Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s Administration has just released its quarterly housing report, and there may be some good news for the city’s middle class. I was among a small gathering of reporters who met with the mayor this week when he reiterated his vision for the city’s housing market.
Mayor Walsh’s goal is to create 53,000 units of housing by 2030. Here’s where we are now: 13,000 units –according to the new report--have either been completed or are under construction. Of those, nearly 3800 rental and owner-occupied units are designated for the middle class—families making an average of 50 thousand annually. Another 1500 units have or are being built for low-income residents.
Sheila Dillon is the Mayor’s Chief of Housing.
“No one wants to see the city become a city of very wealthy and lower income. So we have very clear targets for the middle income, and right now we are very close to being on target to meet those.”
Dillon says nearly half of all new housing starts in the first quarter of this year are accessible to middle class families. That compares to 26% last year. Efforts to protect middle class households, according to the report, includes program assistance in slowing foreclosures, and preserving affordable housing in gentrified neighborhoods like Mission Hill, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury and the South End.
Yet, a common complaint heard in Boston these days is that the city is increasingly unaffordable. And the greatest symbols of widening inequality for many are the luxury residential buildings scraping the sky in the Seaport District.
Mayor Marty Walsh concedes that by design the Seaport District is an exclusive community targeting upper-income earners by and large. But city officials were also quick to add that much of the planning around the district took place prior to Walsh’s election. The focus on the Seaport District, the mayor complained, overlooks housing construction for low and middle class buyers and renters in other parts of the city—part of a long term Walsh vision to slow income inequality in Boston.
“With that income inequality you need access to jobs and you need a good place to live. And I think crating more housing will help us with that. And also companies start to say, ‘he wait a second, the people live in the city of Boston. Why don’t we look to invest in the city and create more job opportunities.”
Boston has made 20 million dollars available for affordable housing from Dorchester to Roslindale to Mattapan to South Boston. As far as the Seaport District, the city says there is very little it can do about current and planned residential rental and built to own construction projects. But the BRA says it is looking at city-owned parcels in the Marina Park area for possible future construction of low and middle-income rental and mortgaged units in the city’s fastest expanding neighborhood; a neighborhood with expansive views of the harbor that at this stage only the well-off can afford.
THE LOWEST AND HIGHEST RENTS IN BOSTON
