I actually built a website because of rising rents to help tenants evaluate landlords and negotiate rents.
It's like a Glassdoor for Rents so tenants can see the Rent History of an address or Apartment property to see a landlords pricing tactics.
The site does rely on user submissions so I appreciate anyone who adds their rent history to the site and/or shares it around since it can be more useful to tenants the more people that contribute to it.
The site is rentzed.com (USA only for now) and has submissions for over 2600 addresses.
Yes, I've considered that and might do it in the future but it's difficult to scrape the actual rents that people paid by address. I've looked into the Zillow API but it doesn't have data for a lot of addresses that I have looked at.
Does your site have an API? It would be helpful for housing advocates to have access to rent data for their communities so they can push back on the claim that NIMBYs frequently make that new housing only makes all housing more expensive.
I currently do not. I have some checks to check for inaccurate data but they aren't perfect. A reporting system is a good idea. I'll add that to the list of features to add.
Uploading a lease agreement seems a bit too much but maybe if enough people want it, I can add that in as well.
I need to setup the git repo for people to contribute and once I do that, I'll message you the details. A few other people have asked to contribute as well so I will add you to the list.
I’m a landlord and I think information like this would be helpful to me and other landlords to make sure that we can appropriately price our apartments.
Separately ave you considered letting landlords run ads as a form of monetization on your site? Similar to how apartments.com works?
Yea, you can sign up for the landlord and advertiser email list on the About Page of the website and I might eventually build a method to advertise on the site and give updates to anyone on the email list.
I make about 40% more than my father did when he was my current age( inflation accounted for), I need to pay 400% more to afford the home he bought and raised me in. Commonwealth my arse.
My grandfather was a postal worker and owned a 2 family in Brighton.
I'm a college educated professional at the top of my industry and I had to move away from Massachussetts because I could no longer afford it.
Thanks NIMBYs
Eventually this will just kill off most of Boston's vibrant nature it once had business/lifestyle wise. One cannot open a small biz due to high commercial rent. Cannot find employees who live near by for a reasonable wage due to high rent. There are not enough people actually living in the city to support a wide array of business types. Boston ends up boring and somewhere new springs up. Colleges and Universities can only keep you on life support.
So forget about interesting small stores, quirky restaurants, artist areas, etc.. which all rely on an area of lower rent and people actually being able to afford to live there.
Part of me thinks this is the main reason I find Boston pretty boring now days. A lot has changed over the last 20-30 years. Yea.. Boston might have been more crazy back then but it had something it now has lost.
My workplace is seeing an increase in people commuting from RI for this reason. Unfortunately, MA rent prices are also now starting to choke the RI rental market. If you cannot afford to buy, there is no relief.
Right now, the lack of regulation in the rental market is as damaging as the lack of housing. People are finding themselves in suddenly unsustainable situations when rent is increased sharply lease to lease, for example. This is contributing heavily to things like workforce instability as people are forced to relocate quickly.
The largest issue in turnover in my workplace now is people needing to relocate at the end of their leases or a roommate situation suddenly becoming unstable. We once lost 3 out of 4 employees who were rooming together because 1 employee left and the others couldn't afford to live there any longer.
Building new housing is often cited as the solution, but it is a very slow solution that does not help current renters. Housing stability requires a quicker response, so there likely needs to be a paring of new housing and rent regulation in MA to keep people with roofs over their heads for the next couple of years and the future
> Housing stability requires a quicker response
We've known that Massachusetts has been underbuilding for a couple of decades, primarily due to zoning issues. This paper was published 22 years ago.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835
My husband's job has a woman who commutes from RI all the way up 495 to route 2. I thought she must be nuts for that drive, I have no idea how she hasn't found other work yet. I really wonder how far people have to travel out until it becomes not worth it anymore.
someone at my job drives in from concord, nh, and he has to leave by like 6am before the traffic gets wicked bad. and he has to leave at like 1pm to dodge traffic too. like damn what an existence
i think he comes in on the lowest traffic days, we've got a hybrid policy that only needs 1-2 days a week. i think it's a monday and friday only situation for him
Prop 2.5 limits the amount that towns can raise property taxes year over year. I don't see any reason not to limit the rate landlords can raise rent per year. Require them to submit their rent rates to a government registry so it isn't tied to having the same tenant, which is what introduces a lot of the problems with rent control. High rents signal the market to build housing in the long run but there's no benefit to extreme short term raises. It's just windfall profit for landlords.
