Housing is expensive in Massachusetts, compared to most places in the nation, and that inhibits the commonwealth’s ability to retain employees of all kinds. It weakens our economy and reduces our competitiveness.
Working families – including employees of cities and towns, as well as teachers, nurses, retail and construction workers – are struggling to afford a home. Because of the high cost of living in the Boston area, a family of four that makes $66,000 a year qualifies for certain affordable housing.
While affordable housing is needed to ensure the state has a solid contingent of workers, it is also increasingly necessary for a steadily aging population. The first of the baby-boomer generation are now celebrating – or at least acknowledging – their 65th birthdays, and many of them would rather stay where they have lived and worked than be forced to move to a low-cost state far away.
The affordable-housing picture for the Greater Boston area is complex, but the bottom line is simple: Only 17 of the 101 communities in the Greater Boston area meet the state’s target of having a minimum of 10 percent affordable housing.
This number is a dramatic drop from last year, according to recently released 2010 U.S. Census figures. Many communities built a lot of housing over the last decade, but the portion of that housing that is affordable didn’t keep pace.
While many feared that the state’s affordable housing law, also known as the Comprehensive Permit law, might disappear at the voters’ hands in the last election, it was retained by a solid, 58 percent margin.
The 42-year-old law enables local zoning boards to approve development proposals under flexible rules if at least 20 percent to 25 percent of a project is affordable housing. Despite frustrations with some aspects of the law, most people in the commonwealth clearly understood that increasing the amount of affordable housing is vital to our future.
Falling Short
Only 34 of the 101 Greater Boston communities currently have a housing plan approved by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development. A plan demonstrates that a community is proactively trying to help the state reach its housing goals and maintain the economic edge that we have developed over the years.
About 18 percent of the housing in the City of Boston is in the affordable category, which is a good performance by national standards. But most of the surrounding communities – with a few notable exceptions, including Concord, Stoughton, Bedford, and Salem – are in some way falling short of our goals.
With municipal budgets challenged as perhaps never before, local officials often lack the time and expertise to engage on the vital affordable-housing front: to identify good locations, to find reputable and qualified developers, to see them through a maze-like process of local and state permitting and then into construction.
Affordable Housing Expertise
Nonprofit development corporations specialize in the hard work of establishing affordable housing in high-cost places like Massachusetts and create jobs for many of the companies involved in the many aspects of real estate development. They have experience in balancing the interests of the local community, neighboring communities, developers, investors and the future residents, all who in the end will benefit.
Every nonprofit development corporation is different, tailoring its efforts to its specific area, but they share the goal of increasing the number of affordable homes. At B’nai B’rith Housing, our emphasis is on creating nonsectarian housing in high-cost Greater Boston communities. We develop, but we also partner with and advise, communities that for lack of resources or other reasons have not been able to meet the state’s requirements and the needs of their residents.
As the economy begins showing signs of recovery, this is the time that communities in the Greater Boston area should get busy and adjust their housing mix to make it more affordable, while at the same time brightening the economic future for generations to come.
