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Music Plays
00:00:03 Aja Kennedy
Even though in Greater Boston we actually have very low rates of unsheltered homelessness, because our emergency system is so robust and able to provide so many resources for people. Despite that, our system hasn’t been able to keep up with the number of families that are requesting assistance from the system.
00:00:19 Aja Kennedy
Because again, it’s just so difficult for lower moderate-income households to find a place to live.
00:00:24 Katherine Einstein
The housing market in Greater Boston is broken. Super expensive.
00:00:28 Katherine Einstein
It’s inaccessible for lots of people, and one of the key drivers of those high costs is that we are not building enough housing of all types.
00:00:35 Katherine Einstein
We are not building enough market rate housing, we are not building enough affordable housing.
00:00:40 Michelle Moran
Welcome to BuildingWell, sustainable homes, equitable communities, your new podcast from New Ecology.
00:00:47 Michelle Moran
Join us as we explore real life stories from key players in green building and community development.
00:00:52 Michelle Moran
We’ll examine exciting new innovations, highlighting practical solutions for creating more affordable, healthier, more resilient, equitable communities.
00:01:01 Michelle Moran
We’re Building well, together.
00:01:04 Molly Craft
This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.
00:01:09 Michelle Moran
Welcome to the Building Well podcast by New Ecology.
00:01:12 Michelle Moran
I’m your host Michelle Moran, and this is today’s host, Alina Michelewicz.
00:01:16 Alina Michelewicz
Hello!
00:01:17 Michelle Moran
We have two special guests today who are co-authors of the 2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card, which is a report published annually by the Boston Foundation.
00:01:27 Michelle Moran
Welcome to Aja Kennedy, Racial wealth gap research fellow with Boston indicators and ph. D candidate at Tufts University.
00:01:35 Michelle Moran
And Katherine Levine Einstein, associate professor of political science at Boston University.
00:01:40 Michelle Moran
Each year, the housing report card includes a special topic, and this year’s focused on public land as an opportunity for increasing greater Boston’s housing stock.
00:01:48 Michelle Moran
Join us on this episode to hear more about the state of the housing market in Greater Boston.
00:01:53 Michelle Moran
So welcome, Aja and Katherine.
00:01:56 Aja Kennedy
Thank you so much for having me here. It’s nice to be here.
00:01:59 Katherine Einstein
Yeah. We’re really excited to talk to you about this research.
00:02:02 Alina Michelewicz
Awesome. Could you introduce yourselves and and what you do.
00:02:06 Aja Kennedy
Sure, yeah
00:02:06 Aja Kennedy
So my name is Aja.
00:02:08 Aja Kennedy
I’m a fourth year PhD student at Tufts University.
00:02:10 Aja Kennedy
Studying economics and public policy.
00:02:12 Aja Kennedy
Most of my research interests are in housing policy, but I’m also interested in social safety net programs more generally.
00:02:18 Aja Kennedy
I also work as a research fellow at Boston Indicators at the Boston Foundation, Writing Policy reports about the well-being of people in Greater Boston.
00:02:26 Katherine Einstein
And I’m Katherine.
00:02:27 Katherine Einstein
I’m an associate professor of political science at Boston.
00:02:31 Katherine Einstein
I study and teach about local politics and policy with a particular focus on housing, and I also serve as the associate director of housing at the initiative on cities at Boston University.
00:02:42 Alina Michelewicz
Awesome.
00:02:43 Alina Michelewicz
Could you tell us a little bit about Boston indicators and Boston University initiative on cities?
00:02:48 Aja Kennedy
Sure. Yeah.
00:02:49 Aja Kennedy
So Boston indicators is a small team of researchers that’s housed within the Boston Foundation. And what, as I mentioned earlier, we write about the well-being of people in Greater Boston.
00:03:01 Aja Kennedy
So It tends to be a lot of stuff on housing policy, but we also write about retirement issues.
00:03:06 Aja Kennedy
Health issues transit any place where we feel like we can kind of weigh in on policy and shed some light on equity concerns when it comes to local and state priorities. So. Yeah.
00:03:16 Aja Kennedy
Glad to be here.
00:03:17 Alina Michelewicz
Catherine, can you tell us a little about Boston University Initiative on cities?
00:03:21 Katherine Einstein
Yeah. So Boston University initiative on cities really serves to connect researchers and students with cities both locally and around the world. So.
00:03:29 Katherine Einstein
It supports both policy engaged research and policy engaged teaching.
00:03:35 Alina Michelewicz
That’s great. All right, so tell us a little about the Greater Boston housing report card.
00:03:39 Alina Michelewicz
What is the housing report and how did you contribute to it?
00:03:42 Aja Kennedy
The Greater Boston Housing Report card is a publication that the Boston Foundation puts out every year.
00:03:48 Aja Kennedy
And for the past three years, Boston Indicators has played a big role in writing what we call the core metrics section of the report card.
00:03:57 Aja Kennedy
So the overall report card tries to give the reader an overview of what’s happening in the housing market in Greater Boston. That core metric section is this section, that kind of.
00:04:08 Aja Kennedy
Presents key metrics. As the name suggests, you know what’s happening with housing prices.
00:04:12 Aja Kennedy
Who’s moving in and out of Boston.
00:04:14 Aja Kennedy
How are we looking on housing instability or homelessness?
00:04:18 Aja Kennedy
Just a lot of different graphs and metrics that kind of describe what’s going on with housing in Greater Boston. And then we also have a second section that’s typically authored by an outside researcher, in this case with Katie Einstein at BU Initiative on Cities and her co-authors.
00:04:31 Aja Kennedy
We normally have a special topic. This year’s special topic that Katie is going to talk about later is about opportunities to use public land for affordable housing production.
00:04:41 Aja Kennedy
So yeah, two different sections of the report card.
00:04:43 Aja Kennedy
One’s an overview of key numbers to help the reader understand what’s going on in the housing market.
00:04:48 Aja Kennedy
Then we have this special topic that tries to highlight maybe an issue that doesn’t normally come to the forefront as much in those conversations.
00:04:55 Alina Michelewicz
That’s great.
00:04:56 Alina Michelewicz
Has a lot of great graphs. I have to say, so if anyone’s a nerd like me and Michelle, you’ll love the report card.
00:05:03 Aja Kennedy
Yeah, it kind of especially that first section is is kind of like a chart book.
