The need for affordable housing
A few weeks back, on my way to my usual cup of coffee, I ran into a neighbor who's become interested in city politics since the last election. While we were chatting, a woman passed by, who my neighbor recognized. He introduced me as a City Councilor. The interaction was overall brief—I said that the City was massively underfunded and City Council's job was to get more money into the City to help with that situation so that Medford could improve over time. The woman said she was a teacher and had lived in Somerville before she was priced out. She hoped the same thing wouldn't happen to her in Medford.
People who I casually run into — the ones who spend most of their time not thinking about municipal politics — tend to have an outsized influence on my thinking because they represent most of the population. I listen closely to casual, day-to-day comments of those who don't follow City politics all that closely.
The consequence of a city improving is that home prices rise and people get priced out. Somerville, 30 years ago, was called "Slumerville", but then they invested and improved, and as they did, housing prices rose. Medford's fairly unaffordable as it is, but I think we're at a similar nexus point, and because we are, we need to be serious about investing in affordable housing.
I wrote in my last post about the nitty gritty mechanisms for funding it. I didn't talk about the need. When I want to learn about the overall housing crisis that affects Medford and Massachusetts right now, I refer mainly to two written sources. The first is an in-depth analysis by the Boston Globe's Spotlight team, which pointed out that it costs, on average, between $500,000 and $600,000 to build one housing unit in Greater Boston. The second is Medford's Housing Production Plan, which sums up the situation early on:
Under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 40B Section 20-23 (C.40B), the Commonwealth’s minimum threshold is for all Massachusetts municipalities to have at least 10 percent of housing units affordable to low/moderate income households or affordable housing on at least 1.5 percent of total land area. As of April 7, 2020, 1,726 units in Medford were included on the SHI, which is 7.2 percent of Medford’s total year-round housing units (23,968 according to the 2010 U.S. Census). At the time of this writing (February 2021), the City would need to create 671 more units to reach the 10 percent affordability target.
So, with 671 units, Medford would conservatively need about $335.5 million to meet that goal. The math is more complicated, but it's about that order of magnitude. If we decided to pay just a pittance of that, we'd still need to invest far, far more annually than we have been thus far to get any results.
I like Spotlight's analysis because it doesn't pretend that the housing crisis is a simple issue. In my job as an elected official, I'm trying to find the levers I have control over that can help with this locally. I can help with the speed of the permitting process — that's the whole reason I have a draft of a transportation demand management ordinance in my Google Drive — but I cannot help the rising price of copper wire overseas.
Part of the crisis, I think, is cyclic. The article pointed out that fewer people work construction jobs than they used to, meaning that lack of labor is a deeper reason for the high costs of development and thus housing. People come to City Council quite a bit to talk about much-needed repairs to our roads, lack of teachers in our schools, and so on. If Medford were a city that housed nothing but construction workers and teachers, our roads would be pristine and our schools would be ranked a lot higher. Construction workers and teachers do live in Medford, but not nearly to the degree that they used to. When campaigning, I spoke with a woman who pointed to a bunch of houses in her neighborhood, pointing out how plumbers and carpenters used to live there. Now, it's lawyers and biotech workers. Lawyers and biotech workers make more money because their skillsets bring greater value to the national and global economy and thus receive higher compensation, but those professions do very little to benefit local infrastructure and institutions. Thus, metropolitan areas that attract such professions slowly decline if they cannot find a way to house lower-income people. A similar version of this problem is being faced by many other cities across the globe.
Put another way: if the working class cannot afford to live here, who are we expecting to fix the roads? If teachers cannot afford to live here, who can we expect to work in our schools?