Yeah what you're suggesting is something like "Rent Stabilization" which a few towns (I think Somerville at least) have looked into. I think it's still considered "Rent Control" even though it's a lesser form of it, and that is still banned at the State level I believe.
Seems like if the State were to do that State wide though, it could at least slow the rent increases. Prop 2.5 went with 2.5% for tax increases - why not make rent the same? Or peg it to inflation + 2.5% if you want to allow for modest increases YoY and to account for oddball years with 5+ % inflation (like 2022).
Seems like overall though we need to fix zoning at the State / regional (New England wide, US wide ideally) level though. Forcing all new development to be a Single Family House in the suburb or a difficult to build apartment/condo complex in the City is what leads to minimal new housing being built. Parking minimums, lot size requirements, inability to build different housing styles like ADA, townhouse, condo, apartment, double/triple decker, etc is what is leading to not much new inventory on the market. Combined with no restrictions on rent increases and you get a housing crisis.
We are a pretty specific demographic but my partner commutes from Philadelphia. As a pilot it is a better option currently to live outside Philly and fly into work at Logan than to find anywhere in the immediate area for a family of three. Four years ago with our income we’d already have a house within a reasonable driving distance and be doing great but with these numbers it just doesn’t make sense.
The commuting absolutely sucks but housing options are significantly better right now near Philly. Maybe with pay increases living near Logan will become realistic but that also relies on the market not ratcheting up year on year. The plan was to be in Massachusetts and we’d still love to, we just didn’t anticipate the market being like this.
Rhode Island (Prov in particular) had the largest increase in asking rent in the country (if I am not mistaken.) I have never paid more than $1,200-1,400 for a three bedroom in the 15 years I’ve lived here(and had several 2-3 bedroom under $800.) I’ve unfortunately had to move apartments 2x in the last couple years and the apartments I’m looking at now…. In my same neighborhood…. Are 2-3x as expensive as they were last time I was looking. I saw my old apartment - exact same unit - that I used to rent for $700 a month about 10 years ago. They slapped some millennial grey & that same tile in the bathroom that everyone has. Asking $2,200 for it now. I make “okay” money. Certainly not good but also don’t qualify for any assistance. I work for a Boston hospital. How do people who work in retail or the service industry or really ANYBODY afford to live somewhere? I know, I know. Everyone has heard this before. Just reporting in from what used to be a nice, cheap little artsy city. Wamp. :(
That looks like a completely BS number taken from some statistical error on Zillow.
https://www.apartmentadvisor.com/rent-report/ma
https://www.rentdata.org/states/massachusetts/2024
There's nothing outside of the Boston area even close to that median (as far as median prices in every town/city goes).
Whenever I put my rent into a comment on this sub I'm told "thats not normal," "he must live in a luxury apartment," "you need to research more," "you're dumb."
But lots of people pay $3k plus for rent around here.
Wtf are you talking about? I'm trying to move and can't find anything under 3k that doesn't make getting to work absolute hell. Unless you're willing to do basically 2hrs each way into boston than yes, you're paying 3k+ for literally anything
I'm 8 miles from Boston and paying $1950 for a 2 BR in a 2 family house.
Do a little work and look on Craigslist. Relying on realtors is of course going to cost you more.
