From Joshua Michel, Ashish Shrestha and Chris Beland
Over the past 10 years, rents in Somerville have jumped by 50 percent. If you live here, you probably don’t need that statistic to tell you what’s happened: Somerville can hold a lot more people, but we haven’t built enough homes for them, and prices have risen fast.
We saw this coming. In 2016, the city studied the housing shortage as part of the Winter Hill neighborhood plan. It found that 500 to 1,000 net new high-income households move into Somerville every year, and that the city would need 8,100 to 14,600 more homes by 2030 to house them. Without this construction, it warned, “this demand … will compete for existing housing that comes onto the market, driving up prices.”
We’ve built only about 3,500 homes. As predicted, prices rose, and so did the cost to our community: The number of households making less than $75,000 (the median income a decade ago) dropped by 7,500. The 2016 warnings were right that more people moving in without more homes being built led directly to higher prices and the displacement of low- and moderate-income residents.
This evidence suggests demand has been running at the high end of the 2016 forecast. If it continues at that pace for the next few years, Somerville would need about 14,600 new homes by 2030 – roughly 11,000 to go. And that only keeps up with arrivals seeking jobs at all the new office buildings. If we want to stop runaway rent prices, we need to make room for residents we’ve already priced out, as well as current residents doubled up with roommates or family because they can’t afford a place of their own.
The hardest part is time. A fast project takes three to four years, if it gets started at all. Research from MIT suggests even the most aggressive zoning reforms lead to redevelopment of about 10 percent of eligible parcels over a decade. We can see that play out in Union Square, where a decade into an adopted neighborhood transformation plan, only two buildings are complete.
Clearly, we’ve already missed the window to meet the 2030 estimate, and any plans we create now won’t bear fruit until about 2040. We’re tens of thousands of homes short, about a decade behind schedule and haven’t even set a housing production target. We need to be ambitious with what we plan for or we will fall short again.
We can’t just hope that other cities will pick up the slack. Every housing plan, including Brickbottom, Broadway, McGrath and especially the upcoming Davis Square Plan must include building substantially more housing in Somerville. We have created a system that keeps the cost of living too high, but we have the tools and opportunity to fix it. Either we get our city to zone for a lot more housing or we are signing up for another decade of rising prices and displacement.
The authors are members of Somerville Yimby, a group that advocates for housing (saying “Yes, In My Backyard”), and Joshua Michel is on the group’s steering committee.