00:05:07 Aja Kennedy
So that even if you don’t read it from cover to cover, you can kind of flip through the sections and find something that’s of interest to you and see what the numbers are and how they’re changing over time.
00:05:16 Aja Kennedy
So we try to make it quickly accessible to to someone who maybe doesn’t have enough time.
00:05:22 Katherine Einstein
I also have to say my co-author Max Palmer, who also is a professor of political science at Boston University, teaches data visualization and data science.
00:05:30 Katherine Einstein
So he will be very happy to hear that you guys are a fan of the data visualizations.
00:05:36 Alina Michelewicz
Oh! Yeah. That’s awesome. I think it is easy to flip through. That’s one of its great benefits.
00:05:41 Aja Kennedy
Awesome.
00:05:42 Alina Michelewicz
What trends have you seen in housing and homelessness and what does it mean for affordable housing needs?
00:05:48 Aja Kennedy
So that is a huge question in this area, talking about housing and homelessness, especially in the past couple of years. The way we talk about it.
00:05:57 Aja Kennedy
In the report card is theirs is… there’s kinds of good news and bad news when it comes to housing and homelessness in Greater Boston.
00:06:04 Aja Kennedy
The bad news is obviously our rates of homelessness are very high and Greater Boston has some of the highest rates of homelessness in the entire country.
00:06:13 Aja Kennedy
And that’s probably not a huge surprise to anyone who’s familiar with the housing market, unfortunately, because we have such high rent costs and housing prices, it just makes it very difficult for someone of lower moderate income to find a place to live.
00:06:28 Aja Kennedy
So that’s the existing state of the Greater Boston area. Then on top of that in the past couple of years.
00:06:33 Aja Kennedy
We’ve really had an uptick in the number of families that are requesting assistance from our state’s emergency system. And so even though in Greater Boston, we actually have very low rates of unsheltered homelessness, because our emergency system is so robust and able to provide so many resources for people, even despite that.
00:06:54 Aja Kennedy
Our system hasn’t been able to keep up with the number of families that are requesting assistance from the system because again, it’s just so difficult for lower moderate income households to find a place to live.
00:07:04 Aja Kennedy
And so we’ve had a lot of immigrants from other countries come in recently and again, because our housing market, it hasn’t really found a place to accommodate people that have fewer resources.
00:07:16 Aja Kennedy
It’s spun into this homelessness crisis that’s been in the news in the past couple of years.
00:07:20 Aja Kennedy
And the state has been trying to figure out how to meet the needs of people who need housing immediately. It is an emergency. It’s a problem, but also in the report card we try and help people remember that even though there’s this very acute crisis happening right now, it’s also a reflection of more long-term trends, in that the way that our housing market is, the fact that there are very low rental vacancies, etc.
00:07:45 Aja Kennedy
Kind of sets the stage for something like this to happen very quickly unfortunately.
00:07:50 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, definitely.
00:07:51 Alina Michelewicz
Certainly been in the news a lot for sure.
00:07:54 Alina Michelewicz
And the special topic report was really helpful in looking at that opportunity. Focus of it and how I can actually be addressed, which I think is really great.
00:08:03 Alina Michelewicz
So we’ll get to that shortly.
00:08:04 Alina Michelewicz
One concept that I found really interesting report was the interest rate lock in.
00:08:09 Alina Michelewicz
You describe what that is and how it’s affecting the housing market?
00:08:13 Aja Kennedy
Yes, the interest rate lock in is when we think about how much it costs someone to be able to own a home, we talk a lot about the sticker price of the house and how that’s going up, but also another big contributor to the cost of purchasing a home is your interest rate, how expensive your mortgage is going to be. So in the prices section of the Greater Boston Housing report card in the metrics section, we have a little chart that breaks down some.
00:08:41 Aja Kennedy
Simulation of what what it would have cost someone to purchase a home three years ago versus today. And in that chart you can really see how the rise in interest rates over the past few years, especially after the pandemic, how that rise in interest rates has really contributed to, to a big jump in how much it costs to afford a home.
00:09:00 Aja Kennedy
So what does that mean for interest rate lock in?
00:09:02 Aja Kennedy
So that means that if someone who purchased a home three years ago or a while ago, when when interest rates were lower, if someone has purchased a home at that time.
00:09:13 Aja Kennedy
And maybe now they’re considering moving or switching homes. They’re going to be a lot less likely to make that decision to switch into a new home if they’re looking at the interest rates that are available today and going well. This doesn’t make economic sense.
00:09:27 Aja Kennedy
Why would I get into a new mortgage when the price of a mortgage has gone up so much?
00:09:32 Aja Kennedy
So if we have a market where a lot of people are making a similar decision that maybe they’re a renter and they’re thinking about buying a home, but they don’t now.
00:09:40 Aja Kennedy
Or, if you’re a homeowner thinking about switching homes, but you don’t because the interest rates are so high, that kind of locks people into where they currently live.
00:09:49 Aja Kennedy
And that means we’re going to see less buying and selling activity on the market again in the prices section, we take a look at the numbers of new listings and and the number of sales and we’re noticing that overtime we’re seeing less and less sales activity, especially again especially after the pandemic since interest rates have gone up.
00:10:11 Alina Michelewicz
So that’s really a challenge for owners.
00:10:15 Alina Michelewicz
Could you talk a little about the income and wealth divide that you found between owners and renters?
00:10:20 Aja Kennedy
We have this chart. You know, you mentioned all the charts in the core metrics section earlier and one of the ones that I really like is the one that looks at disparities in incomes between homeowners versus renters and also in that same chart, we’re breaking up homeowners and renters.
00:10:37 Aja Kennedy
By different demographic groups and in that graph you notice something interesting, which is we tend to highlight disparities between different racial groups which do exist, and you can see that on the graph, but also you can really see this huge gap between the incomes of renters and the incomes of homeowners. On average, the group of homeowners that have the lowest incomes are still above the group of renters that have the highest incomes.
00:11:02 Aja Kennedy
So it’s two distinct groups, which again just illustrates how expensive it is to get into homeownership.
00:11:10 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, that is a great graph. Could you talk a little bit about what you found in household size and affordable housing and what’s the potential impact of this on the housing market?
00:11:19 Aja Kennedy
Talking a little bit more about household size is something we tried to introduce a little bit more in the report card this year and there are so many factors to think about when we think about the size of a household.
