Greater Boston housing report card is ‘sobering’
Research identifies continued barriers to housing access and stability in and around Boston
When the Boston Foundation presented its 2024 annual Greater Boston housing report card at an event Nov. 12, the results weren’t particularly positive.
“This year’s housing report is certainly sobering, it offers further evidence of the challenges we continue to face,” said M. Lee Pelton, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation.
Housing costs have risen greatly since 2015, and while the report found that rent costs have plateaued, they had leveled off at historic highs. At the same time, despite some efforts to support new construction, high construction costs have slowed production. A modest increase in the number of permits issued in the 2010s has given way to another slowdown.
And, all of that is paired with continuing income gaps that leave families’ housing cost burdened — paying more than 30 percent of their income on rents or mortgages. According to the report, the average household income to avoid those burdens clocked in at almost $111,000. More than 50 percent of renters in 2023 were housing-cost burdened; that rises to 59 percent and 55 percent, respectively for Black and Latino renters.
The fixes to some of the region’s challenges around housing supply are also slow to bear fruit, said Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, the Boston Foundation’s research arm that produced the report. That means that even as the city and state look to create policies that will support expanding housing supply, results are not yet identifiable in the data and it will take some time before any impacts can be seen.
“Unfortunately, it just takes a long time to permit and then build all the housing that we need to dig ourselves out of the hole we’ve found ourselves in,” Schuster said.
But researchers who worked on the report have a vision for a big step to potentially expand access to affordable housing: making unused public land available for the development of affordable housing.
According to Katherine Levine Einstein, associate professor of political sciences and associate director at the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, even a conservative approach of redeveloping some of that state and municipal land could net 85,000 new affordable units, according to the team’s estimates.
“We have this amazing resource available to us to build more affordable housing and we are squandering it,” said Einstein, who worked on the team that developed a special topics section for the annual report card on the potential to utilize public land.
According to the report, about 24 percent of the land in Greater Boston is publicly owned by either the state or municipal governments — though some portion of that is already used for other things like schools, public works and conservation land.
But much of that land is simply vacant. Using the tax parcel database, Einstein and her team found that among municipalities, about 42 percent of public land is currently vacant. At the state level, about 17 percent is unused.
In theory, she said, that land should present an exciting opportunity.
“We know it is so, so expensive to build more housing in places like Greater Boston,” she said. “Especially if we want to produce more affordable housing, what could be better than having free land?”
But the report identified a number of barriers to expanding the use of public land, with complicated regulatory processes and public opposition slowing or preventing the redevelopment.
Beyond the regular complications of developing multifamily housing, allowing vacant public land to be converted into affordable housing requires an official process that requires a city council or town meeting, with two-thirds majority, to declare the land as “surplus” — effectively meaning that it is no longer being used for its original purpose. That process is subject to all the normal bureaucracy of proposals moving through municipal government.
If it makes it through — Einstein said that oftentimes the proposals don’t — then developers are left to a request for proposals, or RFP, process that she said is important to prevent corruption or sweetheart deals, but can also hamper development on the public land. For example, the structure of the process means that developers effectively have to go through design review processes twice: once during the RFP process and then again as part of general development.
They are steps that can also make the project extremely lengthy. According to the report, for many housing developments, design review can take significantly longer than the actual construction process.
For example, the town of Weston acquired a parcel of land in 2018 to build affordable housing. Six years later, construction has still not begun.
Einstein said that, in producing the report, the team heard from developers that often there is greater interest in moving through the regular process for private land to avoid the additional complications that come with public land.
Similarly, Greg Minott, managing principal at DREAM Collaborative, a developer who sat on a panel discussion following the presentation of the report, said those limitations can impact where they look to work on projects. He cited priorities like being able to tackle a project quickly and at scale, as well as building where doing the work doesn’t feel like an uphill battle.
“As developers, what we are interested in is places where it’s easy for us to do our work,” he said. “It’s an incredibly difficult job and we want to go where people want housing.”
Obstacles
Throughout the process community members who might oppose the development of affordable housing — or oppose the development of affordable housing in their neighborhoods — can also slow down or prevent approval processes.
Officials who spoke to researchers for the report identified neighbors as one of the biggest challenges to developing affordable housing on public land.
Beyond work around the use of public land, the report highlighted other steps taken by the state in recent years to work to address expanding housing supply, including legislation like the housing bond bill passed by state lawmakers at the end of the legislative session.
That bill authorized $5.16 billion in bonds, and included legislative changes like allowing for accessory dwelling units — also known as granny flats — and the creation of a system for tenants to seal their eviction records in some cases. It also includes funding for other housing-related topics, like $150 million in approved bonds toward the decarbonization of the state’s public housing supply.
Also highlighted in the report is the MBTA Communities Act, a 2021 law that requires municipalities on MBTA transit lines, or their neighbors, to create zoning districts that must allow for the construction of multifamily housing. That legislation has faced controversy. The town of Milton, which is eligible due to its proximity to the Mattapan trolley on the Red Line, rejected a plan for the required zoning district, which led to a lawsuit by the attorney general’s office that was heard by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in October. As of early October, 78 communities had adopted the zoning changes. Another 130 communities are facing deadlines under the law by the end of the year.
The work comes as Massachusetts faces an ongoing shelter crisis, due in part to migrants seeking shelter under the state’s right-to-shelter law, which requires that Massachusetts provide some form of shelter to families experiencing homelessness.
Last fall, Gov. Maura Healey implemented a cap on that system at 7,500, which the system hit by that November.
Some of the state efforts include supporting the growth of public housing across Massachusetts. For example, the housing bond bill includes $2 billion in approved bonds toward the construction and renovation of public housing.
Sen. Lydia Edwards, who chairs the state’s Joint Committee on Housing, said a priority for her is shifting the narrative around public housing from being a resource for a specific group to being a matter of general infrastructure.
“I think a lot of what we were trying to do and need to continue to push for is the narrative around public housing. It’s not for ‘them over there’ any more than you think the T is for them over there,” she said. “It is infrastructure. And you need to see as part of what commonwealths, what state governments provide.”
Boston Housing Authority Administor Kenzie Bok said growing the city’s stock of public housing is a priority. She pointed to the organization’s history, where, for the first five decades of its existence created about 14,000 units of new housing, between the 1930s and early 1980s, before switching to focusing on redeveloping existing units.
“For us, it’s recognizing that it is actually in our organization’s DNA to create new units, especially at that deeply affordable level,” she said.
Bok cited city goals to, within the next decade, build 3,000 new units that it is allowed under the Faircloth Amendment — a 1990s federal law capping how many units for which a public housing authority can receive federal funding. That plan was announced by Mayor Michelle Wu in her 2024 State of the City address in January.
She also pointed to city work to add density at sites where the Boston Housing Authority is redeveloping old deeply affordable housing with new units. She said the Housing Authority expects to add another 5,000 units through that work.
“We’re really devoted to the idea that we’d love for this to be a decade where we at least put those 3,000 Faircloth units on the map, we do the additional development of that 5,000 and we are creating a legacy that both addresses this very real crisis we’re in and means that decades from now people will say, ‘Oh, we had a pretty productive decade in the mid-2020s and on,’” Bok said.
