To Live (Some Notes on Housing)

February, 2019.

Construction is nearing completion on One Dalton Place in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay. One Dalton Place is a series of luxury apartments perched atop a hotel. The apartments in the building have reportedly sold for prices ranging from $2.5 to $40 million dollars.

Boston had a population of 685,094 in 2017. It’s estimated to have a population of 710,000 to 724,000 residents by 2030. The city of Boston needs to see 15,000 homes built every year in order to keep track with population growth.

The average median rent in Boston is somewhere between $2,300-$2,800 dollars per month. Rent has been rising continuously in the city since 2009, where the average effective rent was 1,600 a month. That’s a 43% increase at minimum, an average of $700 more gone to the rent, and it means that — all together, as the organization Massachusetts Housing Partnership put it — “88% of households earning median income can’t afford their neighborhood’s average median rent.”

And — to top it off — there’s also the question of race: the median income of an African-American family in Metro Boston is $8. And, as Elliot Schmiedl noted in a blog post over at MHP, the financial burden for African-American families doesn’t end there…