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Boston's economic success leading to failure as region falls further behind on building housing for low and middle-income families
By adamg on Sun, 12/04/2016 - 2:45pm
An annual housing report card by the Boston Foundation and the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University highlights the dark clouds over the region's economic boom: Poverty rates are growing as the cost of living increases due to housing prices - yet the region is failing to keep up with growing demand for housing, at least for people below the highest income brackets.
For the third year in a row, real average wages have increased and by the end of 2015 were 5.4 percent higher than in 2009. Unfortunately, however, wage growth has been highly unequal, with the bottom 20 percent of jobholders experiencing nearly a 5 percent decline in their hourly wage since 2009 while those in the 80th percentile of the wage distribution received nearly all of the gains.
Waiting lists for family housing vouchers are growing, families are spending longer periods of time in shelters, and those who have vouchers remain in the same or similar demographic communities, reducing access to employment networks and educational opportunities that are more likely to lead to economic mobility. All of our findings - combined with the real cost of living in Greater Boston - bear out the conclusion that the number of families marginalized by the housing market will only climb unless we find more appropriate and effective policies and fund these interventions at all levels of government.
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Comments
Good news for property owners real estate assets
Bad news for everyone else including the owners, since this will be leaving wealth growth on the table everywhere else in the economy.
Might not be a terrible thing since its hard to create a bubble when you are essentially capping growth.
But, what about the lower and middle class who are the consumer spenders that build the bedrock of our economy?
Bedrock?
Serious question - are the consumer spenders the bedrock of the greater Boston economy? I think we have more money as a region precisely because the bedrock of our economy is stuff which pulls in tons of money from the rest of the world - technology, bio/pharma, higher ed, medical, defense firms.
Housing is a real tough issue which should be a focus but isn't the answer to improve regional transportation and build more everywhere? Anywhere and everywhere with solid transport links to the city core?
This is what drives me crazy about the legislature - they truly don't seem to think feeding the economic engine is important.
Try
Try telling communities along and outside of 495 to build more and build dense. Many have actually increased minimum plots for building, and are actively trying to keep young families away, because those are kids they'll have to find tax revenue to educate.
I agree. Imagine what a high speed rail with one stop in Framingham and end of line in Worcester would do to the central MA economy.
Now be sad it'll never happen.
Fails?
you can thank the old BRA and all of the politicians in the City.
Actually you can thank the
Actually you can thank the neighborhood groups that fight any kind of development. 12 months to get a variance is obscene. You have developers sitting on 6,000+ sq ft lots looking to build, but the neighborhood says they only want 2 units and a ton of parking, even though they are 1/2 mile to the Redline. Then you have protesters fight tearing down vacant warehouses to redeveop and tying the process up in court. Any sane developer is not going to play that game, it's far too expensive to do anything other than higher-end development. THAT is why we have a building shortage, not the BPDA (BRA).
No kidding
One thing I realized slowly when I moved up here is that there isn't anything around here that you can rightly call 'suburbs' the way there are in other metro areas. To a large extent, it's either the city or the boonies, with nothing in between.
In places like Philly (where I'm from) or the DC area (where the wife is from) or around NYC, the suburbs are where the bulk of 'middle class' housing is. These are mostly old farms that were paved over starting in the 50's and on through the 90's where a decent-sized house with a ~1/4 acre lot in a good school district can run in the mid 400's if it's older and in the mid 600's if it's a McMansion.
Here...not so much. An older house with no garage and sometimes not even a driveway set back the absolute minimum from it's sardine can-sized tiny lot can run past 700 even in the outlying towns with so-so school districts.
Why? You can't build in the city because it's already built up and for anything geared toward 'middle income' buyers, the cost of compliance and kickbacks doesn't make economic sense. You can't build in the outlying towns because of open space ordinances put in place to keep the ghetto from spreading via 'affordable housing' laws at the state level. This latter part often gets drowned out by disingenuous pols who cast the problem as one of 'too much local control.'
