Subtheme: 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. Many ultra-rich buyers are absentee owners, i.e. people who buy a property just as an investment vehicle and don’t live there. This can have the effect of driving up prices while taking housing supply off the market. One area worthy of investigation is the increase in housing production for extremely wealthy, absentee owners. What proportion of Boston’s newest and most expensive high-rises are owned by corporations? By absentee owners? What are the connections between high income and absentee-ism? What proportion of the city is owned by people who don’t live here? Just how unaffordable are these developments for average Bostonians?

Background Reading

  1. Reckoning with Boston’s Towers of Wealth – An investigative journalism story by the Boston Globe about how Boston is building luxury housing for the wealthy at the expense of affordable housing.
  2. Homes for Profit: An Analysis of Investor Activity in the Greater Boston Residential Real Estate Market, 2000 - 2022 – An important report by our partner, MAPC, about the negative impacts of speculation on housing affordability. Uses the residential sales dataset listed below.

Datasets for the Final Project

  1. Residential sales data in Metro Boston, 2000-2023 – All residential sales transactions in Metro Boston between 2000-2023. Includes information about seller, buyer, price, location, whether the sale constitutes a “flip”, and much more.
    1. This is a large dataset! You might want to filter this to just look at City of Boston
    2. You could also filter at the high end of the sales transactions and look into specific hi-rises and luxury housing. Consider combining this data with the property assessment data below.
    3. You could aggregate this dataset to Boston neighborhoods and then compare with dataset #2 listed here.
  2. Corporate ownership rates and owner occupancy rates in Boston neighborhoods, 2004-2024 – Rates of corporate ownership and owner occupancy by neighborhood in the City of Boston over 20 years. With this data, you can see which neighborhoods might be experiencing more corporations buying up properties and/or more absentee owners also buying up properties.
  3. Metro Boston property assessment data, 2024 – If you want to look into specific hi-rises and luxury housing (such as the Towers of Wealth in the above link), this is the place to start. This is a large dataset so you will probably want to filter it down to properties greater than some threshold.
  4. Geographic data for making maps

Other Creative Data Ideas

  1. Google Street View Data – Google Street View might be an interesting source of photographic data for pre- and post-luxury housing developments.
  2. Real estate listings – E.g. Zillow, Redfin. Also possibly a good source of photographic information about specific properties, including interior shots. Make sure you use these with credit to the source.
  1. Affordable Homes Act – See specifically the provision about levying a transfer fee on large sales which would help deter speculation and “flipping” - short-term sales. See also the proposed Homeowner Production Tax Credit which would incentivize production of housing for low and moderate income people.
  2. Local Option Transfer Fees - Similar to #1. Bills proposed in the Massachusetts House and Senate would allow towns to impose transfer fees (0.5% - 2% of the sale price) on large real estate sales as a way to deter flipping and to generate revenue for affordable housing.