TRYING TO NAIL DOWN how Boston fits into plans to tackle the statewide housing crunch has been a bit of a mystery for the past three years. While there is movement to update the capital city’s housing goals, landing on a top-line number is not a priority for the Wu administration.
In a Monday briefing with reporters on changes to the Boston Planning and Development Agency, Mayor Michelle Wu and planning chief Arthur Jemison were leery about offering long-term production goals even as they referred to policies that would drive “a very large number” of units year over year. The reluctance to set a specific goal marks a sharp departure from her two predecessors, who regularly paraded out ambitious housing targets.
“I don’t want to get caught up in a number,” Wu said. She and Jemison worried that committing to a high-level production goal might encourage approving or pushing for projects just to edge ever closer to the promised goal.
One might say “we’re going to do something even though it’s not consistent with the zoning or expectations. It’s going to get us an extra 150 units against the number,” Jemison said.
For decades, Boston mayors publicly set high-level housing production numbers to give a sense of expected population growth and the city’s plan for development. The projections evolved over the years as the housing climate changed.
Mayor Tom Menino built on his early 2000s “Leading the Way” housing initiative – committing to tens of thousands of permitted units and preserved units – with a 2013 “Housing Boston” plan that called for 30,000 units of new housing by 2020. His successor, Marty Walsh, continued the projections alongside the citywide Imagine Boston 2030 plan, with the inaugural “Housing A Changing City” report in 2014 calling for 53,000 new units of housing by 2030. That number was raised to 69,000 in 2018.
Boston had exceeded its earlier production goal, the Walsh administration said at the time, but population growth was booming ahead of their expectations.
Yearly updates to the housing goals stopped after 2020, with the final report, concluded under acting Mayor Kim Janey, focusing mainly on the impacts of Covid-19 on housing stock needs and forceful pushes for racial justice as a reminder that preserving equity is a core goal in housing policy.
Three years later, Jemison said the city’s Office of Housing is working toward an update, but they want to make sure that it considers more than just the overall unit count. “So I think we’re trying to come up with the right approach to it,” he said.
Prior housing goals always considered the array of housing stock available and needed, breaking down the top-line number into subgoals for affordable units, senior housing, student dormitories, off-campus residences, and Boston Housing Authority-controlled public housing units, among other categories.
“As I have experienced the housing goal, having a number that is 10 to 15 years out, I mean, my question is, in the day to day, how much does this shape what we are doing, how we’re interacting with stakeholders and those who are proposing these projects, how we’re interacting with residents,” Wu said. “And if that number being 47,000 or 52,000 doesn’t end up changing the work that we’re doing to improve zoning and streamlining this method, [officials could end up] focusing on that number rather than the component pieces to be able to unlock creating as much housing as possible, as quickly as possible.”
The Healey administration, in announcing its $4.1 billion housing bond bill, has indicated that it is working on a plan that would include statewide housing goals. Facing a 200,000-unit shortfall to keep up with population growth and housing costs by 2030, the new bond bill would support production of 40,000 homes and preserve and maintain more than 27,000 existing units.
Movement on a Boston plan is coming in the very near future, sources say, but its scale remains a mystery. Wu said her focus is on year-over-year progress, and Boston is one piece of a regional puzzle. Boston is part of the 15-municipality Metro Mayors Coalition, which pledged in 2015 to create 185,000 new housing units by 2030 but is short almost half of the units it expected to have by 2022.
Wu made reference to “internal projections,” which were not elaborated on. A new “Squares and Streets” planning and zoning initiative could produce anywhere from tens of thousands of units to over 100,000 units in the limited main streets areas, Wu said.
When asked by reporters about the housing projections offering a sense of predictability or accountability when considering the looming housing shortfall – which the administration touted during the briefing as key priorities – Wu said her goal is “a much more meaningful, immediate metric than a sort of a 10 to 15 year goal that in the past, as Boston has experienced, ends up getting revised every other year anyway.”