We at Somerville YIMBY talk a lot about the need to supply more homes to solve our housing shortage. But supply is only half the economic equation. We also need to ask ourselves where all this demand came from. Why have we seen such large increases in the cost of housing while similarly old and dense rust belt cities have stagnated?
Jobs. It’s plain and simple: over the last 30 or so years, Massachusetts has massively increased its workforce, especially with high paying jobs in the tech, biotech, and health sectors. And that is a good thing. It means increased income tax revenue for the state, more commercial tax revenue for cities, and more good jobs for people who live here. But it has also meant that more people want to live in the Boston area, particularly centrally located cities like Somerville.
Somerville, too, has played its role in the job creation, with the number of jobs increased by about 12,000 between 2010 to 2022 in our city. Meanwhile our population only grew about 5,200 amount for that period. That puts enormous pressure on housing here as people tend to want to live close to work.
Source: City of Somerville and American Community Survey
And we can see these changes in jobs reflected in Somerville’s demographics. The following chart comes from the city’s recent Housing Needs Assessment and clearly shows that over the last ten years Somerville has shifted towards being a city of wealthier households.
For decades, we have not built enough housing for all the new people who want to live here. At first, construction wasn't entirely necessary, because there was room: newcomers were mostly reversing the post-WW2 pattern of white flight and de-industrialization. Later, however, the slow pace of housing construction was deliberate: incumbent homeowners wanted to increase the value of their homes, and cities wanted the higher revenue that comes from commercial development. That led to many legal and procedural barriers to construction, which in turn led to increased competition and elevated prices. The result, as we all know, is that it now takes a lot of money to move and live here.
The outcome, even if well-intentioned, is profoundly unfair. As a society, we must build more dense housing - both market rate and Affordable - to stabilize our situation and provide more opportunity for everyone to live in Somerville.