Home lottos reconsidered in affordability squeeze

Carolyn Lane, on a salary of less than $50,000 a year, moved in May into one of Boston’s most luxurious, new rental complexes. She has access to a rooftop pool, two gyms and an indoor dog-relieving station – and pays one-third of what it costs her neighbors for the same one-bedroom layout.

“It’s a slice of heaven,” said Lane, who has a monthly rent of $1,190 after winning an affordable-housing lottery at the 315-unit Ink Block apartments. The administrative assistant was one of 544 entrants for just 41 discounted residences.

The Boston policy requiring developers to accommodate lower-income residents in even the most expensive buildings is being scrutinized as cities struggle to provide affordable housing. Helping lottery winners such as Lane live in swanky digs limits the construction of properties elsewhere that can accommodate more people, said Barry Bluestone, an economist at Northeastern University.

“It’s a nice gesture but it does virtually nothing to solve the housing crisis,” said Bluestone, founding director of Northeastern’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy in Boston. “There are a lot of areas where it would be cheaper to build middle-income housing.”

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Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is considering changes to the city’s policy requiring that 13 percent of units in new rental and condominium buildings be for moderate-income residents. The city is trying to determine under what circumstances developers may be allowed to build affordable properties elsewhere or pay into a housing fund instead of including the cheaper units on-site, said Sheila Dillon, Boston’s housing chief.

For Boston, in the midst of one of the biggest luxury-construction booms since the Back Bay was built in the 1800s, the question is whether the inclusionary zoning program designed to widen housing opportunities is helping as many people as it could.

“If you’re looking at the numbers, it makes more financial sense to build more units on cheaper land,” said Rachel Meltzer, an assistant professor of urban policy at the New School in New York. “But that undermines one of the goals of inclusionary zoning, which is economic inclusion — to counter the concentration of poverty.”

Almost 500 U.S. municipalities have inclusionary zoning policies, which began in the suburbs and migrated in the 2000s to costly urban areas, where they were adopted in place of vanishing federal housing subsidies, said Robert Hickey, senior research associate at the nonprofit National Housing Conference in Washington. Smaller cities such as Pittsburgh and Nashville, Tenn., are now considering proposals as housing costs soar.

“The goal is to harness this new growth in luxury housing to build in some affordability for the broad middle that earns too much to qualify for federal housing assistance but too little to afford what’s available,” Hickey said. •

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