In February, voters in Milton rejected a zoning plan to comply with a state law expanding affordable housing near transit stops. Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Politics

A BU Class Tackles the Massachusetts Housing Crisis

As Milton and other towns fight rezoning, Terriers study how to overcome opposition to building affordable multiunit housing

Not-so-fun fact: if you plan to stay in Boston after BU, it could take you nine years to save enough to buy a starter home. That’s if you’re coupled. Stay single, and you can quadruple that wait.

The depressing numbers, from a study by real estate news and research site Point2, testifies to Massachusetts’ affordable housing crisis—one of the topics of this spring’s College of Arts & Sciences political science class Urban Politics and Policy. Several students taking the course, taught by Katherine Levine Einstein, a CAS associate professor of political science, focused their final project on ground zero in the state’s housing wars, Milton.

In February, voters there rejected a plan that would have zoned for multifamily housing near public transportation stops. (A 2021 state law designates 177 municipalities as “MBTA communities” that must allow affordable apartments near transit.) In retaliation, the state cut grants to Milton and sued to force the town to comply. Most communities have heeded the law, but at least three others have joined Milton in opposition. 

“We were unsuccessful in getting a comment” from Milton officials, says Elizabeth Kostina (CGS’22, CAS’24), one of the students who studied that town, along with Brookline and Everett. Her group found “varying levels of acceptance and restrictions around affordable housing in these towns.”

Specifically, she says, Milton’s three affordable housing developments enforce age limits, suggesting “a conservative approach catering primarily to seniors, rather than broader affordability that would include low-income residents, people with families, etc.” Brookline takes a more expansive approach, with 31 developments and availability based on income (without age restrictions) for “a more progressive, inclusive stance,” Kostina says. Everett has 14 developments and also allows for occupancy not restricted by age.

The students’ report emphasizes “the need for more inclusive, holistic affordable housing strategies, tailored to each community’s demographics and socioeconomic conditions, going beyond just serving seniors,” Kostina says. The report also calls for the need to overcome community opposition “through education, infrastructure planning, and consensus-building” in all three communities.

“There’s sort of bipartisan opposition to building new housing,” Einstein tells BU Today. The obstructionism doesn’t surprise her: she coauthored a 2018 study of the most vocal residents at planning and zoning board meetings in eastern Massachusetts. Most opposed development, and they trended older, whiter, and more home-owning than their neighbors. 

The housing crisis goes beyond subsidized units for the poor. The US housing stock hasn’t kept up with need, driving up the cost of that tight supply even for folks who don’t receive public assistance. (Experts say we need almost four million units nationally.) 

Boston, a magnet for high-paid professionals who can afford expensive housing, and for students willing to pile up in high-priced apartments and split rent, is the 7th most expensive of 269 cities ranked by financial website NerdWallet. Housing Navigator—a nonprofit online warehouse of housing data—recently reported that the official inventory of affordable housing statewide overcounts the actual number by 34,000. And the state’s home vacancy rate of 0.4 percent indicates a supply crunch.

“We’re a really attractive place to live,” Einstein says, “but if you look at our housing construction, compared to much more affordable cities in the country, like Houston and Phoenix, [we] build so much less.” Job growth in Austin, Tex.—a college town like Boston—has exploded, she says, “and they have seen some increase in their rents and housing expenses, as you’d expect, but nowhere near the same rate of increase in places like California and Boston. And one of the big reasons is that it is easier to build in Austin. It is much easier to permit new housing.”

For the final project, Einstein’s students partnered with nonprofit and public planners to brainstorm subsidized housing policy, as part of MetroBridge, a BU program that turns Terriers loose on real-life municipal problems. Working with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a state agency encouraging smart growth, including affordable housing, students fanned out to their assigned communities and analyzed data from Housing Navigator.

The students investigated which towns have affordable housing, which don’t, and the guardrails each erects around eligibility. (Winchester, for example, opens subsidized housing only to older residents, leaving younger people who are parents or poor without that option, says Einstein, adding that such discrimination is legal.) 

The course, which Einstein has taught since coming to BU in 2012, covers concerns beyond shelter—schools, transportation, environmental protection. But “when you ask Massachusetts residents what’s worrying them the most, housing costs will rise to the top,” she says. Solving other problems—failing schools, say—hinges on cracking the housing nut. 

“What school system your kids can attend is tied to what town you can afford to live in,” she notes. Making housing energy-efficient and within walking distance of public transit also reduces greenhouse gases.

Einstein says her class may give students hope that the housing crisis is fixable. For all the moaning in some communities, her students watched others get in line with the transit law; one, Arlington, “went way above the state minimums” for permitting housing. She also gives shoutouts to larger, diverse cities, such as Boston and Cambridge, for having embraced more publicly subsidized housing. 

The course takeaway is that all politics—or at least, important, unappreciated politics—is local. “So much of the actual policy action is happening at the local level,” Einstein says. “Our local governments—where turnout in elections is abysmal, where people are not really participating or even aware of what’s going on—are actually where really important policies related to housing, education, policing, and transportation are all unfolding.”