• Molly Callahan

    Senior Writer

    Photo: Headshot of Molly Callahan. A white woman with short, curly brown hair, wearing glasses and a blue sweater, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Molly Callahan began her career at a small, family-owned newspaper where the newsroom housed computers that used floppy disks. Since then, her work has been picked up by the Associated Press and recognized by the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2016, she moved into a communications role at Northeastern University as part of its News@Northeastern reporting team. When she's not writing, Molly can be found rock climbing, biking around the city, or hanging out with her fiancée, Morgan, and their cat, Junie B. Jones. Profile

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There are 4 comments on Greater Boston Housing Earns “Failing Grade” in Annual Report Card

  1. Interesting article, but it fails to take into account the fact that 20% of Boston’s population is college students. Even though the majority live on campus, this puts a big strain on lower cost housing. How do we address this issue?

  2. My rent in Waltham increased by $325/mo this year, and this is AFTER negotiating the landlord down. That’s an added $3900/mo. Meanwhile, purchasing a single-family house anywhere remotely close to the CRC (let’s say under 45 minutes driving) is impossible on my BU salary and my wife’s teacher salary. It’s brutal out there…

  3. Boston housing has been a joke forever. Scumlords scalping the market, the only things under development are luxury. What did the city expect? It’s almost like rent control would make things more accessible… But the scumlords would riot. Forget buying a house on my BU salary, and I can barely afford rent. What a joke. We should be making plenty to afford to live here, but Boston housing is oppressive.

  4. Subsidized housing reliably pushes up property valuations, which is the core issue. The article makes a brief afterthought of the inane zoning laws across the country, like host-presence requirement for sub-month leases and the blanket ban of coliving units. There’s also limits on floor area ratios, huge green space laws that make development impossible, infamous height restrictions, restrictions on new construction unless partly owned by a public agency, etc. Remove these laws.

    Some specific regulations are sensible, but most of market distortions heroically make housing unaffordable. Calling for more subsidized housing may feels righteous to the authors of this article, but empirically only delays housing affordability for longer and dooms those already paying inflated rates. But this article clearly was an exercise in the authors’ specialties (political science).

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