00:11:30 Aja Kennedy
So maybe I’ll just try and mention a couple of the trends and things to kind of illustrate what makes it so complicated.
00:11:37 Aja Kennedy
On the one hand, for example, there’s, in our demographics section, there’s one chart that shows that homeownership is becoming less prevalent among young adults, especially a lot of that is coming from young adults who can’t afford to either rent or own a home on their own.
00:11:55 Aja Kennedy
They can’t afford to form their own household. A lot of times they might end up staying with parents or maybe staying with roommates etc.
00:12:02 Aja Kennedy
So you can think of that as kind of an increase in household size beyond what there would have been.
00:12:07 Aja Kennedy
So maybe fewer households but larger household size.
00:12:10 Aja Kennedy
On the other hand, nowadays young households in Greater Boston have fewer and fewer kids than they used to. Since we might think of household sizes as getting smaller, there’s kind of some competing competing trends here. Then I’ll mention one third thing about.
00:12:29 Aja Kennedy
Household size, which concerns where seniors decide to live.
00:12:33 Aja Kennedy
So a couple of times in the report, we mentioned how older individuals who maybe might think about downsizing and moving into a different place to get the smaller place to live again kind of going back to the interest rate lock in idea that we talked about earlier.
00:12:49 Aja Kennedy
If it’s becoming so expensive to move if it’s difficult to find an affordable place to buy.
00:12:54 Aja Kennedy
Or even to rent, those seniors are going to be less likely to move out into different housing.
00:12:59 Aja Kennedy
So in that case, they still might live in a in a larger unit, but still have a smaller household size. So there are a lot of different ways that the cost of housing can affect household formation and household sizes.
00:13:13 Aja Kennedy
There’s so many dynamics when it comes to household formation that we kind of take into account when we think about what type of housing should be produced and what type of housing should be incentivized.
00:13:23 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, that’s really interesting.
00:13:25 Alina Michelewicz
There’s a big difference between somewhere where a family of four or five or six would live versus a one unit bedroom.
00:13:33 Aja Kennedy
Exactly. Yeah. Those are two different needs. Just having different types of housing that can accommodate different household sizes. Hopefully at price points that are affordable to those households.
00:13:44 Aja Kennedy
It’s not an easy vision to accomplish, but it is something that local policy makers have to really try and take into account and see how we can encourage types of housing to be produced that can really meet the needs of the households in Greater Boston.
00:13:58 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah. So switching gears a little bit.
00:14:02 Alina Michelewicz
Could you tell us what it means to be cost burdened? That topic was covered a little bit in the report and I’d like to highlight that one.
00:14:10 Aja Kennedy
Yes. We mentioned cost burdens just about every year in the report card. When we talk about being housing cost burdened for households that spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs, whether it be the cost of rent or utilities or their mortgage, if you spend more than 30% of your income on housing costs we label you as cost burdened.
00:14:31 Aja Kennedy
In the report card, we look at renters and we look at homeowners and where we just quantify the share of households in each group that are cost burdened.
00:14:43 Aja Kennedy
Year after year, we continue to see that it is more common that a renter is cost burdened than for a homeowner. And we also see that black and Latino households, especially renters, are more cost burdened than other households.
00:14:58 Aja Kennedy
But again, that’s if you spend more than 30% of your income on housing. And it’s also worth highlighting that even aside from just the cost of housing going up, inflation generally has been.
00:15:10 Aja Kennedy
You think about, let’s say, the three years after the pandemic, inflation generally has been going up not only for housing costs, but for other costs.
00:15:18 Aja Kennedy
So even if you think about the other 70% of your income or whatever you would spend on these other costs, the purchasing power of that has also tiped down a bit in this report, of course we’re just focused on housing cost burden.
00:15:31 Aja Kennedy
But, just a reminder that that doesn’t always illustrate the whole picture of people’s cost burdens.
00:15:36 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah definitely.
00:15:37 Alina Michelewicz
We’ve talked on the podcast before about energy cost burdens.
00:15:41 Alina Michelewicz
Relative portion of your income that goes to utilities like electricity and gas.
00:15:47 Alina Michelewicz
So definitely another part of the picture there.
00:15:50 Michelle Moran
Yeah. And as the climate continues to change, I can imagine it would only increase energy costs and other costs.
00:15:57 Aja Kennedy
Absolutely, absolutely.
00:15:58 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, there was a really crazy data point in the report that families need to earn over $110,000 a year to afford a median 2 bedroom apartment in Greater Boston.
00:16:09 Alina Michelewicz
And I found that really in some ways not surprising, because I’m living in the greater Boston area but.
00:16:16 Alina Michelewicz
When you kind of step back and think about that, it’s pretty surprising.
00:16:20 Aja Kennedy
Yeah, and I’m glad that caught your eye, ’cause. I think one of the things that we try and do in the report card is just find ways to to help people understand how expensive it is to live in Greater Boston. And so.
00:16:33 Aja Kennedy
That’s just one little vignette that kind of hopefully paints the picture a little bit. So I have to give a shout out to my colleague, Lucas Munson, who kind of made that little chart and crunched the numbers to kind of give a typical example of what it would cost.
00:16:46 Aja Kennedy
So the way we came up with that number was just kind of a back of the envelope calculation. We took the median.
00:16:53 Aja Kennedy
Rent price of a 2-bedroom apartment in Boston, which is about like $2300.
00:16:59 Aja Kennedy
And we added on the cost of typical utilities, which brought it to around 2700 a month.
00:17:05 Aja Kennedy
If we’re trying to estimate the income that it would take for someone to afford this apartment and not be cost burdened, it turns out it does come out to $110,000.
00:17:16 Aja Kennedy
So of course, for each household, whether that makes sense is going to vary.
00:17:21 Aja Kennedy
But this was just kind of one example to show this is how expensive it is to live in Greater Boston.
00:17:26 Alina Michelewicz
What kind of jobs and salaries did you find were cost burdened?
00:17:30 Aja Kennedy
Yeah. So this is another one tabulated by Lucas.
00:17:33 Aja Kennedy
So shout out to him. There are a lot of jobs in Greater Boston that would be cost burdened if we’re looking at that medium 2-bedroom apartment. This includes a lot of really critical roles in our society.