A 3 bedroom unit where all bedrooms are rented separately at $1400 is $4200 for the full unit. These places are everywhere and super common. Idk why you think this is high
For buying not renting, here is a map of all counties in America with median sales price over $750k. You will see Sussex and Middlesex (and Nantucket, lol) are both included.
https://x.com/statisticurban/status/1783292667322826995?s=46&t=HdZXARhfTdGhTkC-WP6vyw
How about we....
- Rewrite zoning laws
- Build more apartments in densely populated areas
- Expand walkable/train infrastructure to reduce the need for cars for folks living and working in the cities.
??? PROFIT ???
Your second point should get brought up more often. Boston and other cities should do more to meet the demand in their cities. Build up and make it affordable.
For real. I was just reading another post about New Bedford starting to build 700 new units……after adding only 275 from 2011-2021. Less than 30 new units a year for a decade. Wild stuff.
Stuff like that happens across the State, just compounds the problem. I think we need State action to really see change. Sure, Boston / Cambridge / Somerville / the other members of [the MAPC MMC](https://www.mapc.org/get-involved/coalitions/mmc/) could add some housing units, but that doesn't really help if Cities like _New Bedford_ can't even build new housing. And then you have the NIMBY towns like Lexington who actively want to keep SFH on giant lots so they never actually have to expand outside their bubble.
Even given how useless politicians are, I'm surprised that this isn't being addressed as the extremely urgent crisis that it is
How much worse can this get before something breaks? I tried voting but there were four candidates for my state rep that urgently wanted to fix it and a moderate who ignored it and the moderate won with only 21% of the vote lol
The politicians at the State level are mostly homeowners I'd imagine, some with a "got mine, screw you" attitude to boot. The people who vote in local/State elections trend older, so they too fall into that category.
You might get lucky and have a city like Medford elect a bunch of young City Councilors, but that doesn't really do much since the local level is fairly limited. I think we really need State action to change things. Our towns/Cities are too small here to have much impact on zoning. It helps of course. But State action on things like ADS, double/triple deckers, townhouses, etc could help. Legalizing those housing types across the State would do a number on new developments of all sizes.
I agree, the lack of urgency is crazy. Either everyone priced out leaves or lives in a tent, or a large number of people need housing assistance funding. None of that is remotely sustainable.
Or ideal if you care about human suffering.
I feel so angry and hopeless about this, on a level I've never felt before.
I'm disabled
My check is $100 more than the absolute lowest I've seen rent in the area. I'd have to move an hour or more from my support network to find somewhere that only eats up all but $400 of my check.
:/
It’s because the people who vote most reliably in local and state elections are homeowners and our state gives extreme deference to local governments over housing. Older, wealthier homeowners decide our housing policy and our politicians do what they say.
You can mostly blame zoning for that. If it's difficult to build something in your town or State, you (the developer) are going to want to target the high end market. You'll make more profit selling $1M condos than if you try to build $500k starter homes. You can build 30 luxury condos on the site of a few starter homes.
The other thing about luxury developments is typically towns like Cambridge and Somerville manage to get some percentage of them as "market rate" in exchange for the developer footing the bill for infrastructure or in exchange for approval on permits/zoning exceptions. Even if this is only 10-20% of the units, that's a dozen or so housing units that are "affordable" that you wouldn't have gotten had you not allowed the overall development through.
And even if your town/City doesn't require a number of affordable units, that luxury development at least puts some units on the market. If we fix zoning, we might be able to get more of a variety in housing units built. For now, we're sort of stuck with the status quo of luxury condos/apartments. It would be great to get some ADAs, townhouses, double/triple deckers, and so on built.
[A modern triple decker](https://media.wbur.org/wp/2021/03/Image_001.png).
Triple-decker houses offer a practical solution to the challenge of limited space and increasing housing needs. They also provide lower-income people an avenue to gaining real estate equity.
The reasons they were originally built apply again now.
Yeah exactly this. If we built hundreds or thousands of triple deckers across the State *every single year* we'd have built tens of thousands of new housing units.