Take a look at the satellite view of Boston zoomed way out to see a 20 mile radius around the city, and take the same look at other metro areas in the northeast. In Boston, what you'll notice is whole big empty patches of green that are completely undeveloped. In other places, you see a more more uniform distribution of housing throughout the area.
disagree with one thing in particular
"To a large extent, it's either the city or the boonies, with nothing in between."
Now, if you're simply calling suburbs places that have access to 'things' and are 'affordable' I would be more inclined to agree.
Obviously you left room for exceptions in there and didn't make a blanket statement, but that being said I still disagree. Plenty of suburbs. Arlington, Lexington, Woburn, Stoneham, Burlington. Throw in the other towns around them too if you want like Reading, Wakefield and Melrose. There are others too. I'd even throw Newton, Wellesley and their cousins squarely into the mix.
If thats 'too city' for you? Milford, Bellingham, Franklin, Hopkington et al are further out but offer a lot of the things you might look for in civilization such as commuter rail access and some bus routes. Sudbury, Wayland, Concord and Westland too.
Obviously I could probably continue on forever as to why I disagree with MA having a lack of suburbs, but I agree that if you're living on somewhere near the median income for the country you'd be better off somewhere else or with some serious changes in MA real estate. And I know you touched upon that. Just rubs me the wrong way to say that MA lacks suburbs, when in reality, I'd rather live in a MA suburb than most others anywhere else in the country.
I say this as somebody that has traveled to every major population center in this country for work, and as a multi state property owner. :shrug:
That's fair
There are places like that here, but:
1. You've pretty much listed all of them, whereas in the Philly or DC suburbs that I'm most familiar with and can speak with some authority about, it's entire counties and a majority of the metro area that look like suburbs, not just a few towns.
2. Rural really is more rural around here. With the exception of a few neighborhoods in Burlington, for example, a "suburb" around here is an old country lane with single family homes on either side instead of farmland or a major thoroughfare with a double yellow down the middle with single family homes on both sides. What's very rare, even in Arlington or Wellesley or Newton are low-traffic streets with just low density residential that are close to stuff. They exist, but many of them are a half hour drive from the nearest store or right next to high density commercial or industrial areas or right next to places with high foot traffic...just not the same.
Having grown up in several of those "dot on a map" places ...
... there isn't much in Massachusetts east of the Berkshires that I wouldn't call either urban or suburban. I don't really consider it to be rural if it is incorporated and you don't have far more acreage per parcel than what we typically see.
I've biked through most of it, too, so I know what the area is like off of the highways.
I suspect the definition of "suburb" is strongly based on what your personal experience of land use is.
Null set
There isn't anything in Massachusetts west of the Berkshires.
Your set theory is missing
Your set theory is missing the part of the universe that is the Berkshires that is very much not "east of the Berkshires".
I think you mean east
But come on now...even if you have the same or smaller sized parcel as you would anywhere else...but when it's the one road through town, then your house, and then the woods for miles behind your property, you wouldn't call that rural?
Oops
Yes, east of the Berkshires looks rather suburban to me. Fixed!
What you describe? Yes, that's rural and rare before you hit the Berkshires. What I'm thinking about were the areas of my childhood where the land was either national refuge land, native reservation, or farms covering thousands of acres each. In the middle would be a town with smaller lots, and city limits where the water district stopped.
Not that rare
A lot of Westford, Chelmsford, Concord, Carlisle, Acton, Lincoln, Bedford pretty much a lot of outside 128 is like that.
Not all the towns are like that, but a lot of them are places that are either "walkable neighborhoods" in the sense that Brookline is, or a place where you can't walk anywhere period because it's a major thoroughfare (or isn't, but is the only road).
There aren't as many places (like I keep saying) where you can go for a walk, but aren't "walkable neighborhoods".
Not really
I have very heavily explored those places on bikes - they are suburban to be sure.
You don't really see true rural areas until you get out to places like Lancaster or in behind Mt. Wachusett.
Yes really
Lowell Road/Westford Road from Concord center to Westford center.
Tiny little one-lane thing with McMansions in either side in the middle of a forest/farm land that can't be built on. Then there's a town center that's as dense as JP and then there's more of the same. That's not the exception in that area. Sure, there'll be a few small subdivisions off of Rt 40 for instance, but they're small and very very sparsely laid out to the point that I wouldn't even call them subdivisions, at least in my lexicon.
