Somerville ditches police/fire palace plan | Northeastern student reporters get the scoop but not the credit | Wu playing fast and loose with housing numbers | Boston biz leaders decry bad timing of tough new green regs |
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Funny math: Amid housing slump, Boston’s mayor stretches the facts to claim she has fostered a record-shattering building boom
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu may be a lot of things, but the housing mayor she’s not.
Construction of new housing, especially market-rate units, has plunged under Wu to levels not seen in years, as her administration has piled regulatory requirement upon regulatory requirement on developers struggling to get projects off the ground in a tough financing environment.
City officials issued building permits for just 177 new units as 2024 wound down, making it the worst four-month stretch in at least the past six years, city records show.
Yet you wouldn’t know it from reading this gem of political truthiness on the city’s website, “Housing Initiatives Under Mayor Wu.”
The mayor, who is up for reelection this year and faces a challenge from Josh Kraft, claims “nearly 20,000 housing units have been built or started construction” during her first three years in office.
But the math does not come anywhere close to supporting the mayor’s claim.
Last year saw just over 1,700 new apartments, condos and homes break ground, with a total of roughly 7,600 units during Wu’s years in offices. And 7,600 is not anywhere close to 20,000.
However, Wu appears to be counting housing units that started construction during the Walsh and short-lived Janey administrations, and which came on line over the last three years, a review of the numbers by Contrarian Boston finds.
Wu also makes some pretty dubious claims about the supposedly record number of affordable housing units that have been created under her administration.
“The Wu administration has created more affordable housing and helped more families become homeowners than during any preceding 3-year period since 1999,” according to the description of the mayor’s glorious housing accomplishments on the city’s website.
Now it’s true that the uber progressive mayor has signaled her main priority is building greater numbers of affordable units, including public housing and affordable-set asides in market-rate buildings.
Yet with the big drop-off in overall housing construction, this claim also seems implausible.
That is, unless you count all of the new apartments being built in the revamp of Charlestown’s Bunker Hill public housing complex as affordable, including the market-rate ones.
“Based on the data BPI is looking at, the Housing Report released by the mayor last week is not an accurate reflection of housing production in Boston,” Greg Maynard, executive director of the Boston Policy Institute, told Contrarian Boston.
It would all be rather funny were it not for the fact that at a time when Boston and the rest of the state and country desperately need more housing, the leader of one of the nation’s major cities is trying to pretend there is no problem at all.
Now tell that to all the union construction workers wondering when their next job and paycheck will be, or the hungry contractors scrambling to look for work as construction sites across Boston fall silent.
The final nail in the coffin? Purged of its recalcitrant chair, Wu zoning board approves tough new green energy regs that could further depress already anemic levels of housing construction
Housing starts in Boston fell to their lowest level in years in 2024, but that hasn’t stopped the Wu administration from barreling ahead with an ill-timed set of regulations.
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