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A tale of two housing markets: Boston, other progressive cities and states struggle to produce new homes, even as red states boom
Just call it a case of the blue state housing blues.
Construction of new apartments and homes has all but ground to a halt in Boston while statewide, numbers are just starting to modestly bounce back after a big tumble following the interest rate shock of 2022 and 2023, federal and city housing data shows.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has blamed the collapse on interest rates and construction costs, factors that have certainly weighed on housing development across the country.
Yet that doesn’t explain why some red states and cities have come roaring back, while others, despite also seeing a decline, continue to churn out housing at rates that Boston and many other blue cities and states would die for.
Housing construction has bounced back - and bounced back big - in Austin, a fellow university town in one of the reddest states in the country, while rents there have plunged by 22 percent, according to Bloomberg News.
Developers rolled out an astounding 50,000 new apartments, condos and homes in Austin over the course of 2023 and 2024.
City officials slashed approval times for new housing projects and loosened up restrictions on height and the number of units that can be built on a single lot, the Bloomberg piece notes.
Last year, by contrast, Boston issued building permits for just a little over 1,700 units, a 50 percent decline from 2022 and the lowest overall total since at least 2018, city records show.
By last fall, new residential construction was down to a trickle in the city, with just 35 new units in November and another 60 in December.
At the state level, the picture doesn’t look much better, either.
Texas issued building permits for more than 225,000 housing units last year, compared to less than 15,000 in Massachusetts, federal data shows.
The Massachusetts total is about what Jacksonville, a single Florida city, has built over the past two years.
The contrast between lagging blue cities and states and their red counterparts isn’t lost on local contractors and developers.
In fact, a number of them, like John Moriarty, president of Winchester-based contractor, John Moriarty & Associates, are now busy building housing in other states and regions where costs are lower and the regulatory burden is much lighter.
That means more predictability and getting approvals for projects in months instead of years, said Moriarty, who for the first time in a long time has no major projects gearing up to start in the Boston area.
“We are busy as blazes in Florida,” with Northern Virginia “busy as well,” Moriarty told Contrarian Boston.
Still, if it’s any consolation to the Wu administration, another progressive bastion is actually doing worse than Boston when it comes to producing housing.
That would be San Francisco, which issued building permits for only 750 new housing units last year, federal stats show.
Hmm, maybe not all tariffs are bad: In WBUR interview, Warren acknowledges role for targeted tariffs aimed at bringing pharma manufacturing to Massachusetts from China
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been blasting the Trump tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which are now poised to take effect on Tuesday.
However, Warren was for tariffs before she was against them.
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