Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is seemingly trying to burnish her housing credentials by taking credit for homes permitted under her predecessors. iStock photo
Josh Kraft has come out swinging in his campaign for mayor of Boston.
In his campaign launch last week, the son of the New England Patriots billionaire issued a scathing critique of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s record, with the city’s slumping housing production front and center.
“My number one priority is to lower the cost of housing by building more housing,” the veteran nonprofit executive said in announcing his bid for mayor Tuesday at Prince Hall in Dorchester, adding that Boston “ranks near the bottom” of all cities in the country in housing starts.
Wu is vulnerable on housing when voters go to the polls this fall. And it’s not just Kraft that knows it but the mayor herself.
After all, how else to explain how the funny math Wu is using to claim that far from overseeing a housing bust, she’s fostered she has fostered a record-shattering building boom?
Construction of new housing, especially market-rate units, has plunged under Wu to levels not seen in years, as her administration has piled regulatory requirement upon regulatory requirement on developers struggling to get projects off the ground in a tough financing environment.
City officials issued building permits for just 177 new units as 2024 wound down, making it the worst four-month stretch in at least the past six years, city records show.
Yet you wouldn’t know it from reading a certain gem of political truthiness on the city’s website, titled “Housing Initiatives Under Mayor Wu.”
The page, which was updated on Jan. 27, touts the mayor’s accomplishments and policy ideas on housing, like giving city-owned lots to developers building smaller mixed-income homes and funneling some of the city’s COVID recovery money towards buying and preserving so-called “naturally-occurring” affordable housing, i.e. low-rent, often older multifamily homes.
But one claim right at the top stands out.
The page claims “nearly 20,000 housing units have been built or started construction” during the mayor’s first three years in office.
Too bad the math does not come anywhere close to supporting the statement.
The top spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing did not provide comment by deadline.
Only 7.6K Units Broke Ground Under Wu
Last year saw just over 1,700 new apartments, condominiums and homes break ground, with a total of roughly 7,600 units during Wu’s years in offices. And 7,600 is not anywhere close to 20,000.
Instead, Wu appears to be counting housing units that started construction during the Walsh and short-lived Janey administrations, and which came online once she became mayor three years ago, a review of the city’s numbers show.
Wu also makes some pretty dubious claims about the supposedly record number of affordable housing units that have been created under her administration.
“The Wu administration has created more affordable housing and helped more families become homeowners than during any preceding 3-year period since 1999,” according to the description of the mayor’s glorious housing accomplishments on the city’s website, putting the figure at 6,098 income-restricted units “completed or under construction” on her watch.
Now it’s true that the uber-progressive mayor has signaled her main priority is building greater numbers of affordable units, including public housing and affordable-set asides in market-rate buildings.
Scott Van Voorhis
Implausible Claims
Yet with the big drop-off in overall housing construction, this claim also seems implausible.
That is, unless you count all of the new apartments being built in the revamp of Charlestown’s Bunker Hill public housing complex as affordable, including the market-rate ones.
“Based on the data BPI is looking at, [the webpage] is not an accurate reflection of housing production in Boston,” said Greg Maynard, executive director of the Boston Policy Institute.
It would all be rather funny were it not for the fact that at a time when Boston and the rest of the state and country desperately need more housing, the leader of one of the nation’s major cities is trying to pretend there is no problem at all.
Now tell that to all the union construction workers wondering when their next job and paycheck will be, or the hungry contractors scrambling to look for work as construction sites across Boston fall silent.
Wu may have bigger rezoning ambitions than a lot of her predecessors, but her record actually getting homes built is lacking.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