00:17:45 Aja Kennedy
Registered nurses, nursing assistants, home health aides and we took the most common jobs in Greater Boston. By looking at some information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we took.
00:17:55 Aja Kennedy
All of those most common professions and looked at their median incomes and out of the top 20, 20 of the most common occupations, and there were only four of those twenty that would be able to afford that two-bedroom apartment without being cost burdened.
00:18:11 Aja Kennedy
So the other 16 actually would be cost burdend.
00:18:14 Aja Kennedy
People who work in really critical roles in our in our local economy.
00:18:19 Alina Michelewicz
For sure.
00:18:20 Alina Michelewicz
And that impacts everybody.
00:18:21 Alina Michelewicz
It’s like if you’re in the hospital and your nurse had to travel hours to get to work because yes, can’t afford to live near. That’s impacting everyone so.
00:18:30 Aja Kennedy
It impacts everyone right.
00:18:32 Aja Kennedy
And it’s first and foremost, it’s important that people have housing to have a safe, stable place to live, but also beyond that, when we think of the greater economic consequences of having a housing market that’s so expensive, it can be difficult for.
00:18:45 Aja Kennedy
Employers to attract employees to work at a place in Greater Boston. If the housing is so expensive that that employee wouldn’t be able to find a place to live.
00:18:55 Aja Kennedy
If we’re thinking about making sure we have enough of a Nursing workforce or other critical roles like that, expensive housing.
00:19:05 Aja Kennedy
Is going to affect that, and so beyond the caring about the health of individuals of humans that need a safe place to stay.
00:19:12 Aja Kennedy
The economic consequences are definitely there.
00:19:15 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah.
00:19:16 Michelle Moran
Definitely.
00:19:17 Michelle Moran
Just another stat to further illustrate your point.
00:19:20 Michelle Moran
It’s median sales prices in the Greater Boston area are now surpassing $1 million in 35 Greater Boston municipalities.
00:19:28 Aja Kennedy
Yeah, which that blew me away when I saw that.
00:19:31 Aja Kennedy
Because I actually did.
00:19:33 Aja Kennedy
I mean, I had heard that, you know, some housing prices were getting expensive, of course.
00:19:37 Aja Kennedy
But again, that’s just another way of illustrating in another way how expensive the housing is.
00:19:43 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, well, it’ll be great to talk about the special topic in a second, but I have one more question or a couple questions before we get there.
00:19:50 Alina Michelewicz
Could you explain to the listeners how it’s possible it’s subsidized affordable housing still might be economically out of reach for lower income earners in Greater Boston?
00:19:59 Aja Kennedy
Yeah. Thank you for highlighting that and bringing that up because this is a thought that has.
00:20:05 Aja Kennedy
Come up to us as we’re learning more about the subsidized housing stock for us. As researchers, we can take a little bit better look of, you know, what the price breakdowns are and what the what the characteristics of the subsidized housing is that we have. So Housing Navigator Massachusetts. They have a data set that looks at all subsidized rental housing in the state of Massachusetts.
00:20:29 Aja Kennedy
Previously, we didn’t have great data on subsidized housing, but now that we have that, we can take a look at these price breakdowns. And so some subsidized housing units are priced so that they’re at a set price that is below market rate.
00:20:45 Aja Kennedy
So the way that they’ll price it will be something like, OK. We want this unit to be affordable to someone who is making 80% of the area median income.
00:20:54 Aja Kennedy
So we’re going to set this price so that if someone makes 80% of area median income, they will spend 30% of their housing costs on this house.
00:21:03 Aja Kennedy
But what that means is, even if someone who makes 50% of area median income rents that apartment, they will still pay the same price as someone who, you know, made 80% area median income.
00:21:16 Aja Kennedy
It’s very possible that someone who qualifies for this subsidized housing unit based on their income will rent this unit and still be cost burdened.
00:21:25 Aja Kennedy
Now, that’s not the only way that subsidized housing is priced.
00:21:29 Aja Kennedy
Sometimes the rate price will be set based on the tenant’s income.
00:21:33 Aja Kennedy
In that case, then, that tenant will not be housing price burdened.
00:21:38 Aja Kennedy
Bcause again, if it’s someone who makes 50% of area median income, regardless of what income they make, 30% of their income will be spent on housing costs, and that way that type of unit would be affordable to to anyone at any place in the income distribution.
00:21:52 Aja Kennedy
Yes, it can be very possible that someone can be in subsidized housing and still be cost burdened. When we think of subsidized housing, they’re not a monolith.
00:22:00 Aja Kennedy
It’s not just like, oh, there’s a subsidized housing unit now, maybe some lower income households can afford it. It does get a lot more complicated than that.
00:22:08 Aja Kennedy
There are a lot of different factors that go into play when we think about whether or not our subsidized housing stock is appropriate for the needs that we have in Greater Boston. And looking at that pricing is just one of them.
00:22:22 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, that was a great explanation and thanks for bringing in the disability accessibility as well. That’s a really important point.
00:22:29 Aja Kennedy
Yeah.
00:22:30 Molly Craft
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00:22:33 Molly Craft
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00:22:36 Molly Craft
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00:23:57 Molly Craft
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00:23:58 Molly Craft
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00:24:03 Molly Craft
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00:24:07 Alina Michelewicz
So that’s a great overview of some of the challenges.
00:24:10 Alina Michelewicz
That we’re facing in greater Boston.
00:24:11 Alina Michelewicz
The report highlights that there’s a lot of public land where subsidized housing could be built.
00:24:17 Alina Michelewicz
What’s the connection between all these trends we’ve talked about and the public land that’s not currently being used for housing and how it could be used?
00:24:27 Katherine Einstein
Yes. So you know, Aja just did a great job of laying out the many ways that the housing market in Greater Boston is broken, right?
00:24:33 Katherine Einstein
Like it’s super expensive. It’s inaccessible for lots of people.
00:24:36 Katherine Einstein
And one of the key drivers of those high costs is that we are not building enough housing of all types.
00:24:41 Katherine Einstein
We are not building enough market rate housing, we are not building enough affordable housing when we think about what are the policy solutions to this really crippling regional challenge, we need to be thinking about building more housing.
00:24:52 Katherine Einstein
I think that’s where in a lot of communities you hear people start saying things like, oh, we don’t have enough land.
00:24:57 Katherine Einstein
We’re totally built out.
