Rent prices in neighborhoods surrounding Tufts are rising rapidly, raising concerns for students and local residents alike. In Massachusetts, a minimum wage worker must clock 120 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom rental home.
“There is no place in the United States where a minimum wage job will get a family affordable housing,” Laurie Goldman, a senior lecturer in the department of urban and environmental policy and planning, explained.
Massachusetts has the second-highest housing wage, or the hourly wage a full-time worker needs to make to afford a reasonable rental home, in the country. To afford two-bedroom housing, a full-time worker needs to make $44.84 an hour. Near Tufts, this number is even higher, with an average housing wage of approximately $65 an hour.
“Anyone I know that is searching independently and isn’t inheriting a lease is paying $1200 or more,” Natalie Meulenbroek, a sophomore who recently signed a lease in the area for the upcoming year, said.
Kit Collins, vice president of the Medford City Council, noted the growing unaffordability in the area.
“You shouldn’t have to have two six-digit incomes in a household to be able to live here, or afford to buy a home here,” she said, “but unfortunately, displacement has been going on for years.”
One problem Collins noted could be contributing to increased housing prices is that housing is increasingly owned by external corporations and not local residents.
“They don’t have any incentive to keep housing prices human-scale,” Collins explained.
Meulenbroek speculated that the landlords surrounding Tufts may also be taking advantage of Tufts’ limited supply of on-campus housing.
“They know that Tufts doesn’t guarantee off-campus housing, so students need to find a place to live, and people are really preying on that stress and that insecurity and think we’re a little bit naive. I think it’s very predatory,” she said. “If [the rate of rent increase] is linear, I don’t even know how anyone could justify living off campus next year if it’s just going to continue to increase.”
Goldman suggested that increasing the housing supply could be one way to address this issue.
“One way of getting more supply in a finite space is to build bigger. Build in other places where you haven’t had housing, or build in places where there is housing but build more densely,” she said.
The Medford Planning Committee has been working with a zoning consultant since the beginning of the year to address this issue. Collins, who is collaborating with the committee, elaborated on the project.
“One of my main goals with the project … is to go neighborhood by neighborhood, corridor by corridor, and say, ‘OK, where in each neighborhood does it make sense to make it easier for developers to add density?’” she said. “Let’s change our zoning so that it’s easier for us to work with, and ideally recruit, really good developers to come in and build more homes in Medford.”
Additionally, Collins mentioned several ongoing projects to renovate Medford Housing Authority properties. Specifically, they are adding height to towers in Medford Square and renovating the Walkling Court in Hillsides.
“That is one of the most exciting things that we’ve gotten to approve or oversee,” Collins described. “Not only are they increasing the number of units within that development, but they’re renovating existing units, adding new units and creating a space that will have really high-quality, affordable units for people with disabilities and households that include people with disabilities.”
In addition to increasing the housing supply to address this issue, Collins also believes that bringing back rent control could be a crucial solution for the surrounding area. She explained that rent control was illegalized on the state level many years ago, but that it could be a key mitigator for increasing housing prices.
“Until we have reasonable local tools to make it so that 20% rent hikes are no longer allowable … It’d be really hard to keep people in homes until we have a tool to say, ‘You know what, you can’t price stuff to force people out of their apartments,’” Collins said.
“It’s really more appropriate to let communities decide for themselves how to handle policies within the community,” she explained. “If rent control were to be legalized, that’s not to say that every city would be forced to implement the same policy. It’s merely putting the controls back into the hands of communities to say, ‘Is this something that we think we need, that we think would help us?’ If so, let’s craft a policy that works for us.”
While creating more housing, rezoning and fighting for the return of rent control are important factors for stabilizing rent prices, Goldman stressed that there remains much to be done.
“The gap between what we need and what there is, or what can be built in the near future, is so big that we’ve got to be thinking about how to do a whole lot more,” she said.
