| If you’d told us 10 years ago if Massachusetts’ own “City of Sin” would be a candidate for the next up–and–coming market in the Boston area, you’d have to forgive us if we laughed.
Saddled with debt, squirrely roads, decades of disinvestment and only a commuter rail stop to connect it to Boston, Lynn was hardly the picture of a place that would be “fun to buy into.”
Over the last few years, the city has been on an upward trajectory, with arts and other investments in the downtown. A new mayor, former state Sen. Thomas McGee, has added to that sense of optimism after defeating the small-minded administration of Judith Flanagan Kennedy in a landslide in 2018.
Commercial developers, as Banker & Tradesman’s Steve Adams reported recently, are responding and starting to eye the 20-minute train ride from downtown Lynn to North Station as a selling point for potential apartment-dwellers.
As Jay Fitzgerald reports in this week’s issue, the city’s value proposition isn’t going unnoticed by hopeful homebuyers of many stripes. It is still affordable by Boston standards, with a median single-family home price of $345,000 and a median condominium price of $242,250 in 2018, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman. While it doesn’t have highway access, residents can still reach Boston via the Commuter Rail or a cheaper, but slower, bus ride to Revere’s Blue Line stops.
As prospective purchasers throughout Massachusetts brave the open houses and bidding wars that pop up every spring like crocuses, they all seem to be seeking the same thing as people buying into Lynn: affordability and access to other parts of the Boston metro. But their standards now are necessarily very different from those their predecessors held a decade ago.
The Worcester area is also drawing attention from homebuyers despite its distance from many job centers. The city’s neighbors just to the north – Holden and West Boylston – have both seen their median home price rise by about 14 percent in the last year, putting them in the top five hottest Worcester County markets. On either side of Interstate 190, they have easy access to both Route 2 and the Mass. Pike along with downtown Worcester’s increasingly vibrant downtown.
Keep an eye on Gateway Cities like Lynn and Boston’s exurbs over the next two years – they may well become the next centers of demand in the area real estate market.
Absent a sustained downturn in the market or a statewide craze for new housing construction, the same forces driving consumers into these previously underappreciated areas are likely to remain in place. These new arrivals may be a valuable, revitalizing addition to their new towns and cities.
Local and state officials should ask themselves, however, whether such a future is an equitable future. If most consumers on the lower half of the income spectrum are forced further and further from their jobs, they will need much better ways of getting around than the creaky, infrequent commuter rail and clogged highways.
