Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is finally ready to kick off his long-promised drive to build more homes, apartments and condos that the city’s beleaguered middle class can afford.
And with prices poised to soar again this spring, heaping further pressure on ordinary buyers who can’t just swing a million-dollar mortgage, it’s not a moment too soon.
The Boston Redevelopment Authority will roll out a series of public meetings over the next six weeks to discuss plans to spur construction of tens thousands of new condos, apartments and townhomes.
Up-and-coming sections of Jamaica Plain and South Boston are the first two of what eventually could be a dozen different housing growth zones being eyed by City Hall. For developers interested in building moderately priced homes, the menu includes tax incentives, less onerous affordable housing standards, and the ability to put up taller buildings.
“If we build enough housing to meet our needs and meet our growth, we are hopeful it will moderate prices throughout the whole city,” said Sheila Dillon, Boston’s housing chief and head of the Department of Neighborhood Development.
The city’s housing campaign comes roughly a year after the Walsh Administration released an eye-opening report that found middle-class buyers completely priced out of downtown and struggling to keep a foothold in several other neighborhoods.
The scale is ambitious, with Boston’s new mayor looking to bolster the city’s anemic supply of moderately priced, middle-class housing with 20,000 new units.
The choice of Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain and Andrew Square in South Boston as the first two growth zones provides a roadmap for where the Walsh Administration’s big housing push may headed. (We are really talking about the Washington Street corridor – Forest Hills to Egleston Square – and Dorchester Avenue along the Red Line from Broadway to Andrew stations.)
Forest Hills and Andrew Square are both next door to T stops and both sit on the rough but growing edges of neighborhoods transformed by a surge of gentrification over the past few decades.
Moreover, both areas also have something that can rarely be found these days in downtown Boston – vacant lots and old warehouses just begging to be built out with apartments and condos. In Andrew Square, it is older industrial property that is being eyed, while in Forest Hills, the state owns large tracts of land currently used as a bus yard.
Finally, both areas are not in the traditional residential sections of either neighborhood. That potentially reduces NIMBY concerns while providing the kind of buffer zone needed for the development of what could be hip new neighborhoods.
“These are areas we believe can tolerate greater density and greater height,” said Brian Golden, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
In fact, developers are already moving in, with DL Properties floating plans for 700 middle-class apartments in two towers where old industrial buildings now stand near Andrew Square.
Forest Hills has seen a new 280 unit apartment complex take shape over the last year near the T station and a proposal put forth for another 76-unit building.

Carrots For Developers
Meanwhile, the two big city agencies leading the housing push, the BRA and the Department of Neighborhood Development, are also doing some hard thinking about what it will take to get developers to  build $400,000 townhomes in Andrew Square or Forest Hills as opposed to more multimillion-dollar condos in the Back Bay.
Sure, land costs are lower in Andrew Square and Forest Hills than they are in Back Bay or the  South End, but, even so, Boston remains an expensive place to build.
So city officials are weighing a couple different carrots for developers looking to build moderately priced housing. Two are fairly familiar: Tax breaks during a project’s early years and the ability to build taller buildings with more units. A potentially more controversial idea is letting developers charge more for affordable units.
Want to build a new condo or apartment building in Boston? Then be prepared to set aside 20 percent of the units for rent or sale at below market prices.
To offer some relief, one idea under consideration is to let developers recoup a bit more money on their subsidized units. That would effectively let developers charge rents affordable to those making up to 100 percent of the Boston area’s median income, instead of 70 or 80 percent now.
It will surely take some adjusting and fine tuning to get the economic incentives right.
Possibly the bigger question now is whether Walsh can sell the idea of tens of thousands of new homes and condos in Boston’s neighborhoods, from East Boston to Dorchester to Hyde Park and Roslindale.
It helps to target former industrial areas with half-used warehouses, but that won’t necessarily defuse all potential opposition, as the decades-long battle waged by Southie politicians to dictate the future of development in the Seaport attests.
Walsh and City Hall’s development and housing czars Golden and Dillon are going to have their hands full for the next several months – if not the next year – selling the new growth zones to skeptical JP and Southie residents.
But something also tells me that Walsh and his team are well aware of the political dynamics, which, if handled incorrectly, could wreck the whole campaign before it even gets started.
Talk early on by City Hall honchos of quickly naming all 12 housing growth areas has slowly faded. There was clearly a realization that vague talk of thousands of units here, thousands there, will simply inflame NIMBY sentiment before anything gets proposed, let alone built. Let’s be real; Bostonians can be every bit as NIMBY as their suburban brethren. So the next few months, then, should prove critical for Walsh’s housing campaign.
Slow but sure may very well win the day here – provided the mayor shows a little backbone, that is.