Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s bold plans for affordable housing run into old-school politics, perverse regulations, and limited home rule. By Gabrielle Gurley
The downtown skyline view from LoPresti Park on the East Boston waterfront is worth lingering over despite a chilly, brisk wind. On a Tuesday midafternoon, a bundledup person and a dog stroll around the new blocks of orange, white, and taupe condos, the soccer field, basketball and tennis courts. A few blocks away, mostly young commuters stream out of the MBTA Blue Line subway station to the buses upstairs in Maverick Square. Big banks share the square with check-cashing places, small restaurants, and the mandatory Dunkin’ Donuts outpost in this Latino neighborhood with deep Italian roots. Across the street from the police station is a vibrant mural: “You will always be welcome in the City of Boston/Siempre serán bienvenidos en la Cuidad de Boston/Saranno sempre benvenuti nella Città di Boston.” 32 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022
If you can afford it. In 2015, a modest three-bedroom rowhouse on a corner in “Eastie” sold for $250,000. In March, it listed for $980,000. Lower-end waterfront condos go for a million-plus. Last year, the median rent for an Eastie one-bedroom apartment was $2,100. In April, the median rent for the city approached $3,000 for a one-bedroom, catapulting “the Hub” into New York/San Francisco unaffordability territory. Joni DeMarzo sees luxury condos and thinks “social cleansing.” The third generation of her Italian/Austrian immigrant family to reside in the neighborhood, DeMarzo, who works as a nanny, lives with her mother in a “no-man’s-land,” as her sister calls it, near Logan International Airport. She founded Stand Up for Eastie, a local housing advocacy group, two years ago after tussles with developers building next to her home.
Most of her relatives still live in East Boston, but the friends she grew up with are long gone. Developers “are not building homes, they’re building investors’ dreams,” she says. “Is there ever going to be a single-family house built ever again in East Boston or is it just units, units, units?” In Boston’s current housing crisis, a fortunate few snatch up the available luxury units, while nearly everyone else gets dropkicked into the exurbs. Tens of thousands of people have left the metro area over the past decade, many of them working- and middle-class renters and homeowners. This situation is not unique to Boston. Longtime residents get forced out of attractive, popular cities everywhere, and modestly paid people look elsewhere. But the national housing affordability crisis affects this city’s residents in a uniquely Boston way.
PHILIP BURKE
City Limits T