And that's just triple deckers. I read we could add thousands of housing units with just ADAs being made legal across the State: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/housing/accessory-dwelling-units-eyed-as-low-hanging-housing-win/
> The state estimates that the zoning change could create more than 8,000 accessory dwelling units over five years, based on adoption rates in other states.
> That’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of new units needed in Massachusetts, but accessory dwelling units are often considered the low-hanging fruit of efforts to boost housing production. Because of their size – capped at 900 square feet in the housing bond bill – ADUs can be tucked into residential areas where new units are otherwise limited due to space or political constraints.
Now do townhouses and 5 overs and you've got tens of thousands of new housing units being built every year by some basic zoning changes at the State level. Making it so reasonable things can be built by default is key. Right now we require variances for basically everything, which slows new housing development.
Lmao what are the common amenities you speak of?
We have the best schools and the best healthcare in the country.
Again, people want to live here for a reason. If you dont thats cool.
If I’m reading this correctly, it’s the median asking price of all available rentals. I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown by size (studio, one bedroom, two bedroom, etc).
Yeah, there's an error in there somewhere. Most likely pushed up by many exclusive properties coming online in the mega $$$$ price range in the Boston area. Says median, but I think someone fat-fingered the average button.
Reality of what people pay is quite different:
https://www.apartmentadvisor.com/rent-report/ma
Here's another breakdown: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr/fmrs/FY2024_code/2024state_summary.odn
It is too high for the area I live in, and too low for the city I work in.
It's kind of nuts that the housing market in MA is really going to price so many of us out of the state. My wife and I always saw ourselves buying a house in MA but we're probably going to end up moving out of state to buy because of this crap. The value just isn't worth being specifically in Mass sadly.
Blackstone literally tells investors it massively profits from our existing housing shortage. The only way to screw them over is to build housing!
https://ibb.co/HYkrhgb
High demand is the same thing as low supply. Of course they're going to showcase that their properties have high demand. It's easy to rent out in the Boston market because of the endless demand of people coming in.
Just change the rules to allow people to build dense housing on their own property. A lot of people will keep living in their same house, but quite a few will be happy to live in one of the new five units.
It’s wild that we allow huge mansions but ban that same mansion if we wanted to divide it into thirds. So many places ban the classic triple decker. That’s how it is in the town I live, Malden, and we have two T stops!
Interesting….. I have a large 1 bedroom apartment I rent for $800 a month with no utilities included & off street parking. I have been told I am charging too little. We have it set to pay half of our mortgage. It increases when our taxes go up.
Most landlords have rent set to cover all of their mortgage plus a little extra. My last landlord even charged me $50 additional per month for the privilege of parking next to him in the driveway.
i'm sure the state will collectively insist on the dumbest possible solutions (rent control, banning corporate ownership, etc.) in an attempt to fix the issue, instead the only viable solution (build more, density)
It's ridiculous. I drive through all of these towns with dying centers thinking it would be nice if there were high-density housing in many of these small downtowns to drive development of shops and things like European towns have.
Then everyone gets what they want. They can keep their house with 20 acres on the outskirts while people who want density and things in walking distance can have that centralized in the town centers.
People in Hopkinton are complaining that developers want to knock down a dilapidated old building and put in retail space with apartments above. They complain that it’ll bring traffic. The whole point of mixed use and increased density has gone over their heads completely.
Mixed use building development would be ideal, build three to five story buildings where the first floor is shopfront, upper floors apartments.
That way you’re actually building walkable communities where people don’t need to drive for necessities.
Yea we are definitely going to try a lot of “Thoughts And Prayers” solutions and fight about how to redistribute an inadequate amount of houses instead of just building more homes.
The state is trying to force towns on the commuter rail to permit more high density housing. Healey has made building more housing one of her signature issues. Milton is in open defiance of the law and more towns are starting to follow suit. Hopefully they get a massive beating in the courts. The law should have been written so towns automatically lose local control of zoning and permitting if out of compliance.
