There’s been some more parsing of that recent Census data on Boston’s declining population, more than I can gather or digest right now. If people are wondering what all the handwriging is about, it’s that the data captures several narrative strands that people are concerned about lately: the weak economy, the change in character of many of the city’s neighborhoods, or the further move of Boston toward a Paris model, with a bourgeois center and working class periphery.
But one part of the handwringing I don’t exactly get is the worry that high housing costs are driving people away. After all, the flip side of someone being priced out of the market is someone buying in. High prices mean high demand relative to supply. It’s not as if the city has tons of housing units going vacant. Say that our economy was roaring and that people now forgoing or leaving the city could afford high rents or purchase costs. Where would they live? Realistically speaking, we’re not going to be adding to the housing supply any faster than we are today. That leaves only two possibilities: people find someway to live more densely in existing housing units (i.e. roommates) and/or people move out of the city. Either way, housing prices get bid up further in the process.
I don’t mean to be sanguine about the displacement of people that the housing market accomplishes. But it really is a mechanism of that displacement not its ultimate cause. And given the rapid boom of the 1990s and a more or less stagnant housing supply, something had to give.
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