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Report: Average rent in Boston surpasses $3,000
Tell us: Is renting in Boston becoming too expensive for you?
Laura Frost is part of one-third of the residents in her building facing rent increases between 30% and 50% — increases they cannot afford.
Frost is also the leader of the Torrington Tenants Association, which negotiates with the property development and management firm Torrington Properties. Torrington Properties bought the property where Frost lives — 840 & 846 Massachusetts Ave. — in 2019.
In another life, Frost said, she might use her role as tenant association leader to organize meet-and-greet picnics. Instead, she teaches tenants their rights to avoid being priced out of their homes.
In Boston, the average apartment rent recently surpassed $3,000 for the first time, according to the real estate portal Boston Pads. This contradicts the projected dip in new-lease rents in 48 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week. It also makes living in Boston inaccessible for many renters.
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Frost estimated that half of the tenants in her building are new, and the others are “legacy tenants,” people who have lived there for years — in some cases, for decades — before Torrington bought the property.
Since 2019, residents of the 60-unit building have been tenants-at-will, renting with the possibility of short-notice eviction. Now they’re faced with rent hikes — and left with nowhere to go.
“If we had realized what [Torrington] was going to do to us, we would have started looking for alternate housing four years ago when things weren’t so bad,” Frost said. “We didn’t want to move, but we would have had the option to go someplace else.”
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While Frost and her fellow legacy tenants have faced rent increases before, she said, they came from landlords who “wanted them to stay.” The Torrington model, on the other hand, aims to push them out, she said.
Scott Tranchemontagne, a spokesperson for Torrington, said increased costs are not intended to create tenant turnover, but rather to offset the operational costs of the 61-unit complex.
In the four years since Torrington bought the property, Tranchemontagne said, the organization has invested more than $2,000,000 in upgrades without raising rent.
“This is not one of those situations where they’re trying to jack up rents to force people out,” he said. “They simply need to bring rents up to a reasonable level … It’s still well below market rent.”
Tenant displacement
Katie McCann, a rent organizer at City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots housing justice organization, said no-fault eviction notices and “profit-driven rent increases” are two catalysts for “turnover-focused tenant displacement.”
“Very large rent increases — sometimes as high as 900 or $1,000 — are obviously given with the intention of displacing current residents so that [building owners] can bring in wealthier residents who can pay much higher rents,” McCann said.
Rent control and stabilization would make rent hikes like these impossible, keeping tenants from being evicted on short notice or for profit, McCann added.
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Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, said high rents are due to a triple-whammy of low supply, low turnover, and high costs for landlords.
A lack of suburban housing means people who might be financially ready to buy a home in the suburbs of another city can’t afford to around Boston, Salpoglou said. These people stay in the city as tenants with bigger pockets than their counterparts.
It’s a tale as old as time: When rent goes up, some tenants are priced out. But in Boston, it’s happening on a larger scale, McCann said.
When asked where her neighbors go when they move out of her building, Frost said, “Nobody knows.”
“Where can you go?” she said. “We can’t live in Massachusetts with things the way they are.”
Is rent control a solution?
Salpoglou believes the root of the problem is a lack of housing supply.
“We’re not producing enough new housing to meet demand or population growth,” Salpoglou said. “Less moving out creates less supply as well as less turnover, and prices tend to go up.”
But Frost and McCann disagree. McCann said there is available housing — luxury housing — that stays vacant because the renters who are being forced out of their homes can’t afford it. It’s not the lack of supply, she said, but the lack of affordable supply.
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While they agreed that increasing affordable housing in and around Boston will help alleviate this crisis, both Frost and McCann advocated for rent control as part of the solution because it prevents displacement in the first place.
“Rent control and stabilization is the most urgently-needed tool because it keeps renters in their home right now,” McCann said.
Why Boston is an outlier
So, why doesn’t the Boston rental market follow national trends?
Because Boston is a “desirable place to live” with a “diverse, vibrant, and healthy economy,” Salpoglou said, so it’s more insulated from national trends
For example, he said, when medical workers and big tech employees in Boston are laid off, there’s a rich job market for them to find new work without moving away. This isn’t the case in other cities with smaller job markets, like Phoenix or Miami, Salpoglou explained.
Salpoglou also said he hasn’t seen many lease breaks or sublet requests — indicators of a “changing economy” — on Boston Pads. This leads him to believe that, contrary to national trends, renting in Boston will remain tough on tenants.
“The only thing that could stop [a tight rental market] would be another pandemic or an earthquake or something,” he said. “Nothing will shatter the Boston rental market.”
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