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McMorrow sees acute shortage in rental housing
Commonwealth Magazine Associate Editor Paul McMorrow reads the recent census data and sees evidence of an acute shortage of rental housing in Greater Boston. McMorrow wrote in a Nov. 22 Boston Globe op-ed piece:
A decade ago, 40 percent of Suffolk County residents were sinking more than 30 percent of their incomes into rent, a threshold that federal policymakers consider to be unaffordable. Now, half of the county’s renters are paying unaffordable rents. A quarter of Suffolk County residents are devoting more than half their income to paying rent - a number that’s risen significantly over the past decade.
McMorrow sees the same phenomenon at work in Middlesex County, where housing producton has fallen off dramatically or has been limited to single-family homes.
In Middlesex County, roughly half of the new housing built over the past decade were single-family units. And development in key transit-rich cities has ground to a halt. Between 2008 and 2010, housing construction in Cambridge fell off its mid-decade pace by 92 percent; it fell by 87 percent in Medford, and 97 percent in Malden.