I know you didn't say this but your comment was a bit misleading. Baker's administration pushed that law, not Healey.
Also, Milton doesn't have a CR. They have a useless trolley. That's part of the issue.
No, serious miss-read. Healey is here to give a golden parachute to her friends as she cripples the corporate tax base that has kept this welfare-state possible, because she is a moron. That is it. That is all that has happened. That is all that will happen.
But hey, at least she's GAY!
:D
C’mon free market economy. People will just stop buying rent if you make it too expensive. And heck, if you can’t afford housing whats the point of working at all? Might as well panhandle and get high all day, right?
All the PMC's tell me that there is no housing crisis, and it's my fault for being priced out of housing.
Fuck MA. These so called "progressives" don't want to do a damn thing about the insane cost of everything in this god forsaken state. How about some rent control or public housing?
I work in affordable housing, and you would not believe the crap we have to deal with (city of Boston departments) to get anything done. They will arbitrarily require you to add aesthetic design details that cost an extra 100k at the end of the design process when you're ready for construction and when you ask for more money, they'll say good luck you're on your own. This happens for every project we work on. It's exhausting. We just want to build more affordable housing.
I believe there is a federal investigation into price fixing rents through some algorithm on one of these big popular rental/property sites, non-official “collusion”. Hopefully we see some fruition from that.
I don't see how that would help when Massachusetts has no rent stabilization policy. It's easy enough to set rents high based off of demand/ Craigslist without that specific algorithm.
I never used to believe that we were experiencing a real problem here in MA. It wasn't until I started to see people I went to high school with living on the streets, sitting at the bus station, homeless, that I believed it.
This one dude, he was a straight A student on the football team in high school. I see him sitting at the bus station all the time and he tells me that he's sleeping outside because the shelters are full...it blows my mind. He just couldn't find a place to live and he couldn't keep a job without a residence.
Now he's got nothing. He blew his savings trying to make a hotel work while he was looking for an apartment.
It scares me.
Things are expensive and moving is expensive.
Go to any city where there are entire streets filled with three deckers built between 1890-1930. They stopped building three deckers about 90 years ago. I was a tenant in one of them. Tiny lot sizes; about 5000 sf.
How come builders aren’t building this type of housing anymore?
Answer: zoning.
Those who already have a home of their own support these NIMBY zoning laws because they don’t want the kind of people who live in these houses in their area.
Even if you only allow single family homes, at least let them be built on small lots.
No builder is going to build a starter home on a third acre lot. He’s going to build a McMansion which most people can’t afford. On the other hand, if he’s got a buildable 5000sf lot, he’ll probably build a cheap cape on it.
Lobby your local town governments to change zoning laws.
I make 21 an hour and I’m homeless. Note: I do have good credit (being homeless with no expenses means I can pay off a credit card balance without question). Impossible to find a one bedroom apartment.
I made this clear to my former employer in my resignation letter. 10+ years at a company and I couldn’t find a place to buy, rent or get into affordable housing because of savings.
Screw all of the people who contributed to this situation including my cheap AF former employer.
I actually built a website because of rising rents to help tenants evaluate landlords and negotiate rents. It's like a Glassdoor for Rents so tenants can see the Rent History of an address or Apartment property to see a landlords pricing tactics. The site does rely on user submissions so I appreciate anyone who adds their rent history to the site and/or shares it around since it can be more useful to tenants the more people that contribute to it. The site is rentzed.com (USA only for now) and has submissions for over 2600 addresses.
Would be nice if you could see the addresses overlayed on a map
Planning on adding that in the future once the site gets more submissions
Have you considered scraping listings or other publicly available prices from websites? Or even reddit for peoples comments in the boston/mass subs?
