Boston's housing stock is old (surprised?)

Why does it cost so much to live in Boston? Why is housing so expensive?

Simple question, and there's a simple answer: supply and demand. Too many people want to live in too few homes.

Solving the problem is where things get tricky. Do you increase supply? Do you decrease demand?

High housing prices obviously limit demand, but no one would thing that's a good idea - you keep making people not want to live here and eventually they won't live here.

Increasing supply is trickier because, as we all know, much of downtown Boston is off-limits to any sort of residential development, due to its historic nature (and, something called NIMBYism).

The US Census Bureau collects data that shows just how bad things are.

Boston's housing stock is old. Like, older than just about any other major US city.

This handy little chart compares Boston to San Francisco, New York, and several other major US cities (these are city statistics, not "metropolitan areas"). It shows that in Boston, 57% of its housing stock (condos, single-family homes, apartments) was built before 1939. Other cities are different: half of San Francisco's housing stock was built prior to 1939, but look at Las Vegas and Miami; not surprisingly, little of their residential housing is old.

[IMG]http://i369.photobucket.com/albums/oo139/JohnAKeit...

What's striking is that, since 1939, every other major US city similar to Boston has had periods of growth during different decades. New housing in Boston has dropped, percentage-wise, in just about every decade. (I don't know if the data includes "public" housing, FYI.)

Obviously, uncontrolled growth has its own set of problems - according to the data, Miami and Las Vegaas continued to increase their housing stock during the recession at rates higher than other US cities; it's not a coincidence that they're now facing a glut of housing, which is stretching out our bad economy.

Separately, the BizJournals website did its own tally, by county, and found that Suffolk County has had very little growth. Suffolk County is Boston, Revere, Winthrop and Chelsea. Boston's housing stock makes up about 90% of the total.

[IMG]http://i369.photobucket.com/albums/oo139/JohnAKeit...

Suffolk County came in 17th out of 3,143 counties when it came to percentage of housing built prior to 1939 [b]1960[/b] and 3,003th out of 3,143 counties when it came to percentage of housing built since 1990. That's the highest 0.5% for the first, and lowest 4.5% for the second.

What do you think? Is this data useful when analyzing our city's housing problem?

What's your solution? Housing subsidies? Better public transportation to expand the options people have over where to live? More housing in downtown Boston to take some of the pressure off everywhere else?