CISS Affiliate’s Class Tackles Massachusetts Housing Crisis
This article, by Rich Barlow, originally appeared in BU Today on May 22, 2024.
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, CISS Affiliate and CAS associate professor of political science, focused their final project on ground zero in the state’s housing wars, Milton….
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.
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.”