00:24:58 Katherine Einstein
There’s nowhere we could possibly even dream of putting this housing.
00:25:01 Katherine Einstein
And one of the things that we did in this special topic is, say that is absolutely not true.
00:25:06 Katherine Einstein
There is so much land where we could be building housing and what’s more, it’s publicly owned, which is going to allow us to build potentially some of the deeply affordable housing that is not economical to build on private land.
00:25:19 Alina Michelewicz
That’s a great overview.
00:25:20 Alina Michelewicz
So tell us a little about the barriers to actually building on that land.
00:25:26 Katherine Einstein
Right. So first, if we just sort of ignore the issue of public land for a second, I think it’s been really well documented that in Massachusetts and indeed in many places across the country, we make it way too hard to build housing.
00:25:39 Katherine Einstein
We create at the local level these incredibly onerous permitting processes through our zoning and land use regulations that mean that developers who want to build, just like a townhouse, right like not some sort of massive complex. They end up going through multiple hurdles just to get housing built.
00:25:52 Katherine Einstein
Every single line of these hurtles introduces opportunities for public opposition and maybe like lawsuits to gum up the works and make it really hard to build housing. Right.
00:26:02 Katherine Einstein
So that’s true for anything that you want to build, whether it’s on private land or public land. But one of the things that we document in the report is that developing on public land adds all of these extra regulatory burdens. And many of these regulatory burdens come from.
00:26:15 Katherine Einstein
A really understandable place of wanting to prevent corruption. But the problem is we’ve actually created a lot of state laws and state procurement laws that in practice make it incredibly difficult to convert this incredibly valuable asset, public land into much needed affordable housing.
00:26:35 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm. Is it fair to say that in many ways it’s more challenging to develop on public land than privately owned land? And that’s one of the challenges with addressing the housing crisis?
00:26:47 Katherine Einstein
Yeah, it’s really bleak. Right.
00:26:48 Katherine Einstein
Because in an ideal world we would make it easier to build on public land, which would make it cheaper to build on public land, which would make it more economically viable for us to build that incredibly affordable housing.
00:26:58 Katherine Einstein
But in practice, the exact opposite is true.
00:27:01 Katherine Einstein
And so we actually interviewed affordable housing developers as part of the special topic, and one of the things that they told us that really shocked us is that they would rather pay for privately owned land that have to deal with publicly owned land because it takes so much longer to build and there’s so many more.
00:27:18 Katherine Einstein
Places along the way, where the regulatory process can potentially jump in and say oh Nope, sorry, you can’t build there and just to give the listener sort of a concrete example of like, OK, what does that mean?
00:27:29 Katherine Einstein
What is the regulatory process that’s making it so hard to build on public land?
00:27:32 Katherine Einstein
So in many communities across Massachusetts, right?
00:27:35 Katherine Einstein
They’re governed by this form of government called town.
00:27:38 Katherine Einstein
Meeting in town, meeting forms of government, you have a legislative body that is either hundreds of people or even thousands of people, right?
00:27:46 Katherine Einstein
It could be like every registered voter in the town.
00:27:49 Katherine Einstein
And in many cases, if you want to build a housing development on publicly owned land, you have to get 2/3 support from town meeting. Anyone who’s been to a town meeting.
00:28:00 Katherine Einstein
Knows that it’s really easy to rile up anti housing sentiment at these forums, and so it doesn’t take a lot to delay or outright block proposed housing developments.
00:28:11 Katherine Einstein
And we document multiple cases in communities across the state where that exact process unfolds, where the town was like, hey, we’d like to have some affordable housing here and, oh, there’s a developer willing to do it.
00:28:21 Katherine Einstein
And town meeting said no thank you. We don’t want to see housing there.
00:28:25 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:28:26 Aja Kennedy
I think highlighting those hiccups in the political process of producing housing is a very important part to add to conversations about what it takes to produce more housing.
00:28:36 Aja Kennedy
I think we talked a lot about zoning regulations and and the price of construction materials going up and things like that. But when it comes to something like a very slow political process or other roadblocks on the road to building housing, for a developer, time is money.
00:28:50 Aja Kennedy
And so those delays really do cost money. And so I think it’s great that Katie’s highlighting that.
00:28:55 Michelle Moran
Yeah, absolutely. I was just gonna read a little stat for if—these burdens were less or didn’t exist.
00:29:01 Michelle Moran
What could be: almost 1/4 of land in Greater Boston is publicly owned, with the potential to create over 85,000 housing units. If only 5% of the vacant non conservation land is redeveloped.
00:29:12 Michelle Moran
That’s such a small amount of the available public land.
00:29:15 Katherine Einstein
Yeah. So just to sort of help the listeners, like really understand how much.
00:29:16 Aja Kennedy
Yeah.
00:29:20 Katherine Einstein
Publicly owned land we potentially have available. Right.
00:29:22 Katherine Einstein
So if we look at privately owned land, 87% of it is not vacant. So it’s being used in some way. It’s not like available for us to, you know, build the affordable housing of our dreams if we look.
00:29:35 Katherine Einstein
In contrast, at municipally owned land, only 32% of that land is non-vacant 26% of it, according to the state tax parcel database is conservation.
00:29:46 Katherine Einstein
So like, OK, that’s we don’t want to build on our beautiful green spaces wetlands, right? There’s value to that conservation land.
00:29:52 Katherine Einstein
But 42% of municipally owned land is classified as vacant in this state parcel tax database.
00:29:59 Katherine Einstein
We don’t think we should be building up all or even like most of that land.
00:30:03 Katherine Einstein
So in our calculations, we were so conservative, we said let’s just imagine building 5%.
00:30:09 Katherine Einstein
Of the vacant land that local governments and the Commonwealth owns, and that’s take as an assumption that we’re going to build at the density that is allowed by MBTA communities.
00:30:19 Katherine Einstein
That’s like 15 units per acre. So not a crazy amount of density, right?
00:30:25 Katherine Einstein
And that’s going to produce a total, as you said, of 85,000 units under those really conservative estimates, so.
00:30:30 Katherine Einstein
This is to us, an untapped and squandered public resource.
00:30:35 Alina Michelewicz
I think that’s a great point too, that it’s the vacant land.
00:30:38 Alina Michelewicz
It’s not where you’re playing basketball on the weekend.