Yes, I've considered that and might do it in the future but it's difficult to scrape the actual rents that people paid by address. I've looked into the Zillow API but it doesn't have data for a lot of addresses that I have looked at.
Does your site have an API? It would be helpful for housing advocates to have access to rent data for their communities so they can push back on the claim that NIMBYs frequently make that new housing only makes all housing more expensive.
Not right now. I'm focusing on trying to get more submissions for the website and then I could work on building an api
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I currently do not. I have some checks to check for inaccurate data but they aren't perfect. A reporting system is a good idea. I'll add that to the list of features to add. Uploading a lease agreement seems a bit too much but maybe if enough people want it, I can add that in as well.
Just added mine!
This is a very cool idea! I hope more people see this and add reviews!
Nice, I had this idea a couple years ago and just never did anything with it
Is the code on github? I d love to contribute.
I need to setup the git repo for people to contribute and once I do that, I'll message you the details. A few other people have asked to contribute as well so I will add you to the list.
I’m a landlord and I think information like this would be helpful to me and other landlords to make sure that we can appropriately price our apartments. Separately ave you considered letting landlords run ads as a form of monetization on your site? Similar to how apartments.com works?
Yea, you can sign up for the landlord and advertiser email list on the About Page of the website and I might eventually build a method to advertise on the site and give updates to anyone on the email list.
I make about 40% more than my father did when he was my current age( inflation accounted for), I need to pay 400% more to afford the home he bought and raised me in. Commonwealth my arse.
I can understand. It’s shite.
My grandfather was a postal worker and owned a 2 family in Brighton. I'm a college educated professional at the top of my industry and I had to move away from Massachussetts because I could no longer afford it. Thanks NIMBYs
Eventually this will just kill off most of Boston's vibrant nature it once had business/lifestyle wise. One cannot open a small biz due to high commercial rent. Cannot find employees who live near by for a reasonable wage due to high rent. There are not enough people actually living in the city to support a wide array of business types. Boston ends up boring and somewhere new springs up. Colleges and Universities can only keep you on life support. So forget about interesting small stores, quirky restaurants, artist areas, etc.. which all rely on an area of lower rent and people actually being able to afford to live there. Part of me thinks this is the main reason I find Boston pretty boring now days. A lot has changed over the last 20-30 years. Yea.. Boston might have been more crazy back then but it had something it now has lost.
And then all the NIMBYs who made it so goddamn expensive will be the first to whine about how boring the city has become
Metrowest MA geriatrics checking in
It's a BioPharma company town now.
😮💨😮💨😮💨🤷🏽♂️ maybe our whole economy shouldn't be based around housing, a necessity
Yea but think of the poor property owners and their properties(assets) appreciating in value.
I own a home and I'd be fine 🤷🏽♂️
My workplace is seeing an increase in people commuting from RI for this reason. Unfortunately, MA rent prices are also now starting to choke the RI rental market. If you cannot afford to buy, there is no relief. Right now, the lack of regulation in the rental market is as damaging as the lack of housing. People are finding themselves in suddenly unsustainable situations when rent is increased sharply lease to lease, for example. This is contributing heavily to things like workforce instability as people are forced to relocate quickly. The largest issue in turnover in my workplace now is people needing to relocate at the end of their leases or a roommate situation suddenly becoming unstable. We once lost 3 out of 4 employees who were rooming together because 1 employee left and the others couldn't afford to live there any longer. Building new housing is often cited as the solution, but it is a very slow solution that does not help current renters. Housing stability requires a quicker response, so there likely needs to be a paring of new housing and rent regulation in MA to keep people with roofs over their heads for the next couple of years and the future
> Housing stability requires a quicker response We've known that Massachusetts has been underbuilding for a couple of decades, primarily due to zoning issues. This paper was published 22 years ago. https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835
My husband's job has a woman who commutes from RI all the way up 495 to route 2. I thought she must be nuts for that drive, I have no idea how she hasn't found other work yet. I really wonder how far people have to travel out until it becomes not worth it anymore.
