors say. The number of households in with more than one renter per room jumped 65 percent across Greater Boston from 2010 to 2022, with tens of thousands of households now in this situation in Greater Boston. But even with the higher costs, data presented in the report shows eviction filings are slightly lower than they were before the pandemic.
The report focuses largely on rental affordability, but notes that home prices are growing fastest in Boston and its densest neighbors along with what authors dubbed “streetcar suburbs” – affluent inner-ring suburbs like Belmont, Newton and Melrose – while the most recent Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data available to the authors, from 2022, shows that homebuyers of color continue to be concentrated in Boston and Gateway Cities like Lowell, Brockton and Lynn.