00:30:40 Alina Michelewicz
It’s not where you’re walking your dog in the morning like this is not parks or conservation land like that we’re talking about.
00:30:46 Alina Michelewicz
It’s 5% of the bacon land, which is kind of a different thing I think. Also to connect it to the core metrics.
00:30:54 Alina Michelewicz
Area one of the things that was noted is happening in the housing supply was that it’s higher cost but also projects are stalling.
00:31:03 Alina Michelewicz
New permits are decreasing.
00:31:05 Alina Michelewicz
And he’s all related to what Katherine just described.
00:31:09 Aja Kennedy
Yeah, that even overall, aside from talking about public land, we’re starting to see a little bit of a slowdown when it comes to production, especially for larger multifamily units. I kind of have to hesitate to be too definitive on that yet because the data that we get kind of has a time lag and it kind of takes a year later for us to really start to see.
00:31:29 Aja Kennedy
What’s happening with building permits, but so far we do kind of see some evidence of what has been in the news about an anticipated multifamily housing slowdown.
00:31:41 Aja Kennedy
Again, that’s even aside from using public land just.
00:31:44 Aja Kennedy
Overall in general.
00:31:45 Katherine Einstein
I think for the listeners thinking about the development of housing in Greater Boston, instead of thinking like, how do I conceptualize this in the context of public land?
00:31:52 Katherine Einstein
It is terrible building housing across Greater Boston.
00:31:56 Katherine Einstein
We make it so, so hard to build housing of all types and then on public land we make it like that. Much harder.
00:32:02 Katherine Einstein
It’s really that we have a sort of disastrous permitting process that the State is doing a lot right and they need to be doing even more.
00:32:09 Katherine Einstein
And we’ll get to that when we talk about policy solutions. The state has taken really seriously.
00:32:13 Katherine Einstein
That this is a big policy problem and is trying to streamline the permitting process.
00:32:17 Katherine Einstein
But ll of these problems are just that much worse on public land.
00:32:20 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah.
00:32:20 Aja Kennedy
The quicker you can make these type of processes, the more you can take away some of the uncertainty in the construction process.
00:32:29 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, definitely.
00:32:30 Alina Michelewicz
So our organization, New Ecology, sits at the Nexus of affordable housing and energy efficiency, sustainability.
00:32:39 Alina Michelewicz
O I’m curious what tensions you see between affordable housing development.
00:32:44 Alina Michelewicz
And reaching Massachusetts climate goals, because sometimes they’re kind of described as if they’re at odds.
00:32:50 Katherine Einstein
They shouldn’t be at odds with each other because building dense, transit-oriented housing in walkable communities is great for the environment, right?
00:33:00 Katherine Einstein
We reduce our greenhouse gas emissions because fewer people are driving places.
00:33:03 Katherine Einstein
Like, there’s so much good about building housing in that sort of dense, sustainable way.
00:33:09 Katherine Einstein
But I think all too often when.
00:33:11 Katherine Einstein
Look at the nitty gritty process by which housing is developed.
00:33:15 Katherine Einstein
We see that ostensibly pro-environment policies and people end up coming sort of…
00:33:21 Katherine Einstein
I would say like on the wrong side of the housing debate, just to sort of clear examples of this, the 1st is that in number of local governments, they have added environmental regulations that go beyond.
00:33:33 Katherine Einstein
The state of Massachusetts’, already strong standards when it comes to building near wetlands or things like that.
00:33:39 Katherine Einstein
And what we know, if we actually look at the data on those environmental regulations is they make it more expensive to build and they ensure that we get fewer pieces of housing in those communities.
00:33:47 Katherine Einstein
So I think there’s a.
00:33:48 Katherine Einstein
Real question that we should be asking about whether some of those regulations have been added with exclusionary aims designed to prevent the construction of affordable multifamily housing.
00:33:58 Katherine Einstein
The second piece, if we actually look at the public meetings that we have as part of the housing approval process, we can see a number of people show up to those meetings in opposition to new housing.
00:34:10 Katherine Einstein
Citing their environmental concerns, citing concerns about the local wildlife.
00:34:16 Katherine Einstein
And we obviously should be concerned as part of our broader building in a sustainable way about like how we’re treating our wetlands when we build new housing.
00:34:24 Katherine Einstein
But I think oftentimes we see people sort of weaponize those environmental concerns as a way of fighting affordable multifamily housing that could potentially actually be supporting our climate goals.
00:34:36 Aja Kennedy
You’ve also done work talking about how senior restrictions and subsidized housing similarly can also be used for exclusionary purposes.
00:34:44 Aja Kennedy
There’s been a ton of work out there about how zoning regulations can be used for exclusionary purposes.
00:34:49 Aja Kennedy
So this is in the climate context of how those kinds of polls can be misused. But we kind of see it in other areas of housing policy as well.
00:34:56 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, I love what you started with that transit oriented affordable housing really serves climate goals. Walkable cities, sustainable communities.
00:35:04 Alina Michelewicz
So I think it’s really important to focus on that aspect.
00:35:08 Alina Michelewicz
The environmental regulations certainly can be a challenge.
00:35:11 Alina Michelewicz
I’m curious if you could tell us a little more?
00:35:14 Alina Michelewicz
There’s a section in the report about this concept of weaponizing public land, and there is a bit of consternation around this concept.
00:35:21 Alina Michelewicz
There was an article in the Boston Globe in November, November 25th, which talked about the report and this sort of concept, could you tell us a little bit about what that means?
00:35:31 Katherine Einstein
Yeah. So one of the things that we did is we did a little bit of a deep dive over the last 10 years and looked at times when towns purchased large plots of land. And we’re like, OK, what are they doing with this public land?
00:35:43 Katherine Einstein
How often are they building housing?
00:35:45 Katherine Einstein
How often are they using it for other things and what we found really shocked us, we found really shocked us.
00:35:50 Katherine Einstein
We found 13 instances of cities and towns across Massachusetts, buying public land expressly to block the development of housing, and in almost all cases it was actually to block the development of affordable housing. These cities and towns spent over $50 million in public resources.
00:36:09 Katherine Einstein
In many cases it was actually in parts of subsidized by the state government. They blocked over 1000 identifiable units of housing.
00:36:17 Katherine Einstein
So this is really concerning when we think about all the challenges we have to build a new housing, right? Like this shows us just how much some communities don’t want to see new housing. They are willing to raise their own taxes to block the development of affordable housing in their communities.
