The Dorchester Reporter sums up a recent Metropolitan Area Planning Council report that found that 21% of the home sales in the Boston area between 2004 and 2018 were to investors - but that that figure rose to 31% in parts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.
The complete report and a map: Homes for Profit: Speculation and Investment in Greater Boston.
The City Council will take a look at how to keep moderate-income families in Boston. Read more.
Bloomberg reports Boston-area rents dropped 0.2% from September to October, which, when coupled with an even smaller decrease in New York rents, was apparently enough to cause an unexpected bit of a slowdown in national inflation numbers.
Councilors Lydia Edwards (East Boston, Charlestown, North End) and Kim Janey (Roxbury) say the city's current affordable-housing efforts are not enough to stop the Manhattanization of Boston. Read more.
Jamaica Plain News reports the one-floor unit was listed at $1.15 million - and that the city assessed the entire building for about $972,000 this year.
Greg Cook reports on educator and video star Tory Bullock and the Gentrification Game installation he set up for today and tomorrow between 4 and 7 p.m. at Dudley Neighbors, 572 Columbia Road:
One neighborhood is home to a liquor store while the other has a wine emporium. One side has a check cashing business and a torn-down theater, while the other has “an actual bank” and a pristine theater. Bullock asks, “Can you survive in my fictional transitional neighborhood?”
The 15 mayors who make up the Metro Mayors Coalition pledged yesterday to building 185,000 new housing units by the year 2030 as the Boston area continues to grow. Read more.
Mayor Walsh announced this morning Boston is upping its 2030 housing goals by 30% - from 53,000 new housing units by then to 69,000, based on new projections that show the city's population growing to nearly 760,000 by then.
The City Council today approved holding a hearing to figure out ways to keep longtime Roxbury residents from being forced out of their homes as developers increasingly snap up local parcels. Read more.
Mayor Walsh today announced a new proposal for dealing with short-term rentals that would by default bar investors from buying up units or even entire buildings and offering rentals on Airbnb and similar sites. Read more.
Allston and Brighton residents who say their neighborhoods are being overrun with overpriced investor-owned housing units are organizing to fight for an increase in the number of affordable units developers have to include in their projects and to figure out how to increase the number of condos whose owners actually live in them. Read more.
City Councilor Matt O'Malley (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury) has had enough of storefronts and apartments that go empty - sometimes for years - in even the swankiest of neighborhoods and wants to begin looking at ways to prod landlords to rent the spaces out that could include "vacancy fees." Read more.
The BPDA board yesterday approved a test to make it easier for homeowners to add a single apartment in three neighborhoods - in a program that will include zero-percent city loans of up to $30,000 for any required modifications. Read more.
The City Council yesterday approved a measure that would require landlords of larger buildings to have a specific reason to evict tenants - and to notify the city, so it could alert tenants to their rights, WBUR reports.
An annual housing report card by the Boston Foundation and the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University highlights the dark clouds over the region's economic boom: Poverty rates are growing as the cost of living increases due to housing prices - yet the region is failing to keep up with growing demand for housing, at least for people below the highest income brackets. Read more.
David Bates provides a snapshot of our accelerating luxury condo market: More and more new condos are geared at the upper crust, prices of existing units are skyrocketing and Millennium Tower alone could represent $1 billion in luxury condo sales.
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