Build it and they will come — but will they have a good place to buy their groceries?

Boston faces the livability conundrum of building up neighborhoods.

According to experts, a neighborhood needs a diverse infrastructure to thrive. Adobe, Ally Rzesa/Globe Staff

April 9, 2026 | 7:00 AM

6 minutes to read

It’s the chicken-or-egg conundrum when it comes to livability: What comes first? The luxury condos or the full-service grocery store?

“What comes first? Jobs, people, amenities is the standard sequence,“ said Gary Menger, president and founder of Applied Geographic Solutions. ”The amenities are always the last to show up because investment in restaurants, retail, and even parks and recreation doesn’t happen until the people arrive — with cash in hand.”

While Boston leaders grapple with a housing affordability (and supply) crisis, not all of New England — or Massachusetts — is being seen as unlivable or unattainable. Lowell topped the list of Massachusetts municipalities on Livability Media’s Top 100 Best Places to Live (which looked at cities with a median home value under $500,000) in November. Cities like Worcester and Providence have boosted their respective livability profiles in recent years as homeownership in Boston proper becomes increasingly out of reach for many.

It is easy to see why buyers are looking there: The median home price in Lowell hovers around $495,000, below the statewide median of $597,700 and well under the $806,000 in Boston, per Redfin data.

A clothing store in downtown Lowell displays its colorful goods outside on a sunny day. – David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

So, what’s a city like Boston to do to become more livable?

“You’re not just buying a house, you’re buying a neighborhood,” said Kira Greene, a founding agent of Compass in Rhode Island who has spent the last decade working with Boston-area buyers priced out of the city. “That resonates with every buyer I’ve worked with from Boston.”

The increasing problem is what kind of neighborhood Boston’s development pipeline is actually delivering. New luxury towers have risen across the Seaport and other development corridors, promising to revitalize underutilized land and inject new life into the city’s housing stock. But it’s not hard to find a consistent take from those walking these gleaming new streets: Something feels missing — be it a longtime neighborhood pub or that elusive full-service grocery store (Though they try to fill the void).

Some argue it’s an ecosystem problem.

“You end up getting this barbell of housing typologies,” said Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators and one of the coauthors of the Greater Boston Housing Report Card. “It’s either pretty expensive single-family homes or larger new apartment buildings.”

The result, he said, is “this big doughnut of middle-class family housing that’s not getting built.”

Cottonwood Group stepped in to save Boston’s St. Regis Residences from financial distress. The Los Angeles-based real estate private equity firm developed the EchelonSeaport condo complex across Seaport Boulevard from the St. Regis. – David L. Ryan/ Globe Staff

That missing middle is the kind of neighborhood most Boston homebuyers seek. But everyday amenities — the independent coffee shop, the hardware store, the casual neighborhood restaurant — require a diverse and steady customer base to survive.

They also require a local workforce. Build a neighborhood where only high earners can afford to live, and you’ve priced out some of the very people needed to staff and sustain the places that make a neighborhood worth living there.

The housing supply debate is, of course, more nuanced than a single narrative.

“Housing diversity plays a role in being able to attract and retain people who fill all kinds of jobs. That said, there are places where luxury apartments keep going up and filling up, too. And in many places, renting one of those may be more cost-effective than buying in that area,” said Livability editor-in-chief Amanda Ellis.

Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research, notes that more supply of any kind generally puts downward pressure on prices.

“The domino effect [absolutely happens],” Zhao said. “If you put more supply into the mix, prices come down for everyone.”

The evidence is visible in the Sun Belt, where cities that built aggressively through and after the pandemic have posted measurable affordability gains while Boston and New York City — where new construction has lagged — have only seen costs climb. Housing supply in Austin, Texas, grew by 30 percent between 2015 and 2024, fueling a rent decline of 19 percent, according to Pew research.

But Zhao was quick to flag the limits of that argument.

“If you build 100,000 new housing units in Boston and they’re all one-bedroom luxury apartments, you’re not really going to help that many people because the composition does matter,” she said.

The composition — who gets housed, in what kind of unit, and at what price point — is precisely what determines whether a neighborhood develops the critical mass of diverse residents needed to support functional retail.

Zhao pointed to her own neighborhood of Chelsea in Manhattan, where lower- and middle-income residents remain, but “there are very few neighborhood amenities that actually serve that population very well anymore. Everything is like a million-dollar art gallery.”

For those residents, she said, the question can become painfully simple: “Where am I supposed to get my groceries?”

The St. Regis condo building at 150 Seaport in Boston. – David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

It’s a question Boston’s Seaport has been asking for years. The district stands as perhaps the region’s most vivid illustration of what a luxury-dominant development corridor delivers: glass towers, high-end fitness studios, trendy restaurants, and a conspicuous absence of everyday fixed infrastructure.

Greene has watched a steady procession of Boston-area clients — millennials and empty nesters alike — cross into Rhode Island, drawn not by new construction but by something considerably harder to engineer.

“It’s incredibly rare to have big-city amenities — whether it’s Trinity Repertory Theater or James Beard-rated restaurants — combined with more affordability,” she said of Providence. “There’s a cool grittiness to it.”

People enjoy coffee al fresco in Providence. *– Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff*

The mature buyers, in particular, have surprised her. Empty nesters who sold their MetroWest homes expecting to return to city life discovered that what they were actually after wasn’t a luxury building.

“They are hyper, hyper, hyper focused on walkability,” Greene said. “They want to walk to the bookstore. They want to walk to the coffee shop. They want to walk to a park.”

Redfin found that within Massachusetts, the biggest increase outbound migration from Boston from 2021 to 2025 was to Springfield and Pittsfield.

Part of the problem, Schuster said, is that middle-market housing is nearly impossible to build at scale given current regulations around minimum lot sizes, building code restrictions, and the effective prohibition of triple-decker-style development across much of the urban core. The economics push developers almost exclusively toward new high-end projects, and the marketing follows.

“Just because a builder put stainless steel appliances in a new apartment, people branded it as luxury,” Schuster said of the labeling shortcut that has fueled, in his view, “a populist backlash” against new construction of any kind.

A packed sidewalk at the South End Buttery in Boston. *– Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff*

The result is a vicious cycle. The cities that most need housing diversity are often the hardest places to build it, while the markets quietly winning livability rankings (like Lowell, Fall River, and Warwick, R.I.) largely got there through historical circumstance rather than deliberate policy. Old mill towns come with durable bones: walkable streets, mixed-use blocks, housing stock at multiple price points, and neighborhoods that accumulated their character over decades and are just in need of a little refurbishment and TLC. The ecosystem was already there.

There are signs that Boston is beginning to reckon with some of the livability lessons. The Affordable Homes Act, new accessory dwelling unit regulations, and a growing legislative conversation around building code reform are early signals that the political calculus is shifting. The state’s $5.2 billion Affordable Homes Act package aims to create or preserve 65,000 homes over the next five years and legalized accessory dwelling units “by right” statewide. This, along with a growing legislative conversation around building code reform, gives some hope about future housing creation locally.

“Placemaking needs to be an intentional and inclusive process. Communities should actively engage and listen to their residents on what they want. New development is just one part of livability,” said Ellis. “I don’t believe you can manufacture livability, but leaders can always be making continual improvements to a place.”

“Build, baby, build,” might be the mantra of housing advocates looking to usher in more affordability and livability to this region. The caveat: Make sure what you’re building leaves room for the neighborhood to follow.