It’s early going, but a new report released by Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh Wednesday shows that so far, the city is so far on track to hit ambitious goals he set to build more affordable housing in the city.
Between January 2011 and March of this year, the city issued permits for more than 13,000 new apartments, condos and homes, according to the report, surpassing the goal of 10,200 Walsh had set for that period.
But much of that new housing — 60 percent — has been condos and apartments are out of reach for most middle-income households, roughly those with incomes below $100,000. And only 1,538 of the units permitted since 2011 were affordable for low-income households, a total that nonetheless exceeded the city’s modest goal of building 1,256 such units during this period.
“The housing plan is a response to a lot of the high-end housing being built in the Seaport and Downtown Crossing and other areas,” Walsh said at a briefing with reporters. “For [it] being so early, the numbers are good. We have a ways to go to do better, but I think we’re doing okay where we are.”
The report is the first in what officials say will be a series of quarterly updates on Walsh’s efforts to get 53,000 residential units built across Boston by 2030. That goal and a number of other benchmarks are spelled out in a comprehensive plan to grow the city’s housing stock released by the Walsh administration last October in response to skyrocketing rents and a growing population.
Since 2011, developers received permits to construct more than 1,000 units of housing reserved for Bostonians with middle-class incomes, exceeding the target of 850 since 2011.
“We’re starting to see less permits pulled for very high end units and starting to see developers pull permits for more moderately priced housing,” said Sheila Dillon, director of the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development.
However, the city fell 20 percent short of its goal to permit 3,400 units of market-rate housing that middle-class residents can afford.
One hope of the 2030 housing plan is to move more college students into campus dormitories and out of residential neighborhoods, where some live in unsafe or overcrowded apartments — and sometimes clash with neighbors. Decreasing the number of students living off-campus would free up those apartments for working families, officials said.
The initial data suggest this may be a significant challenge: Planners had hoped the city would have authorized 3,400 new undergraduate beds between 2011 and this March; only 1,983 beds were actually permitted.
However, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, or BRA, recently approved a 540-bed dorm at Boston College that was not counted towards the total. And officials said they are currently in “deep conversations” with two colleges that would share a single new dormitory, potentially demonstrating a new model for student housing in Boston. .
“We do have this potential marriage of a smaller college or university... and one of the bigger universities that desperately needs beds,” said Brian Golden, the director of the BRA, who declined the name the universities because negotiations are still ongoing. “It’s a win-win for both universities and especially for the neighborhood that will see undergrads pulled out of the housing stock.”
Walsh said the city was also open to universities partnering with private developers to build dorms.
Future housing reports will only look at one quarter of data at a time, but the initial report released Wednesday also analyzed housing numbers stretching back to January 2011, the benchmark for the Boston 2030 goals.