I'm not saying that suburbs don't exist in those parts, I've driven through a bunch, but they're much less numerous and very overwhelmed by the undeveloped land they sit in.
A matter of perspective
As I noted before, I grew up in some of the most sparsely populated areas of the US. You know where those guys occupied the wildlife refuge? I lived in the adjacent county for a time - 2x the size of MA, with about 10,000 people at the time.
So that's why I think what you are talking about - an area that I know extremely well from the seat of a bike - is suburban and not rural.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
There's nothing wrong with
There's nothing wrong with towns preventing unsustainable overdevelopment and preserving more green space. You can't just tell other places to build more because you think they haven't done enough.
Make the size of the region relatively constant over a long period of time, then you will have enough housing.
That's a combination of
That's a combination of conservation land and private land, and large amounts of open space like that are good when preserved.
Just some things about Bellingham
I'm from Bellingham south side to be exact.
Here's some fun facts:
*largely ignored metal Health in high schools
*Tons of white supremacists
*be very selective where you eat there
*the police have a history of picking who they'll arrest and treat like a fleshy pinata
*a nice helping of sex offenders
*an economy based on poorly maintained tattoo studios and paintball gun stores
*local business models based on breaking and entering and methamphetamine abuse
* poor leadership and management skills probably due to low expectations lower educations.
*this one's just a personal criticism but don't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to making your town a destination area by half building an out door strip mall.
Some positives:
*there's a Bobs furniture (it's almost always empty go a head take a nap)
* local culinary arts: Chili's, Outback steak house, Unos Chicago bar and grill
*fun activities for children (I had the long standing hobbie of huffing paint ages of 4-16)
*you can leave
Get around more
In Boston as well, the suburbs are where the bulk of middle class housing is. It just doesn't look the same to you.
The population of the Boston metro area exclusive of the city of Boston is almost as large as that of the Philadelphia metro area exclusive of the city of Philadelphia. Boston City: 654K. Metro region: 4.7M. Philadelphia city population 1.5M, Philadelphia metro population 6M.
The thing about the suburbs around here is that you might not notice them if you're used to a different pattern of settlement. Most of the largest suburbs are cities in their own rights, or towns clinging to their township. You want something resembling what you're used to, go to Waltham or Lawrence or Revere.
Considering Cambridge and Brookline not to be suburbs, but more like satellite cities, Scummy missed the following in the inner ring: Belmont, Medford, Melrose, Somerville, Waltham, and Watertown.
In the outer suburbs you could add Bedford, Beverly, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Concord, Dover, Essex, Framingham, Lincoln, Lowell, Lawerence, Lynnfield, Maynard, Medfield, Natick, Needham, Sherborn, Sudbury, Tewksbury, Weston, and Winchester.
I get around plenty
I've either lived in, worked in, or otherwise been too or through many of the towns you've listed in a nontrivial manner, and I reaffirm my assertion that there aren't planned bedroom communities around here on the scale and of the caliber that there are in other metro areas.
Move the goalposts
Ah, so it was "planned bedroom communities" you wanted. Fair enough. It seemed like you wanted suburbs before.
"it's either the city or the boonies, with nothing in between." - false
"there aren't planned bedroom communities around here on the scale and of the caliber that there are in other metro areas" - true
Just because you don't see what you're looking for doesn't mean there's nothing there.
What goal posts?
Where I grew up, suburbs were (and still are) synonymous with planned bedroom communities, not just any old adjoining towns that aren't part of the urbanized core.
And this is not where you grew up
And here, "planned bedroom community" is not synonymous with "suburb."
Seriously, kid, just because people in other places do things differently doesn't mean they do them wrong.
The first suburbs in America were created here in Boston in the late nineteenth century. The term "bedroom community" was first invented at that time, to describe life in "streetcar suburbs" like Roslindale. The suburbs here grew radially around the train lines; by the time cars became popular, the settlement patterns had already been set. Geography didn't permit much more - eastern Mass didn't have massive, flat potato fields around the city to plow under and turn into Levittowns after WWII.
