Why Cambridge (and the Boston area) need to build vastly more housing
There are many ways to think about the problems of housing, and one model I like is thinking of housing through the lens of social provisioning: how do we ensure this critical human necessity is available to everyone? We can break it down into two parts:
- How do ensure we physically have enough housing units, of the right kind, in the right locations? This can range from one extreme where the government builds everything itself, to the other extreme of corporations building everything with no regulations whatsoever, with a large amount of variations in the real world.
- How do we distribute these housing units once they exist? This can range from the government determining where people live, to a market where everyone has to pay for housing, again with a vast number of variations in practice.
For our purposes the interesting point is that these are two separate problems, with two separate failure modes:
- Not enough physical housing to go around; if there are a million people and only 100,000 2-bedroom apartments, that's a problem.
- Even if there are sufficient physical units, it might be impossible for people to get access to the housing they need, for example because housing is only available as a market commodity, and it costs too much.
Focusing just on that first failure mode, we can ask: do we have enough housing units in the Boston area?
My working theory: we need vastly more housing in Massachusetts
My argument is that we are going to see vastly more demand, making our current housing stock insufficient.
Short-term: Politics
In large parts of the US, women are having their health care access destroyed by abortion bans. For example, maternal deaths in Texas jumped 56% from 2019 to 2022, compared to 11% increase in the rest of the country. This is only going to get worse. Massachusetts doesn't have this problem, at least for now.
Looking forward, the Republican majority in Congress may try to get rid of the Affordable Care Act; they have raised the idea of allowing insurance companies to screen people based on prior conditions. If this happens, even more people won't be afford to access healthcare... except in Massachusetts, which passed an equivalent law a few years before the ACA. Other states will likely follow in MA's footsteps, but it will take time.
If you're trans, MA isn't going to make your existence illegal, and you'll probably still get access to the healthcare you need. If you want to marry your same-sex partner, you're not dependent on the continuing good will of the Supreme Court, you'll still be able to get married.
Then there's the proposed crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which will likely end up impacting many legal immigrants as well. There are many people who will want to live somewhere where they know the local government doesn't automatically consider immigrants to be criminals.
Medium-term: Climate change
Boston is a coastal city, so sea rise is a concern, but we're still much better placed than many parts of the country. It's worth looking at this map of climate impacts on the US, and the various risk scenarios: deadly heat, fire, economic damage... we're going to do a lot better than average. Many of the people living elsewhere in the US are going to have some very strong motivations to move someplace better, like here.
And keep in mind this is just within the US; the pressures of climate change are being felt that much harder in poorer countries. Unless significant levels of funding are provided by richer countries to mitigate these harms, we will see relentless environmental disasters pushing hundreds of millions of people to emigrate elsewhere.
How should we respond?
Faced with a massive wave of people who will be motivated to move here, what should we do?
We can say "fuck you, got mine!" and do nothing. Or at least, those of us lucky enough to own housing can afford to say that.
Or, we can decide that we need to allocate any new housing to low-income people who already live here, and that people from elsewhere aren't our problem. This is a somewhat better response, but as the grandchild of refugees I feel this is still nowhere near sufficient.
Or, we can agree that if housing is a human right, that means that limiting our housing to people who happen to live here right now isn't sufficient. Instead, we need to build more housing; certainly sufficient housing for anyone currently living here, insofar as the number of units is the bottleneck, but also:
- For at least some of the people who now or in the near future will need to move someplace better.
- For all the people who are leaving Cambridge, or the Boston area more generally, because it's too expensive.
This requires building societal capacity, from individuals to organizations to government. We need to:
- Train more people with relevant skills.
- Figure out how to build larger buildings, faster, at lower cost.
- Learn new technologies that can make construction cheaper.
- Create organizations capable of building at a large scale.
- Build the transportation infrastructure to get new residents around.
- And so on.
We can't do this in a year, but we do need to learn by doing so we can accelerate in the future. Which means we have to start building now. And we obviously won't do it all in one small city or one metropolitan area or one state, but we have to start somewhere, so why not here?
We also need to remember that second failure mode of provisioning of housing: making sure everyone has access to this housing. If we build housing that only rich people can afford, we still haven't succeeded. And here Cambridge is a pretty good place to start: while more can be done, it's already the case that new buildings with 10 or more units are required to have 20% of floor space be affordable units, which means more significant construction creates more affordable units.
But if we need to build more, who should be paying for all this, and who should be implementing all this? The City, the state, the Federal government, non-profits, private companies? I'll share my best guess in the next email.
A bit more
- Take action! A Better Cambridge has a Multifamily Housing Social on December 3rd, to discuss why we need to end exclusionary zoning and how you can help. If you're interested but can't make it, they also list other ways you can help support legalizing multi-family housing.
- Today's song: La Femme Fatal, Digable Planets (1993)