In greater Boston, the rent is too damn high, and it’s only heading higher.
The Globe splashes today with news that rents in and around Boston have hit another record high. Rents in the city have jumped 7 percent over the past year, to an average of $1,881. Inside I-495, rents are averaging just under $1,800. Apartment vacancies, long among the country’s lowest, are now hovering around 3 percent. And when too much demand meets too little supply, prices jump. That was the case a few years ago, when rents were rising in the face of a steep recession, and it’s even more true now, as the state’s technology, biotech, health, and education employers have the Massachusetts economy outperforming much of the rest of the nation.
The Globe pins the rental housing crunch on a dearth of recent new construction, and notes that Boston officials have 7,000 housing units in the city’s development pipeline. The problem is that the recent spike in rents is the result of long-standing structural problems in the state’s housing market, and a construction boom in one city isn’t enough to straighten things out.
Last fall, CommonWealth examined the state’s affordable housing crisis, which has grown worse, even as housing prices decline. In Massachusetts, homeowners and renters face steeper affordability challenges than the average American worker, because housing prices and rents here have grown far more quickly than wages. Housing prices and rents have exploded because supply can’t keep up with demand. As UMass Dartmouth professor Michael Goodman told CommonWealth, “You’d expect, in a normal market, where there’s demand for housing, we’d build housing, and when there wasn’t demand, we wouldn’t. That’s not the case here.”
Massachusetts doesn’t just come short of building enough housing to meet demand; when the state does build, it hasn’t built the right type of housing. Zoning in many municipalities favors the construction of large-lot single-family homes, while making it difficult to construct dense multi-family dwellings. These restrictions blunt the effects of upswings in construction, while exacerbating the lulls. US Census Bureau data show that, in each of the past two decades, housing construction in Massachusetts lagged the pace the state achieved in the 1980s by at least 35 percent. The state also produced far fewer multi-family developments, which tend to be rentals, than it did during the 1980s. Massachusetts renters aren’t just up against a brief, recession-induced break in apartment construction; they’re fighting a two-decade-long supply slump. So get used to seeing the state set new record highs in rental rates. These stories are going to be around for a while.
–PAUL MCMORROW
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
The city of Pittsfield will celebrate its downtown cultural district designation by the Massachusetts Cultural Council today, reports the Berkshire Eagle.
Only Suffolk Downs and a company vying for a slot parlor license in Plainville have made the non-refundable $400,000 deposit required to apply for a casino license, the Springfield Republican reports. Palmer residents await a move from Mohegan Sun, which has expressed interest in the Western Massachusetts license.
Syringes are found along the shoreline in Swampscott, the Lynn Daily Item reports.
ELECTION 2012
The three Republican candidates to replace Barney Frank — Elizabeth Childs, David Steinof, and Sean Bielat — made their pitches separately to editors and reporters at GateHouse New England’s Wicked Local headquarters in Needham.
Keller@Large says President Obama needs to use the Paul Ryan pick to motivate the estimated 80 million registered voters not planning on going to the polls because if they did, surveys show they’d break for the incumbent big-time.
Ryan’s budget plan is built a series of “rosy assumptions,” reports the Globe. Ryan’s spot on the ticket puts Medicare in the spotlight. The Atlantic focuses on how the poor would fare under Ryan’s fiscal blueprint. New York magazine recalls that Ryan helped talk House Speaker John Boehner out of a grand budget compromise last year. Paul Krugman interrupts his vacation to hurl rounds of invectives against the GOP VP candidate: “He is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.” Ryan and Obama jab at each other in Iowa.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page calls the Brookings Institution “the intellectual frontmen for President Obama’s re-election campaign,” and argues that Mitt Romney’s tax plan is mathematically possible if Romney starts taxing municipal bonds.
US Sen. Scott Brown tiptoes around the Ryan pick, while Democrats eagerly try to join the two Republicans at the hip. Brown will deliver a tax policy speech today in Randolph.
The former campaign manager for state Rep. Daniel Webster, a Pembroke Republican who has had legal and financial problems in the past year, is launching a write-in candidacy for the primary to unseat her embattled former boss.
The Hampden DA is investigating allegations of vote fraud involving a Republican candidate for state rep in East Longmeadow.
Five local mayors in Massachusetts’s Sixth Congressional District endorse John Tierney for Congress, and try to align Republican challenger Richard Tisei with Paul Ryan’s sweeping budget plan.
A Democratic challenger to Rep. Richard Neal was caught plagiarizing material that appeared on his website from other Democrats.
FISHING
A former New Bedford scalloper who was forced out of the business and had to sell all his possessions including a house his family owned for generations is suing federal officials for malicious prosecution.
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
State Street Corp. says it won’t seek any state tax breaks for the new complex it is building on the South Boston waterfront. The company already secured $11.5 million property tax break from the city.
The New York Times digs into the foreign bribery investigation surrounding Sheldon Adelson’s casino company. The man at the center of the investigation tells the Times that Adelson “should thank me.”
EDUCATION
A state-appointed advisor picked to observe the Fall River School Committee and critique its performance over the last three months gave the board a mixed report card in his final report.
Harvard and MIT have joined a dozen other elite higher education institutions in filing briefs with the Supreme Court in support of the University of Texas practice of considering race in admissions decisions.
HEALTH CARE
Laboure College, the small nursing school at Steward Health Care-owned Carney Hospital in Dorchester, has purchased a campus in Milton and is planning to relocate there by next spring after renovations are completed.
TRANSPORTATION
US Rep. William Keating is calling for a congressional investigation into charges that Logan Airport screeners are engaging in racial profiling to look for potential terror suspects.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Court officers had to break up a brawl last Friday in the hallways of Brockton District Court following the arraignment of Dominic Tassy, who is facing murder charges in the shooting death of Brockton resident Lonnie Robinson.
MEDIA
Victim advocate, lawyer, and columnist Wendy Murphy gets her half-hour in the spotlight on Greater Boston’s “1 Guest.”
The Boston Globe, the Nieman Lab, and CommonWealth report on the launch of RadioBDC, Boston.com’s online radio station.
PASSINGS
Red Sox icon Johnny Pesky is dead at 92.