00:36:33 Alina Michelewicz
Why do you think there is such public opposition to housing projects?
00:36:36 Katherine Einstein
This is something I’ve thought a lot about in research like beyond this special report.
00:36:40 Katherine Einstein
So I think there’s a number of reasons.
00:36:42 Katherine Einstein
One is that people just don’t like change, and new building is this incredibly visceral and highly visible change, right?
00:36:50 Katherine Einstein
So I think people react negatively to change.
00:36:52 Katherine Einstein
I think there are some people who perceive new housing as a threat to their property values.
00:36:57 Katherine Einstein
For most of us, right, if we own a home.
00:36:59 Katherine Einstein
That’s the most expensive thing we own, and we don’t want to see sort of our wealth diminished.
00:37:04 Katherine Einstein
In ways that people might perceive new development to do, and then finally I think we cannot overlook sort of racism and classism baked into housing opposition, particularly if we’re thinking about opposition to affordable housing.
00:37:17 Katherine Einstein
But yeah, I think you’re correctly identifying like people have a really visceral and strong opposition to housing, and it’s such a challenging barrier.
00:37:25 Katherine Einstein
To overcome in other research that we did, we actually went out and looked at.
00:37:29 Katherine Einstein
All of the people who participate in public meetings about housing development and found that only 15% of people who show up to those meetings show up in support of new housing. It’s a huge problem and a real challenge as we think about trying to accomplish our affordable housing goals in the state and beyond.
00:37:48 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah.Ok. So let’s talk about the benefits that affordable housing can provide for the community ’cause that’s sort of the opposing side. Right.
00:37:55 Alina Michelewicz
Is like. Here’s all these benefits to affordable housing, and I think we’ve touched on a few, like making it so that, say a nurse could live closer to the hospital.
00:38:04 Alina Michelewicz
Tell me a little about what you see as the benefits of affordable housing.
00:38:06 Katherine Einstein
So 1st to start with the benefit of affordable housing.
00:38:59 Katherine Einstein
I want to start with like a.
00:38:11 Katherine Einstein
You know, debunking a myth.
00:38:09 Katherine Einstein
It does not reduce your property values.
00:38:17 Katherine Einstein
So for all those people who are like anxious, like, oh, my gosh, they’re going to build, you know, 10 units of affordable housing, what will this do to my home value?
00:38:21 Katherine Einstein
The answer is nothing like it’s not going to do anything to your home value.
00:38:24 Katherine Einstein
But what are the benefits, right?
00:38:26 Katherine Einstein
We allow people to have access to safe and stable housing and we know that that contributes profoundly to people’s physical and mental well-beings, it contributes to their economic well-being, right?
00:38:36 Katherine Einstein
Just that access is so, so important. We also know that socio economic diversity improves educational outcomes.
00:38:43 Katherine Einstein
Right, so if we.
00:38:44 Katherine Einstein
Have more affordable housing in a community and create more socio economic and racial diversity that is better for the education of every single child in that community from all different backgrounds. We provide greater equality and access to high quality public goods. When we build more affordable housing.
00:39:01 Aja Kennedy
And I’ll also talk on one thought about how having access to opportunities to live in different neighborhoods can help economic mobility and things like that baked into that is also some differences in how social networks are formed.
00:39:13 Aja Kennedy
The more that income segregation goes up and we have these siloed communities that limits opportunities for people from different groups or different backgrounds to build networks and get to know each other, not only for, you know, economic mobility purposes. If you live in an area where there.
00:39:31 Aja Kennedy
Are a lot of you know, working professionals, maybe you have access to learning about all these different jobs or different ways that you could spend your time.
00:39:39 Aja Kennedy
So, you know, not only for those purposes, educational and work, but also just for community building. I think it’s kind of unsettling the more we get siloed into these different communities and don’t get the opportunity to really get to know different kinds of people.
00:39:54 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, there’s so many ways that it can benefit.
00:40:58 Alina Michelewicz
Existing residents.
00:40:59 Alina Michelewicz
Future residents like affordable housing has a great power to improve our lives and the quality of life in communities.
00:40:06 Alina Michelewicz
So it’s really great that you guys are thinking about how that can be made.
00:40:09 Alina Michelewicz
More possible in Greater Boston. I also want to note that we talked a lot about like housing as a.
00:40:16 Alina Michelewicz
Commodity.
00:40:17 Alina Michelewicz
Or like people are.
00:40:19 Alina Michelewicz
You know they’re paying for.
00:40:20 Alina Michelewicz
There’s ownership. It’s wealth, all of that. But it’s also considered a human right, right?
00:40:26 Alina Michelewicz
This is also.
00:40:27 Alina Michelewicz
Just.
00:40:29 Alina Michelewicz
The right thing to do is provide housing for everybody in our Greater Boston community, and that’s such an important aspect that I think sometimes it’s easy to kind of forget about that.
00:40:40 Katherine Einstein
There’s really great research, you know, going back to a point Aja made earlier talking about homelessness in Greater Boston.
00:40:46 Katherine Einstein
So there’s really great research that looks nationally at what are the places that are experiencing the worst homelessness crises, and it’s about housing costs, right?
00:40:55 Katherine Einstein
It’s not about places that are having worse mental health crises or places that are having worse addiction crises.
00:41:01 Katherine Einstein
Right. It’s about the broader context of the housing market. And so if we’re thinking about this issue of housing as a human right, I mean our failure to build enough housing and to keep our housing market affordable is the reason that we’re seeing this uptick in homelessness and.
00:41:18 Katherine Einstein
We’re seeing profound human suffering in our community.
00:41:21 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah. So.
00:41:23 Alina Michelewicz
Let’s get action oriented.
00:41:26 Alina Michelewicz
What policy changes did you identify that could help more publicly developed? Cause I think that’s a great solution that you’ve identified in the Greater Boston Housing report card.
00:41:36 Katherine Einstein
So I think there’s a number of different solutions that you know, I really hope that the state government is able to implement and the first is to streamline the process for the disposition of public land.
00:41:47 Katherine Einstein
Ideally this wouldn’t be going through town meeting and certainly wouldn’t require a 2/3 majority vote.
