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THE CONTEXT
KEY TRENDS AND FINDINGS
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND INNOVATIONS 2002 - 2004
REMAINING CHALLENGES
COMPETITION
THE CONTEXT
Housing meets the basic human need for shelter, provides a key building block of livable communities, and is a means to economic opportunity and security — an essential element of a prosperous regional economy. In the City of Boston, roughly 600,000 people live in nearly 240,000 separate households. Metropolitan Boston is home to more than 3.3 million people living in 1.3 million households. The housing sector includes private home builders, community development corporations and other nonprofit housing providers, community-based and advocacy groups, banks and mortgage companies, and city and state housing and housing finance agencies. Civic and business leaders and many elected officials have also identified housing affordability as a key issue driving individual and business location decisions. Creative efforts have been launched to increase the production of housing.
KEY TRENDS AND FINDINGS
Housing costs have soared in Boston and across eastern Massachusetts. The median price of a single-family house in the Greater Boston region (as defined by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors) was $469,000 at the end of 2004, up 12% from 2003 and up 45% over the past five years. Home prices in the City of Boston have risen even faster, with the median sales price at $330,000 in 2003, more than double the price five years earlier. Two- and three-family home prices are rising even faster than the price of single family homes in Boston, with 2003 median prices up 17% to $434,000 for a two-family and $466,000 for a three-family. While housing specialists recommend that households purchase homes that cost less than 2.5 times their annual income, a 2004 Boston Globe analysis of housing prices in 2002 concluded that the only community in Eastern Massachusetts where a family earning the median income could purchase a home costing less than three times annual income was Fall River. And a family earning 80% of median income can afford a home priced at 80% of the median in only 13 of Metro Boston’s 161 municipalities. (see indicator 6.1.1)
Boston is one of the ten least affordable metropolitan areas in the United States. While there is no single way to determine metropolitan-area affordability, a survey used to compare the cost of living in large metropolitan areas ranked Boston the fourth least-affordable market in the United States in 2002, with only Manhattan, Chicago and San Francisco costing more. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s 2004 Out of Reach report found that Metropolitan Boston was the eighth "least affordable" metropolitan area for renters, behind San Francisco, Stamford, Connecticut and five cities in California. In the Out of Reach rankings, Massachusetts was second only to California as the least-affordable state.
Advertised rents fell somewhat from 2001 to 2003, but rents remain unaffordable for many. Even with lower rents, 43% of rental households in Greater Boston spent more than 30% of their income for rent in 2002, and 21.5% spent more than half of their income for housing. The National Low Income Housing Coalition calculates that a full-time worker in Metropolitan Boston would have to earn $24.35 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment.
In Massachusetts, approximately 10,500 families — including 20,000 children — are homeless. The state has over 80 state-funded homeless shelters and in 2004 all were filled to capacity. Boston’s annual census of the homeless undertaken each December found a slight decrease from 2003 to 2004, but the population of approximately 6,000 homeless in Boston is one-third higher than in 1992. About 20% of Boston’s homeless are children. In a given year there are approximately 10,000 homeless preschool children — and according to a survey by Horizons for Homeless Children, less than half are enrolled in day care or Head Start. (see indicator 6.5.1)
More housing is being built, with permits for new housing rising from just under 10,000 annually in 2001 and 2002 to approximately 11,700 in Metropolitan Boston in 2003. Permits for of multi-family housing increased significantly, with 4,581 permitted units in buildings with five or more units in 2003, up sharply from only 2,701 such units in 2001.
The Commonwealth Housing Task Force brought together housing organizations, housing developers, the business community, organized labor, academic institutions, elected and appointed officials, smart growth advocates and many others to craft new policies to increase city and state resources available for housing production. The Task Force proposed paying cities and towns cash incentives to create and permit new housing construction in special zoning "overlay districts" in smart growth locations. It projected that 33,000 new units could be built in such districts over the next ten years.
Between 1990 and 2004, more than 16,000 dormitory beds were constructed in Boston — the equivalent of building 4,100 new housing units. The Boston Redevelopment Authority estimates that in just five years, Boston’s colleges and universities reduced the unmet demand for dormitory beds from a deficit of 21,795 beds in 1999 to one of 17,177 beds in 2004.
Boston’s major institutions are beginning to build housing for their employees and neighbors. Boston’s colleges, universities, hospitals and medical institutions employ 112,000 people, nearly one of every five jobs in Boston. Joslin Diabetes Center and Children’s Hospital are set to break ground on a combined research facility and condominium tower in Longwood Medical Area. The YWCA is creating 184 units of housing in its r
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