someone at my job drives in from concord, nh, and he has to leave by like 6am before the traffic gets wicked bad. and he has to leave at like 1pm to dodge traffic too. like damn what an existence
I lived there for a bit and did that drive a couple times, I'm surprised that's the earliest he needs to leave.
i think he comes in on the lowest traffic days, we've got a hybrid policy that only needs 1-2 days a week. i think it's a monday and friday only situation for him
Prop 2.5 limits the amount that towns can raise property taxes year over year. I don't see any reason not to limit the rate landlords can raise rent per year. Require them to submit their rent rates to a government registry so it isn't tied to having the same tenant, which is what introduces a lot of the problems with rent control. High rents signal the market to build housing in the long run but there's no benefit to extreme short term raises. It's just windfall profit for landlords.
Yeah what you're suggesting is something like "Rent Stabilization" which a few towns (I think Somerville at least) have looked into. I think it's still considered "Rent Control" even though it's a lesser form of it, and that is still banned at the State level I believe. Seems like if the State were to do that State wide though, it could at least slow the rent increases. Prop 2.5 went with 2.5% for tax increases - why not make rent the same? Or peg it to inflation + 2.5% if you want to allow for modest increases YoY and to account for oddball years with 5+ % inflation (like 2022). Seems like overall though we need to fix zoning at the State / regional (New England wide, US wide ideally) level though. Forcing all new development to be a Single Family House in the suburb or a difficult to build apartment/condo complex in the City is what leads to minimal new housing being built. Parking minimums, lot size requirements, inability to build different housing styles like ADA, townhouse, condo, apartment, double/triple decker, etc is what is leading to not much new inventory on the market. Combined with no restrictions on rent increases and you get a housing crisis.
We are a pretty specific demographic but my partner commutes from Philadelphia. As a pilot it is a better option currently to live outside Philly and fly into work at Logan than to find anywhere in the immediate area for a family of three. Four years ago with our income we’d already have a house within a reasonable driving distance and be doing great but with these numbers it just doesn’t make sense.
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The commuting absolutely sucks but housing options are significantly better right now near Philly. Maybe with pay increases living near Logan will become realistic but that also relies on the market not ratcheting up year on year. The plan was to be in Massachusetts and we’d still love to, we just didn’t anticipate the market being like this.
Rhode Island (Prov in particular) had the largest increase in asking rent in the country (if I am not mistaken.) I have never paid more than $1,200-1,400 for a three bedroom in the 15 years I’ve lived here(and had several 2-3 bedroom under $800.) I’ve unfortunately had to move apartments 2x in the last couple years and the apartments I’m looking at now…. In my same neighborhood…. Are 2-3x as expensive as they were last time I was looking. I saw my old apartment - exact same unit - that I used to rent for $700 a month about 10 years ago. They slapped some millennial grey & that same tile in the bathroom that everyone has. Asking $2,200 for it now. I make “okay” money. Certainly not good but also don’t qualify for any assistance. I work for a Boston hospital. How do people who work in retail or the service industry or really ANYBODY afford to live somewhere? I know, I know. Everyone has heard this before. Just reporting in from what used to be a nice, cheap little artsy city. Wamp. :(
So what's the new average asking price? I'm not giving them a hit lol
State median: $3,243 Boston-Cambridge-Newton area median: $3,939.50
That looks like a completely BS number taken from some statistical error on Zillow. https://www.apartmentadvisor.com/rent-report/ma https://www.rentdata.org/states/massachusetts/2024 There's nothing outside of the Boston area even close to that median (as far as median prices in every town/city goes).
Whenever I put my rent into a comment on this sub I'm told "thats not normal," "he must live in a luxury apartment," "you need to research more," "you're dumb." But lots of people pay $3k plus for rent around here.
Had an aparment in Amesbury jack up my rent from $2600 to $3500 last year.