00:41:54 Katherine Einstein
One of the other sort of fun features for developers who are building on public land is they essentially end up going through the review process twice, which like I think we’ve documented already in this podcast, that the review process is pretty nightmarish for developers.
00:42:06 Katherine Einstein
But they have to go through it once to get approved as the builder on public land and then once they get approved as the builder on public land, they get to go through it all over again to actually do the building.
00:42:14 Katherine Einstein
And so we think there are a number of steps the state could take to prevent developers from having to go through as many hurdles right there clearly needs to be some process in place to prevent corruption in the disposition of Public land, but there probably are ways that we could make this process be much faster and much more predictable.
00:42:31 Katherine Einstein
I think the second thing that we’d really like to see is the state take steps to make sure that state resources cannot be used to purchase land to block affordable housing development.
00:42:42 Katherine Einstein
And so we propose reforms to this law called the Community Preservation Act.
00:42:46 Katherine Einstein
Which has been used in about half of the cases that we identified in the report to purchase land to block the development of affordable housing. We also think that this is maybe a less likely to be impactful reform, but a very realistic one. We think that the state can provide helpful resources like technical assistance for helping local communities navigate this really complicated process for, you know, using their public land to build housing.
00:43:12 Katherine Einstein
So we think that’s like a low hanging fruit and something really easy for the state to do.
00:43:16 Katherine Einstein
The last thing that I would sort of say is a policy recommendation is we would really love to see the state continue to push local governments to streamline the housing permitting process generally.
00:43:27 Katherine Einstein
We are recently starting to see the fruits of a state law called MBTA communities, which is requiring local governments served by the MBTA to increase allowable density.
00:43:37 Katherine Einstein
And you know, we’ve seen one town.
00:43:38 Katherine Einstein
I would not have guessed this, so this is going to be our model town beforehand, but we’ve seen Lexington really come out in front.
00:43:44 Katherine Einstein
They have over 1000 housing units in the pipeline right now because of MBTA communities. So I would like to see more cities and towns follow the example of Lexington and reform their zoning.
00:43:58 Katherine Einstein
In a way that actually allows for the meaningful construction of large numbers of new housing.
00:44:02 Alina Michelewicz
That’s great when you think about next year’s housing report, what trends would you like to see like in an ideal world, a year from now, what would the housing report card look like?
00:44:14 Katherine Einstein
I want to see those housing units in the pipeline.
00:44:17 Katherine Einstein
So we’ve seen a lot of communities engaged in what is called paper compliance with MBTA communities, where they are technically complying with state law, but they haven’t actually meaningfully streamline their permitting processes.
00:44:26 Katherine Einstein
And so I want to see more communities follow the great example that Lexington has set, which shows us that like if we streamline these permitting processes, building is actually possible and so.
00:44:37 Katherine Einstein
I want to see more housing getting built and I want to see that potential of public land unlocked by the state government so that we see those deeply affordable units getting permitted on public land.
00:44:46 Michelle Moran
Yes.
00:44:47 Aja Kennedy
And just to tack on to what Katie was saying about hopefully more units being produced under MBTA communities, hoping also that some of those units might be affordable to lower moderate income households. And one of the Boston indicators up zone updates blurbs that we have, we talked a little bit about affordability concerns with MBTA communities because.
00:45:08 Aja Kennedy
There is no requirement that you know the zoning regulation require that that units be below market rate, but some communities can opt in to have their inclusionary zoning restrictions apply to those MBTA communities zones.
00:45:19 Aja Kennedy
So there’s.There’s not really a clear cut across the board consistent expectation of what affordability will look like in these different zones that municipalities have defined under MBTA communities. But I’m hoping that some of the housing that is hopefully produced under this these new regulations will be affordable to lower moderate income families.
00:45:43 Alina Michelewicz
That’s awesome.
00:45:48 Alina Michelewicz
That’s great.
00:45:45 Alina Michelewicz
I think that’s a great note to end on, so hopefully we can reconnect in a year on the housing report card and we’ll see some some good progress there.
00:45:52 Aja Kennedy
Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully we’ll have good news to report on progress next year.
00:45:55 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah.
00:45:56 Katherine Einstein
Every year we do this report thinking we’re gonna find something optimistic. We actually thought public land would be like an optimistic story. And I don’t know why, why we did.
00:46:04 Katherine Einstein
But yeah, maybe next year we’ll have something good to report.
00:46:08 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, you’ll see some progress.
00:46:09 Alina Michelewicz
I mean, all the efforts not for not, yeah.
00:46:10 Aja Kennedy
Thank you so much.
00:46:13 Alina Michelewicz
You Aja and Katherine.
00:46:14 Alina Michelewicz
This was really a great conversation. I learned a lot.
00:46:16 Alina Michelewicz
It’s awesome and thank you for your work on the report card as well.
00:46:17 Michelle Moran
Yeah.
00:46:20 Alina Michelewicz
Work. Thank you.
00:46:21 Aja Kennedy
Thank you.
00:46:22 Alina Michelewicz
Thank you to Aja Kennedy and Katherine Levine Einstein.
00:46:25 Alina Michelewicz
It was great to have them both on the podcast to talk about the Greater Boston Housing report card.
00:46:30 Alina Michelewicz
These are put out annually by the Boston indicators via the Boston Foundation. You can find the reports this year’s and the prior years’, as well as many other reports around demographics, immigration, racial wealth on the Boston Foundation’s website in the reports section.
00:46:46 Alina Michelewicz
We hope you’ll check that report out and also check out the show notes for the article from the Boston Globe and some of the other resources that we mentioned.
00:46:54 Alina Michelewicz
There’s a lot of great information here and as we mentioned, many great graphs! See you next time.
00:46:57 Michelle Moran
For more information on what we spoke about on today’s episode the show notes and transcript are available at newecology.org/buildingwell-podcast. You can find more information on Boston Indicators and the Boston Foundation, including the Greater Boston Housing report card at.
00:47:15 Michelle Moran
Tbf.org you can also find them on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or Vimeo at the Boston Foundation. You can find New Ecology on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X at new ecology inc.
00:47:30 Michelle Moran
See you on the next episode!
00:47:32 Molly Craft
This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.
00:47:36 Michelle Moran
The season 1 BuildingWell podcast committee at New Ecology, is led and organized by Alina Michelewicz and Michelle Moran, with Molly Craft and Michael Abdelmessih .
00:47:45
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