Housing is one of the biggest challenges facing Boston’s next mayor
“Whoever comes after him has to be a mayor of quality, of bridging the gap between what we build and the people who live in this city."
For the last six years, anyone who wanted to build housing in Boston knew they had a friend in the corner office at City Hall.
But with Mayor Martin J. Walsh bound for Washington, D.C., to become US labor secretary, developers and advocates are wondering how his successor will tackle one of Boston’s thorniest challenges: the steep cost of housing.
Since taking office in 2014, Walsh has consistently made the city’s affordability crisis a priority. He set ambitious goals — such as adding 69,000 units of housing by 2030 — and helped foster the biggest building boom the city has experienced in decades.
The idea was to drive down rents ― among the highest in the United States ― by increasing supply.
At the same time, Walsh leaned on developers to help fund more housing for the city’s poorest residents and launched an array of programs to create and preserve apartments they could better afford.
It’s a strategy that has led to nearly 36,000 apartments and condominiums being permitted, more than 7,000 of them set at rents affordable to lower- and middle-income residents. That has increased Boston’s housing stock by about 13 percent in a decade. They’re big numbers, but not enough to help preserve the city’s vanishing middle class, advocates say, or to provide opportunities for young and first-time home buyers to put down roots.
That should be a major concern for whoever leads Boston next, said City Councilor Lydia Edwards, a former Walsh administration housing staffer who has become one of the council’s leading voices on the issue.
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