UPDATE: One of the benefits of our new website, as well as our new media partnerships, is the ability to have timely updates on stories that appear in CommonWealth magazine. Case in point is our joint effort with the FOX Undercover investigative unit at WFXT-TV (Channel 25) on the behemoth that is the Boston Redevelopment […]
Housing
Posted inEconomy
Zeroing in on the BRA
The Boston Redevelopment Authority isn’t easy to write about. The agency wears so many hats (regulator, landlord, banker, developer) and is involved in so many things (city planning, real estate, economic development, housing, and job training) that reporters tend to get overwhelmed and give up. I became intrigued with the BRA during last fall’s mayoral […]
Posted inEconomy, Education, The Download
More affordable housing not the answer for Gateway Cities
The Bay State's older industrial cities are suffering from weak housing markets and high concentrations of poverty. So does it really make sense to "fix" these cities by adding more and more affordable housing units? MassINC senior research associate Benjamin Forman poses the question in Sunday's Boston Globe. Among the unintended effects of current housing […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Nevada underwater, Bay State relatively dry
The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly one in four American home mortgage holders owe more than their property are worth in today's market. Nationally, 22.6 percent of mortgage holders are "underwater," but that figure is a staggering 65.0 percent in Nevada, 47.9 percent in Arizona, 44.7 percent in Florida, 37.3 percent in Michigan, and […]
Posted inEconomy
Foreclosure limbo continues for retiree in Dorchester
the good news for Helen Williams is that two years after receiving an initial foreclosure notice, she hasn’t lost her house. The bad news is that she still doesn’t know whether she will be able to keep it. The 71-year-old retiree, whose case was spotlighted earlier this year in CommonWealth (“Broken Homes,” Winter ’09), is […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Slow housing growth in Mass., but better than Michigan
The Census Bureau has just released its newest estimates of housing units by state, and Massachusetts is pretty far down the list in terms of creating new homes. You can view or download the complete data here. Massachusetts gained 113,439 housing units from April 2000 to July 2008, for an increase in total housing stock […]
Posted inEconomy
Banks balk at short sales of underwater homes
with banks bleeding red ink under the weight of massive losses on home loans, you would think lenders would be scrambling for every dollar they can squeeze out of the devalued houses they hold mortgages on. But when it comes to minimizing mortgage losses, housing advocates and real estate agents say banks often can’t get […]
Posted inEconomy, Environment, The Download
When green is not “green”
"Green" may be the most elastic word of the new century. Once signifying a color midway between blue and yellow, “green” has morphed to refer to anything that could possibly be construed as having a positive (or less negative) impact on the planet. Enter a language problem: some areas that are literally green (lush grassy […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Home builders deem Worcester “80 percent affordable”
The Worcester area has the most affordable housing stock in New England, according to new data from the National Association of Home Builders. The group's Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) estimated that 79.5 percent of the area's homes sold in the last quarter of 2008 were affordable to families making the median household income of $76,900. Thanks to falling […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Housing starts hit “record” low in 2008
Housing construction in the US hit an "all-time low" in December, according to new data from the National Association of Home Builders. (The definition of "all-time" is not clear; there must have been more housing starts last month than in December 1908.) The figures for all of 2008 were no better: On an annual basis, […]