Four years ago, as Covid tore across the globe and people retreated to their homes with the computer as a window to the outside, then-City Councilor Michelle Wu looked into a Zoom screen and diagnosed Boston’s housing woes.
“I think it’s the fact that we are really operating the most complex, opaque political development approvals process anywhere in the country,” she said during a mayoral candidate conversation in August 2021. It’s designed so that “the only way to build anything is to come before city government and offer something,” she said.
On one level, the city is able to “extract something from every single project,” because of the case-by-case review, she said. “But we get locked into this awful status quo where we are spending so much time, energy, and financial resources on navigating the process instead of just creating the actual units that we need desperately.”
Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston was in a pandemic price valley as she spoke – about $2,000 a month – bottoming out after rising rents hit $2,200 just before the shutdowns began in March 2020.
Now Mayor Wu is skating to a second term, in a city feeling one of the most pronounced housing crunches in the country, where the average one-bedroom rental will run a person $2,700 a month. The city’s real-time vacancy rate of about 1.5 percent is lower than the broader metro area, which is itself at just under 1.8 percent, when a healthy rate is closer to 5 to 8 percent. Permitting and housing starts are down, with interest rates chilling the market.
Residents have been feeling the squeeze. Three-quarters of Boston residents say the city government is doing only a fair or poor job making Boston more affordable, according to a survey for the pro-housing group Abundant Housing Massachusetts that polled 550 Boston residents in August. Some 43 percent rated efforts as poor, compared to just 17 percent who said the city was doing a good job.
But housing and planning organizations largely offered a gentle assessment of the mayor’s housing record. Wu is set to enter her second term and criticism seems muted following her 49-point thrashing of Josh Kraft in the September preliminary, which chased him from the race.
More Context
- A first look at Wu’s housing production goal (December 2023)
- ‘It was too effing complicated:’ A pro-housing reckoning over MBTA Communities law (September 2025)
- Yes, building more housing does lower rents, study says (December 2023)
Published by MassINC