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Chrystal Kornegay
The math underpinning Massachusetts’s affordable housing challenges looks stark.
Massachusetts is adding jobs at a rapid clip. The Boston metro region’s jobs base is growing twice as quickly as the regional planning agency, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) projected just a few years ago. We are a growing, prosperous Commonwealth, but our housing stock is not keeping up.
Since 2010, the MAPC estimates that greater Boston has added 184,000 new jobs, and only 32,500 new housing units – more than 3.6 new jobs for every new home. Almost all low-income residents in the Boston region struggle to afford their housing, and middle-income residents are now facing the kinds of affordability challenges that low-income residents faced in the 1990s.
These challenges are not sustainable. They keep residents from sharing in the state’s growth and prosperity, and they threaten the state’s economic future.
But there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about Massachusetts’ ability to meet these housing challenges. We saw two of them earlier this month, at a pair of milestone events separated by three days and four miles – the rollout of an historic regional housing goal, and a groundbreaking for a major new affordable housing community in Cambridge. The common theme tying the two together is a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the strong commitment needed by stakeholders in the local, state and private sectors to overcome the challenges together.
Advocating for new housing production in Massachusetts takes courage. The impacts of any one development are felt in neighborhoods and on individual city blocks. Too often, it can seem that a few communities are carrying the burden of meeting broad statewide housing needs.
That’s why it was significant when 15 metro Boston mayors and city managers from MAPC’s Metro Mayors Coalition stood side by side to announce an historic regional housing production goal.
A New Vision for Housing in Massachusetts
The Metro Mayors said housing affordability challenges don’t stop at municipal boundaries, and that regional challenges demand a coordinated regional response to meet the demand for new housing with new supply. The Metro Mayors set a goal of adding 185,000 new homes across the region by the year 2030. And they grounded their goal in a couple of simple questions: What kind of job growth do we want to achieve, and how many new homes are needed to support those new jobs?
This is the first time leaders from across greater Boston have joined together to set a common housing vision. It’s a vision that will allow the entire region to continue to grow and ensure that current residents continue to live here more affordably. MassHousing was proud to support the MAPC planning process that brought the Metro Mayors together, and to be a partner in helping the region map out its development future.
The Metro Mayors announcement was a powerful first step. It needs to be followed by implementation efforts that will result in new homes. That’s just what Cambridge did after participating in the Metro Mayors announcement, when the city joined the nonprofit developer Homeowners Rehab Inc., to break ground on Concord Highlands.
Concord Highlands is the largest new affordable housing community to be built in Cambridge in 40 years. Homeowners Rehab will bring 98 new rental homes to Cambridge’s Fresh Pond neighborhood, and every one of them will affordable for the long term and will serve everyone –from very low-income households to middle-income families.
MassHousing is supporting the development of Concord Highlands, by providing Homeowners Rehab with $24.7 million in financing, including $3.8 million from MassHousing’s Workforce Housing Initiative. The City of Cambridge is contributing $10 million in local funding.
Cambridge is a vibrant and growing community, and the city’s significant local investment in this project will make Concord Highlands the kind of housing community that allows residents of all means to share in the city’s growth. It’s the embodiment of the vision behind the Metro Mayors Coalition’s housing goal. And it’s an early indication that, as a region, we are poised to meet the ambitious goals we’ve set for ourselves.
Chrystal Kornegay is the executive director of MassHousing.
