Theme: Housing Affordability

Each year, the class works with a “client” focusing on a theme. This year, our partner is the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), a public planning agency whose goals are to promote regional collaboration around the following goals: sound municipal management, sustainable land use, protection of natural resources, efficient and affordable transportation, a diverse housing stock, public safety, economic development, clean energy, healthy communities, an informed public, and equity and opportunity. MAPC serves the 101 cities and towns in the Greater Boston Area.

The class and MAPC will work together on the topic of Housing Affordability in Greater Boston. As students may have noticed when they seek to rent apartments in Cambridge or the surrounding area, housing prices in the area have skyrocketed in recent decades. Greater Boston is the third most expensive housing market in the nation, for both buying and renting. The median rent in the Greater Boston area is $2,740. The average monthly rent in Cambridge is $3,614. To buy a home in Cambridge, you need nearly a million dollars. While it is recommended that households spend 30% of their monthly income on housing, more than half (51%) of Bostonians have to spend more than that just to keep themselves housed. This often means that families have to choose between paying their rent and eating, accessing medicines, purchasing school supplies or other necessities. If they cannot pay, residents may face foreclosure, eviction, and all of the physical and mental health consequences of homelessness. Older adults cannot afford to stay in their homes and close to the places where they have family and social ties to keep them healthier for longer. Many residents, particularly immigrants and BIPOC people are being gentrified and displaced out of their long-time homes. Learn about Virginia’s story.

What accounts for the high housing prices in Greater Boston? What can we, collectively, do about it?

The reasons for housing (un)affordability in Boston are straightforward: (1) there is high demand for housing, not only from people seeking residences, but from investors seeking profit, and (2) there is limited production and scarce supply of housing to meet the demand. In this class, we will undertake projects that use data visualization to address both sides of this equation.

  1. High Demand – Students will build on MAPC’s recent report, Homes for Profit: An Analysis of Investor Activity in the Greater Boston Residential Real Estate Market, 2000 - 2022, to explore questions related to speculation in the housing market. This report conclusively demonstrated the negative effects of speculative investment in real estate and its effects on driving up prices and displacing residents. Undertaking an analysis of more than twenty years of real estate transactions, students will dive deeper into these questions to analyze condo conversions, quantify how much profit investors are making from “flips”, examine large corporations buying up housing stock, and/or visualize the impacts of speculation on tenants and residents (such as evictions, foreclosures and homelessness).

  2. Low Supply – MAPC, MA Governor Maura Healey, and housing researchers all agree that the housing crisis in Greater Boston cannot only be addressed by trying to regulate speculation and lower costs. We also need to accelerate housing production – to make more homes so that we can lower overall costs and accommodate population growth. Massachusetts has been underproducing housing for decades, which, coupled with high demand for living in the state, has led to untenably high prices and suppression of household formation. This latter concept means that more people are living with roomates or parents due to the high cost of housing and this has the effect of reducing the family-sized homes that are available and affordable to families with kids. One way to jumpstart housing production is zoning reform or upzoning. Zoning is the set of municipal regulations that determines what kind of buildings can be built where. But years of racialized zoning practices have led to towns that favor large, costly, single-family residences which end up unaffordable for people with lower–and even moderate, in recent years–incomes. To produce more housing, it will be necessary to reform zoning to allow for increased housing density, smaller homes, mixed-use zoning, and inclusionary zoning for the creation of affordable housing for low- to moderate-income people. In the class, students will look at current zoning data, positive zoning changes (like the MBTA Communities Act), and examine those in relation to census data to show who is living in the communities where change is happening.

Connection to housing policy debates in MA

Students’ final projects in these two areas will be in dialogue with some of the policy conversations and debates that are very active in Metro Boston and in the State of MA. Legislators and policymakers have taken notice of the housing crisis and there are an array of proposed bills to address it. Perhaps the most notable is the Affordable Homes Act, the single largest housing investment in state history, which was proposed by Governor Maura Healey. MAPC itself has a housing legislative agenda that includes bills that advocate for tenant protections, better housing data, right to legal counsel for people facing eviction, and income tax credits for people creating affordable dwelling units on their property. In the class, we will host a number of guests to speak more about this legislation and encourage students to connect their final projects to some of these policy debates.

What is the long-term vision for housing in Greater Boston?

MAPC has outlined a vision for Homes for Everyone in Boston for the year 2050. This plan imagines a future where all residents have safe and comfortable homes that they can afford in the communities that they prefer. No one is unhoused. No renter or owner will have to pay more than 30% of their income on housing expenses. There is housing readily available to meet a variety of needs of the population, regardless of their stage of life, family size, income, or mobility barriers. They also imagine a region that is less segregated, where our communities more closely reflect the demographics of the region as a whole.

Research Subthemes for Final Projects

Students will work in groups of three on final data visualization projects related to housing affordability. Below we provide six areas of research that MAPC is particularly interested in, datasets that can help explore those questions, and background readings you will need to do about that area in order to meaningfully explore your datasets and create interesting visualizations. Your group can also choose to work on something not listed here.

  1. Exploring speculative investment (“flipped properties”) - Drawing from analyzing more than 20 years of real estate transactions with census data, final projects could explore speculative investment, practices of buying up and “flipping” homes, and the connections to housing affordability. Which communities are most affected across the area?

  2. Quantifying condo conversions – Condo conversions typically transform a multifamily residence where units are often rented into several, separate units that can be sold and owned. Final projects could explore ten years of condo conversions in Cambridge and Boston as well as their effects on affordability and tenant displacement.

  3. Housing for the Rich? - In the past two decades, there has been a lot of housing produced in Boston but developers often target buyers at the very upper end of the income spectrum. These folks often park their money in properties but don’t live there. What are the effects of this on affordable housing in Boston?

  4. Exploring corporate owners and evictions - Evictions can have devastating impacts on residents, families and communities. Prior work has shown that corporate and absentee landlords evict more tenants and have negative effects on housing stability. Does this finding hold up in Boston? Which communities end up most affected by evictions?

  5. Making a case for upzoning – One way to jumpstart housing production is zoning reform, or up-zoning – making it possible to build more types of housing in more places. Combining zoning data with tax assessor data, final projects can explore visual arguments that challenge common zoning myths (like “…we can’t build denser housing here because we want to preserve the historic character of our town”).

  6. Visualizing exclusionary zoning – Urban planners have increasingly demonstrated how the “yard and picket fence” style of US housing has negative effects on housing affordability, equity, and transportation, yet single-family zoning persists. Which communities in the Boston area have the most exclusionary zoning? Where are there opportunities for change?

Student groups may pursue a final project topic not outlined above, with the caveats that 1) it still needs to relate to housing affordability in Greater Boston and 2) you need to be a group of 3–4 people and 3) you need to get instructor approval.

Data Ethics

  • Students will need to sign an MOU to work with the residential home sales transactions data, which is a proprietary data set that may not be distributed publicly.

  • Following from MAPC’s commitments to equity, we will use an equity lens in our approach to research, data analysis and visualization. This means that we will center the needs of people who have been historically harmed by exclusionary and discriminatory housing policy in Greater Boston, as in the US more broadly. These groups include: tenants, immigrants, ethnic minorities, BIPOC people, women (especially single mothers of color and pregnant women), low- and moderate-income people, disabled people and veterans. We undertake our research in support of creating a more equitable society in which every person has a home and “every person has a shot at growing up healthy, receiving a quality education, getting a good job that ensures a good quality of life, and enjoying life into old age.”

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