Scott Van Voorhis
Downtown Boston has become a millionaire’s row of gleaming new condo towers built for the rich, McMansions have replaced the tidy Capes in once middle-class Needham, while the median price of a home in Natick now easily tops half a million dollars.
A new report from ULI Boston puts a finger on a troubling trend anyone who has been around the Boston area a few years has probably long suspected, but never really seen until now spelled out in cold hard stats.
The middle class is shrinking in the Boston and the inner suburbs, with a 12 percent decline since 1990 as home and condominium prices and apartment rents have gone through the roof, a new report by the Urban Land Institute finds. Middle-class families with children are an even more endangered species, having plunged 16 percent in Boston and 10 percent across the region when you factor in the suburbs.
The ULI report is just the latest in a series over the years by a range of groups raising alarms about the Boston area’s increasingly dire housing crisis, brought on by decades of anemic new home and apartment construction. And it comes amid signs that everyone from thwarted homebuyers to top political leaders are finally waking up to the economic and social threat posed by a housing market that is increasingly affordable only to the affluent.
Gov. Charlie Baker took one of the biggest steps on the part of any Massachusetts governor in the past two decades – Democratic or Republican – when he pledged $1.1 billion to preserve and create new affordable housing.
Yet there is an elephant in the room, a big question overhanging all this sudden flurry of activity – one that you won’t find in the reports cheerleading for more housing, but which definitely needs to be asked.
After decades of neglect, are these trends actually reversible? Is this not all really too little, too late when it comes to saving Greater Boston’s middle class and halting the stratospheric rise in home prices? And, frankly, is the transformation of a growing number of neighborhoods and towns into playgrounds for the extremely affluent and rich at this point irreversible, with ever-constricting housing choices and options for everyone else?
Decades Of Neglect Take A Toll
Baker’s plan certainly looks good on paper. In fact, the numbers look particularly impressive after eight years of a Democratic governor who wasn’t particularly interested in taking on the housing mess, unless you count a number of failed attempts to sell his Milton manse for a hefty $1.5 million.
The $1.1 billion Baker has proposed spending on affordable housing over the next five years represents a collective 18 percent increase. It also includes plans by MassHousing to dole out $100 million as part of an initiative to spur construction of a 1,000 new apartments and condos for middle- and working-class families.
Baker has also laid out a modest but badly needed plan to try to bring down local barriers to new housing construction, with plans for a $25 million pool from which to divvy out “production bonuses” for suburbs, towns and cities that set up “starter home” zones.
These are noble and encouraging initiatives and, if proposed back in the late 1990s, when the Boston area housing market started to go into overdrive again, they might have made a real difference.
But after decades of neglect, the scale of the problem requires much grander and more aggressive plans, not just by our governor and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who has been pushing the housing issue hard, but by local officials across the state.
If Greater Boston’s real estate market was a house, it would be near collapse now after a couple decades of abuse in which the owners failed to do even routine maintenance. A new paint job would be great, but with the roof caving in and the foundation crumbling, far more drastic measures are needed.
The Boston area and Massachusetts as a whole has seriously lagged the rest of the country in the level of new home and apartment construction since the 1980s, when it was about average. To give you an idea how far we have fallen, housing construction then was three to four times what it is now, with a steady drop from the 1990s on.
There are likely a number of factors behind the drop, but entrenched NIMBY attitudes, especially in the suburbs, have helped choke off construction of new, moderately priced single-family homes while making every two-bit apartment building proposal an epic showdown.
The scale of the challenge is daunting, and one need only look at the new ULI/MAPC report to get a sense of the challenges ahead.
The Boston area will need 200,000 new apartments, homes and condos over the next 14 years just to keep pace with the growth of the local economy. That would be a lot of new housing in an area generally receptive to new development, let alone in the development-phobic Boston area. New residential projects routinely face resentment and suspicion, especially if they include subsidized, affordable units or if there is the possibility – heaven forbid – that it may result in a few more kids enrolling in the local school system.
So it’s great that the governor and mayors like Boston’s are talking up the need for more housing.
But without a plan for turning around Boston area’s increasingly unequal housing market on the scale of education reform a couple decades ago, you can bet the future for middle-class homebuyers will look even more bleak than it does today.
