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A new estimate by housing economists at Zillow found that the Boston metro area lost significant ground in combating its housing shortage last year.
The company’s most recent analysis of the biggest metro areas across the United States said Greater Boston needs 154,985 new homes to meet current demand, a figure that grew by 3,220 units year-over-year.
“The simple fact is there are not enough homes in this country, and that’s pushing homeownership out of reach for too many families,” Orphe Divounguy, senior economist at Zillow, said in a statement. “The affordability crisis extends to renters as well, with nearly half of renter households being cost burdened. Filling the housing shortage is the long-term answer to making housing more affordable. We are in a big hole, and it is going to take more than the status quo to dig ourselves out of it.”
Across the country in 2022, there were roughly 8.09 million households “missing” from the housing market, which Zillow defined as individuals or families living with nonrelatives. At the same time, there were only 3.55 million housing units available for rent or for sale that year, a housing shortage of more than 4.5 million houses, condominiums, single-family rentals and apartments.
The Zillow analysis came the same week Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released its annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. That report found the median-priced Boston-area home needed a family income of at least $216,873 to afford when combining mortgage payments, taxes and insurance costs, locking many out of the market.
For the Cape Cod market, that figure was $215,950, for the Worcester market, that figure was $132,611, for the Pioneer Valley it was $102,697 and for the Berkshire County market someone trying to buy the median-priced home would need to make $92,326.
The report also noted the impact underproduction of housing was having on renters. In the Pioneer Valley, the state’s most cost-burdended metro area, just under 39 percent of renters paid 30 percent-plus of their income to housing last year and just shy of 20 percent paid 50 percent or more. In Greater Boston, just over 36 percent of renters paid over 30 percent of their income on housing and 18 percent paid over 50 percent. In Worcester, those figures were 34.1 percent and 16.3 percent, respectively, while on the cape they were 35.1 percent and 19.5 percent. In Berkshire County, 31 percent of renters paid over 30 percent of their income on housing and 16.6 percent paid over 50 percent.