I remember when Dukakis was running for prez he said if the Pilgrims had landed in California, New England would be a natural park. Everything here is small, poky, and twisted compared to the plains outside NY or Philly.
And you're making my point for me
Just because people in just about every other metro area do things differently, doesn't make the way they're done here right.
Almost none of those supposedly small poky and twisted open spaces that dot the surrounding area are that way by anything other than human decisionmaking. The topography of the few examples of (what I would call) proper American suburbs as they exist in the rest of the country is exactly identical to the topography of the places around here that aren't.
Furthermore, plenty of places in other metro areas that aren't a flat coastal plain also have suburbs like there are in Philly. Maryland north and west of DC isn't exactly flat as a pancake, and has its share of lakes, streams, and rivers, but for reasons that amount entirely to choice was built up over the past half century with a uniformly distributed mix of low-density single-family homes, high density commercial and industrial zones, the occasional high-density residential area, and all with roads and transit to support it.
Solipsistic stubbornness like yours is why this place doesn't have enough housing to meet demand. It really is just as simple as that.
I wasn't joking
about the potato fields.
New England's pattern of development is predicated on the uselessness of most of the region for large-scale agricultural purposes such as efficiently growing wheat, potatoes, or corn. Farming was largely abandoned in New England in the mid-1800s because the soil is poor and is full of rocks, unlike soil in many other places in the country. What was left behind were small farms and pastures and lots of industrial towns.
Most large-scale bedroom communities, such as the Levittowns, were built in areas where the land use pattern had previously been large-scale agriculture. You can pave over hundreds of acres of potato or wheat fields much more easily than a patchwork of towns and small-holdings. We did not have large-scale agricultural areas in Massachusetts in the 20th century, outside of the cranberry bogs, so we have no similar developments. Our best agricultural region is the Pioneer Valley, which is too far from the metropole to be a suburb, and thus remains largely agricultural.
It's not solipsism, it's geology and history - things that exist whether we care or not.
New England Geology, simplified
Is it a bunch of rocks? No --> Swamp
Is it a swamp? No --> Bunch of rocks
No, the reason this area
No, the reason this area doesn't have enough housing is because net increase in the overall population size.
What you said aren't reason why things here are done "wrong" other than that you disagree with them and you think housing is too expensive.
You are also not mentioning that the overall density of this area is already among the highest anywhere.
Technical term is 'association fallacy"
All horses are animals. My horse is brown. Therefore all animals are brown.
Nope.
(Also - I grew up in NJ just across from Bucks County, and I really can't agree with your assertion that all the Philly suburbs are planned communities - it seems to me that very few of them are. Significant Philly suburbs that are distinct old towns off the top of my head - Haddonfield, Media, Collingswood, West Chester, Phoenixville. Even New Hope/Doylestown are sometimes called 'suburbs' of Philly though they're 30 odd miles away (that pisses off the old-timers though).
Let's talk about Doylestown
and Bucks county.
I grew up right on the border between Philly, Bucks, and Montgomery County.
All of that area was farmland in the 40's, and Doylestown and the few other places you mentioned were proper towns in their own right. Now it's almost entirely a sea of low-density single-family homes.
It's not 'planned' the way DC proper or New Haven were planned, but maybe a better term is 'purpose-built' for low-density residential at large scale rather than growing up haphazardly around existing town centers (of which there were admittedly fewer there than there were and are here).
Use whatever terminology you want, but my point is that you don't see that here.
Of course you do
You just described Reading and Framingham/Natick to a tee:
Used to be farmland in the mid 20th, now lots of low-density single-family homes that appeal to Boston-area middle class families.
They ain't no levittowns - but then again, neither are Doylestown or New Hope.
DIfference is
Doylestown and New Hope are islands in a sea of Levittowns. Natick/Wellesley/etc is an island in a sea of open space.
It's not open space
There are people living there. It only looks open from an airplane because they have trees in their back yards.
So they hike a mile through the woods
to get to the nearest road? An cleverly have their properties listed as conservation land or town forests?
