One Way to Afford Housing in the Hub? Bring Back the Triple-Decker

Editor’s note: This is the second story in a series of interviews and articles Sampan is posting over the next several issues that explore the high cost of housing in Greater Boston and beyond. The first story can be found here. These stories include commentary from experts, activists and others.

Everyone who’s lived in Boston has likely seen or lived in what used to be a common type of housing here: The triple-decker. What if the city and neighboring areas started pushing for building more of these multi-family homes again?

For one, the cost of housing might stabilize.

That’s one of many takeaways from Sampan’s recent chat with housing expert Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, a research center at the Boston Foundation. Sampan spoke with Schuster earlier this spring as we began researching for our series on why housing costs are so out of reach for so many in Greater Boston — and to search for ideas on how to bring costs down to earth. Schuster’s area of expertise includes data analysis, public policy, demographic changes, housing, education, transportation, and economic development; he earned a masters in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The following interview is edited for brevity and clarity.

Sampan: I wanted to start with a question about the incomes in Massachusetts vs. the housing costs. When I look at just the Census, one thing that really stands out is that there is a high proportion of households in the state that do make pretty good money relative to the rest of the country. But then it also looks like there's a good portion of the state that does not…. It seems that with housing prices where they are, you have a large portion of the population who would really be struggling unless they can get into affordable or low-income housing….

Schuster: A meaningful portion of the population does earn pretty high incomes. The last time I looked, I think we had the highest median household income in the country. So that means, at least on the income side, many families are doing quite well. But obviously there is large inequality. Families at the lower end often struggle. You mentioned subsidized housing, which I think is important (and it can allow people to live here with much lower incomes). (But) there's a "big if" here, and a lot of families can't get it. But, especially in the city of Boston relative to other U.S. cities, there actually is a relatively large share of subsidized housing. I think roughly one in five units in Boston is subsidized one way or another. So, again, that doesn't mean there's no challenge at all, but you know that's part of how the lowest-income families, many of them, are able to stay here.

Triple-decker-style homes in Boston's Mission Hill. Photo by Adam Smith

Sampan: That’s an interesting dynamic, but I imagine a large part of our population in Boston is made up of students who might want to stay here, to get their first job here. But they have to deal with the high costs of housing. Could that high cost be driving those people away?

Schuster: A couple thoughts there. One is, a lot of the young adults who are living here are living with roommates. There's a whole host of strategies people are using to stay here. Some could be crowding into substandard housing, just paying a larger share of their income than is ideal on rent, but still being willing to do it because they want to be in the Boston area. Some of those college graduates (on the other hand, might) work in decent paying jobs and can afford the higher housing costs. So it is just a real mix.

But … we've really consistently been losing population to other states in the U.S. and that's just been more than offset by international immigration. So, if you look at the top-line population numbers, you see a somewhat steady increase in the last many years, but that’s because immigration is masking a pretty serious problem of out migration to other parts of the country.

And then when you disaggregate who's moving away, you see a lot of those are young families, between the ages of 26 and 35. And that's suggestive of people when they're starting to settle down and maybe start a family, those cost pressures get especially tough.

Sampan: …What are your thoughts on how housing is so closely tied to education quality — and spending on education…. Do you think that system is problematic and contributes to this overall housing problem … especially in the Greater Boston area? It seems like school reputation often factors in on why people will move to an area. And obviously that tends to be the areas that are more expensive, or in some cases really out of reach for a lot of people….

Schuster: I do think that's a big factor.... There are many other factors a family is considering when they're making a decision like this. And if you've got school-age kids, schools are a big one (but there are many different reasons like housing cost, jobs and transportation) so we don’t want to oversimplify this. But I do think it's a big problem that we have chopped up governance of local school districts in Massachusetts ... into such small geographic entities that they function more like club goods than public goods. You can only access that club (for example) if you move to Wellesley (or another wealthy town). That does create huge inequities. Funding is a big one.

The state's Chapter 70 formula for distributing state tax dollars to school districts does help. That does have an important partial equalizing effect on school funding, but it doesn't fully equalize school funding. But even beyond funding you have other (factors that lead to inequality such as the) kind of preparation the students enter kindergarten with, and what kind of family resources they have outside of the classroom. So ... the schools (are) a part of the puzzle and the dynamics of residential segregation in our region.

Sampan: Jumping from that to the MBTA Communities Act, the program to encourage building multifamily housing near transit stops. It sounds like there's been some development of new housing but not as significant as it could be. Could you talk a little bit about what you have found around that, and some of the resistance that you see to it in certain communities?

Schuster: Yeah. I think of that law, the MBTA Communities Act, as an important recognition from the state that we have a regional housing shortage, and that we need to do more collectively across municipalities to encourage more housing production. But that law didn't require more production, it just required some zoning changes in one neighborhood in every city and town to allow for more housing production if there was the market demand and interest to do it. So I think of it as a really important step toward trying to address some of these challenges, but a modest step in practice. The state's gonna have to just do more than just the MBTA Communities Act to more fully break down those barriers to affordable, diverse housing production in the rest of the region.

Sampan: Are we building, the right kind of housing overall, or does it tend to be we are building a lot of luxury housing or high-end housing?

Schuster: A couple of quick thoughts. One is, there's a whole host of types of housing that zoning rules have literally banned – have made illegal – to build. So, you know, crudely speaking, in a lot of Massachusetts, you're allowed to only build large single family homes on large lots. That is a constraint on the market, by saying the only thing the market can build is large single family homes. Then in the in urban areas, in some places, we allow apartment buildings to get built, but it's actually very hard in most places to build “missing middle housing.” I don't know if you've heard that term, but it's townhouses, triple-deckers, not big apartments, but not single family homes, either. And those kinds of homes are the kinds of homes that are often really useful for a starter home, for a young family as a first step into the market, into home ownership. A whole host of laws are on the books that have made that kind of housing hard or impossible to build in many parts of the state.

I think the right way to think about it is not that the market for housing is failing, but actually we don't even have a free market for housing because it's so highly regulated. A lot of the types of modest, diverse housing that people would like, is literally banned.

The other thing is “filtering.” It's been hotly discussed recently. I live in Somerville, and it's a good example of how it plays out. A lot of young professionals, many of whom have decent paying jobs, want to live here. And so if we don't build new apartments for them to live in, what they end up doing is bidding on the crappy old triple-deckers that are already built. So, there's a process of filtering. Housing economics has shown this doesn't always work perfectly smoothly, but there's pretty strong evidence that this is how the housing markets function. And so if you build even new “luxury” apartments, that does alleviate pressure on the rest of the pre-existing affordable housing stock, and it means fewer of the yuppies working in the tech sector are bidding up the prices of the old triple-deckers in a place like Somerville. So the luxury apartments can feel, you know, gross to people, because it's not the type of housing you want. But even there, I think it does alleviate pressure on regular people too...There are still issues... It's not like “pure market utopia” always happens. But I think some of the discourse misses even how luxury housing is connected to middle-income housing.