The housing affordability crisis, which had Massachusetts by the throat before the Great Recession, is back with a vengeance.

The latest warning sign: Homes for sale for more than $1 million are now outnumbering homes below the million-dollar mark in a growing number of Greater Boston communities and neighborhoods, sometimes by a large margin.

There is a palpable scarcity of listings below $1 million in Manchester and Winchester on the North Shore, Cohasset on the South Shore, and in western suburbs like Wellesley, Newton and Needham, according to a review of online listings and a new report from suburban brokerage Pinnacle Residential Properties.

A similar trend can be found in Boston, with homes and condos for sale above $1 million outnumbering properties below the million-dollar market by nearly two to one in the Back Bay and Beacon Hill.

“These numbers are disturbing,” notes Elaine Bannigan, owner of Wellesley-based Pinnacle Residential Properties, which just released a report on the growing dearth of homes under $1 million in Wellesley, Needham and Weston.

“This is a trend that changes the character of these towns as young and middle class families with moderate incomes are increasingly shut out,” she said.

The Millionaires-Only Zone

A closer look at the numbers shows an upside down world in the most affluent suburbs, one in which modest homes are the anomalies and multi-million-dollar spreads are the norm.

On the North Shore, there are 26 homes for sale above $1 million in Manchester, yet just 23 below; in Winchester, the score is 17 above, 12 below, according to Redfin. On the South Shore, Cohasset has 52 homes on the market above the million dollar mark, with 49 below.

That said, Wellesley takes the cake. A staggering 88 percent of all listings in town during the first quarter were listed above $1 million and just 12 percent came in below that figure, Pinnacle reported.

The number is 74 percent in once solidly middle-class Needham.

And let’s not forget the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, where 72 homes and condos were on the market as of April 29 at prices above $1 million, with 43 going for less, Redfin stats show.

One factor surely playing a part is the simple scarcity of homes valued under $1 million in those communities. You have a larger pool of buyers vying for a considerably smaller number of homes, meaning that $600,000 Cape in Winchester is going to get scooped up faster than the $1.5 million colonial.

Frankly, that’s always been the case when it comes to real estate. There are simply a smaller number of buyers who can afford a multi-million-dollar home.

Yet the extreme imbalance, with million-dollar plus homes making up the majority of listings, is a new phenomenon, Pinnacle’s report shows.

Just take the number of homes in Needham that are for sale for less than $1 million, which back in the first quarter of 2007 made up 70 percent of all for-sale listings in town. That number dropped to 50 percent during the same period in 2012, then to 40 percent in early 2013, and now, in 2014, down to 24 percent.

The percentage of homes for sale under $1 million in Wellesley fell from 46 percent during the first three months of 2006 to 36 percent in 2012, and now to just 12 percent, Pinnacle reports.

A Distorted Market

The trend represents a dramatic change in the makeup of the housing market in some of our state’s most prominent communities, which are fast becoming all but impossible for middle class buyers to crack.

Stifling restrictions on the construction of new homes and condos across Massachusetts are taking their toll, with the more upscale towns often the most difficult in which to build.

That has created a chronic shortage of new construction in affluent suburbs like Winchester, Wellesley and Cohasset, even as growing professional sectors like tech and life sciences relentlessly drive new demand.

And builders are responding to this demand by snapping up modest capes, ranches and colonials, and tearing them down to make way for what are invariably $1 million-plus homes.

There are now dozens of teardowns each year in Wellesley, Needham and Newton, among other communities, local building records show, with the result being the disappearance of more modest starter homes and a growth in the number of McMansions.

It’s a trend that is now starting to tilt the balance of what’s available for sale in these communities, argues Pinnacle’s Bannigan.

Minus the teardowns, downtown Boston is seeing a similar trend, with a now years-long boom in luxury condo tower development, with a sprinkling here and there of subsidized units for middle and working class buyers.

This is this is just the latest sign that Greater Boston and, arguably, Massachusetts as a whole, face a chronic housing affordability problem.

We are now heading back to the runaway prices that we saw in the mid-2000s, in the years before the housing crash and Great Recession, notes Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.

“It is a huge concern and it feels a little bit like a perfect storm,” Ziegler said of rising home prices and the scarcity of more modestly priced, starter homes. “We are back to the same kind of pattern we saw before the crisis.” 

Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com