Re: top thread: You're right that it's harder to buy up dozens to hundreds of small lots than a few large farms, but it is not correct to say that it is structurally hopeless.
Find a spot
Anywhere east of Worcester that's literally a mile from the nearest road. You can't unless it's in the ocean.
I'm sorry that the conservation lands, bogs, and town forests in Massachusetts make you unhappy. Maybe you should live somewhere else more reliably ticky-tacky.
OK, a quarter mile
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4915737,-71.350471,14z
Not conservation land, not actively farmed, no camo nets, not nothing. Just a big patch of undeveloped land eastawoostah
Fail
Good move giving up. Because there isn't.
Now, as to the parcel you just identified, it's called the Estabrook Woods. It's Concord's largest remaining parcel of intact woodland, about 1550 acres. About 900 acres have been protected, the biggest part in 1997 when Harvard placed the 672 acres it owns in conservation status.
The Estabrook Woods area contains almost all of Concord’s land that is relatively remote from roads. It has an extensive trail system and is actively used for walking, cross-country skiing, and horseback riding. Harvard, which owns most of it, continues to use it for research and educational purposes.
And about half of it is... wait for it... swamp.
http://www.concordnet.org/DocumentCenter/View/3900
Levittown NY is 4,398 acres, almost three times as big as this tract of swamp and rocks.
In other words
a big piece of undeveloped land. Or in yet another set of words, a swamp that the town and land owner has chosen not to drain and sell for housing.
There are more in neighboring Acton, Groton, etc which are all some form of *recently* declared conservation land that can just as easily be declared open for development into single-family homes if the political will were there.
Yeah but....
Do they have brick brownstones in those towns???
I second Swirly's comment (I think it's below this post), fucked up stuff around here has to do with the fact that we really have no county (or regional) governance. Since before we were a country development in these parts has been driven by local govt where every town is a kingdom unto themselves. Having grown up in one of the towns NOT mentioned in all the lists above, Saugus (the only town within 128 that voted for Trump!!), I can say that "Framingham-North" was considered a "cow-town" for many years - with old farm plots and wood lots (and pieces of ledge) converted into happy little developments that, while they weren't laid out in a neat grid, were basically your 1940s-60s split-entry ranch kind of deals. It was no Spielbergian ET/Poltergeist sprawl, but damnit! we considered them 'burbs!!
But if you want to see a transition from town center to rolling pastures with no 'burbs, check out Scotland.
Here's what you're still missing
There's a historical line of development from good farmland to good subdivision land. The mid-century ticky-tack developments of raised ranches sprang up where there were previously large farm fields near a metropolis. John W. described one local area that was amenable to this. We don't have many others near here.
Patches of land like the Estabrook Woods remained undeveloped into the late 20th Century because they were useless for development, and the development of farms requires similar land to the development of subdivisions. Rocks, swamp, rocks, swamp, like Swirly said. You couldn't farm there effectively, so there were never many fields,and you couldn't usefully build roads and a bunch of houses there either. Eventually the owners of such parcels ended up putting the land in conservation status because it affords a tax break.
Now your answer is that places like Estabrook Wood should have been large-scale bulldozed, with, for example, Hubbard Hill pushed over into Carlisle Swamp? All so the resulting stony muck could be blanketed with a couple thousand ticky-tack houses slowly sinking into tiny lots way out by Concord. Are you serious?
I, for one, am happy to live in an area that doesn't agree with you about this.
It's conservation land, not
It's conservation land, not merely "undeveloped" land, and it's not what is making housing expensive.
Not anything close to open
Not anything close to open space relatively speaking. The region has a vast amount of density far greater than most others.
Yes, let's
Doylestown has a population of 8,300 and density of 3,800 per square mile. The following places in the Boston area have more than 3,000 people per square mile:
Chelsea, Cambridge, Malden, Everett, Brookline, Winthrop, Watertown, Revere, Lawrence, Lynn, Arlington, Lowell (note we're still at more than double Doylestown density), Newton, Medford, Melrose, Quincy, Belmont, Salem, Swampscott, Marblehead, Brockton, Waltham, Hull, Weymouth, Nahant, Stoneham, Winchester, and Wakefield. That's 28 towns.
Doylestown is in Bucks County, which is comparable to Middlesex County. Bucks has 627,000 people over 622 sq mi for 1,040 people per square mile. Middlesex has 1,500,000 people over 847 sq mi for 1,840 people square mile.
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
That is a function of community organization
Around here, everything devolves to the cities and towns, these are contiguous and cover the entire state, and are the base unit of the government structure.
Therefore, the structure of the metro areas is highly dependent on these units of structure.
That's a New England thing - I only rarely lived in incorporated spaces when I was growing up, and most services were devolved to the county level.
On the other hand, I am glad that these "planned bedroom communities" are not as common here or differ strongly in structure from those in Florida or other states. Why? HOAs are the enemy of sanity in many places - total authority without any checks and balances, and for often spurious ends. Give me grass that is nice and long or give me death! ;-)
Can't argue there
But they're more the exception than the rule in where I'm from, at least.
Montco, PA, in particular was divied up into individual Townships by William Penn and that was the base unit of government, which are (in principle at least) similar to New England towns. A few of things that NE towns do exclusively like major roads and deeds are handled at the county level, but it's not even close to being unorganized territory the way it might be out west.
A few of the newer developments that I've seen pop up there in the past two decades do have HOAs, but they are either gated communities (which is a big bag of pointless out where they are) or they're condo/townhouse deals where you're going to have some level of non-governmental authority no matter how you slice it.
eh
i wouldnt say i missed them, i just figured i had made my point :-) Hell, i've lived in three of those towns
Aaahh ya think! ... Good time
Aaahh ya think! ... Good time for a durrrr
This is simple
Real estate interests are $huge$, and they are big campaign contributors at city halls. Another thing is subsidized housing like section 8 actually increases housing costs for those who make too much to get it, but not enough to afford 'market rate' in an inflated market, along with artificial scarcity.
But.....
....innovation!
innovation
creating new ways to eff the little people is still innovation!
The main thing that a report
The main thing that a report like this misjudges is the idea that housing can just be continually produced on a defined amount of room.
You build up. That's how
You build up. That's how cities in Asia have been growing. They tear down three story buildings, and build 10 story buildings. Then they tear those down and build 30 story buildings.
But but
shadows waaah
Build small senior housing in hoods with high walkability scores
Want to create loads of housing all over the metro area? Build small senior apartments/condos with little or no parking in areas with high walkability -- good T access and local amenities like grocers, drugstores, etc.
As seniors get older, many will be looking to downsize. They won't want to own outdoor space because of the maintenance, they won't want to carry 2-3 bedrooms they're not using, and they want to minimize their ongoing monthly costs like property. Many know they'll need to give up one or both of their autos as they get older.
I'm not arguing for senior-only housing; a mix of senior-only and non-constrained is just fine. I'm also not arguing for senior Affordable housing exclusively. While that is also needed, senior market rate housing -- marketed toward seniors who live in Boston and its 'burbs -- is also important.
The upsides are enormous: you can create a relatively large number of units in a small space, and by getting seniors to move into them, you free up a far larger number of bedrooms disbursed around the region. You're essentially adding 3/4 BR homes into the market at the cost/space requirement of 1-2BR apartments. You also get more population in Boston without adding motor vehicle congestion, and even help seniors who shouldn't be driving get off the road altogether. You bring consumers of more frequent and expensive health care closer to where that health care resides. You retain retail expenditures without requiring additional jobs: it's money injected (or retained) in the local economy that isn't subject to the whims of the labor market. Seniors also tend to value a lack of stairs -- elevators and one-floor apartments without so much as a front stoop often matter much more when you're 80. Same goes for level floors without thresholds, doors that feel lightweight to open, doorknobs that are French handled instead of round, windows that aren't warped and tough to open, and on and on.
And this isn't about my housing needs -- I'm under 40 and own my house (along with the bank, of course). It just seems like a really cost and politically efficient way of adding to housing availability throughout the Boston metro while also adjusting to the reality that we have a baby boomer retirement wave coming and the needs of seniors are different in a number of important ways.