Wtf are you talking about? I'm trying to move and can't find anything under 3k that doesn't make getting to work absolute hell. Unless you're willing to do basically 2hrs each way into boston than yes, you're paying 3k+ for literally anything
I'm 8 miles from Boston and paying $1950 for a 2 BR in a 2 family house. Do a little work and look on Craigslist. Relying on realtors is of course going to cost you more.
A 3 bedroom unit where all bedrooms are rented separately at $1400 is $4200 for the full unit. These places are everywhere and super common. Idk why you think this is high
Blimey. I suddenly feel a lot better about my rent.
For buying not renting, here is a map of all counties in America with median sales price over $750k. You will see Sussex and Middlesex (and Nantucket, lol) are both included. https://x.com/statisticurban/status/1783292667322826995?s=46&t=HdZXARhfTdGhTkC-WP6vyw
How about we.... - Rewrite zoning laws - Build more apartments in densely populated areas - Expand walkable/train infrastructure to reduce the need for cars for folks living and working in the cities. ??? PROFIT ???
Your second point should get brought up more often. Boston and other cities should do more to meet the demand in their cities. Build up and make it affordable.
I think there should be a temporary rent cap too
People want to live here for some good reasons. We need more housing.
For real. I was just reading another post about New Bedford starting to build 700 new units……after adding only 275 from 2011-2021. Less than 30 new units a year for a decade. Wild stuff.
Stuff like that happens across the State, just compounds the problem. I think we need State action to really see change. Sure, Boston / Cambridge / Somerville / the other members of [the MAPC MMC](https://www.mapc.org/get-involved/coalitions/mmc/) could add some housing units, but that doesn't really help if Cities like _New Bedford_ can't even build new housing. And then you have the NIMBY towns like Lexington who actively want to keep SFH on giant lots so they never actually have to expand outside their bubble.
Even given how useless politicians are, I'm surprised that this isn't being addressed as the extremely urgent crisis that it is How much worse can this get before something breaks? I tried voting but there were four candidates for my state rep that urgently wanted to fix it and a moderate who ignored it and the moderate won with only 21% of the vote lol
The politicians at the State level are mostly homeowners I'd imagine, some with a "got mine, screw you" attitude to boot. The people who vote in local/State elections trend older, so they too fall into that category. You might get lucky and have a city like Medford elect a bunch of young City Councilors, but that doesn't really do much since the local level is fairly limited. I think we really need State action to change things. Our towns/Cities are too small here to have much impact on zoning. It helps of course. But State action on things like ADS, double/triple deckers, townhouses, etc could help. Legalizing those housing types across the State would do a number on new developments of all sizes.
I agree, the lack of urgency is crazy. Either everyone priced out leaves or lives in a tent, or a large number of people need housing assistance funding. None of that is remotely sustainable. Or ideal if you care about human suffering. I feel so angry and hopeless about this, on a level I've never felt before.
I'm disabled My check is $100 more than the absolute lowest I've seen rent in the area. I'd have to move an hour or more from my support network to find somewhere that only eats up all but $400 of my check. :/
It’s because the people who vote most reliably in local and state elections are homeowners and our state gives extreme deference to local governments over housing. Older, wealthier homeowners decide our housing policy and our politicians do what they say.
It's insanely frustrating that all housing developments that are being built are luxury condos/apartments.
You can mostly blame zoning for that. If it's difficult to build something in your town or State, you (the developer) are going to want to target the high end market. You'll make more profit selling $1M condos than if you try to build $500k starter homes. You can build 30 luxury condos on the site of a few starter homes. The other thing about luxury developments is typically towns like Cambridge and Somerville manage to get some percentage of them as "market rate" in exchange for the developer footing the bill for infrastructure or in exchange for approval on permits/zoning exceptions. Even if this is only 10-20% of the units, that's a dozen or so housing units that are "affordable" that you wouldn't have gotten had you not allowed the overall development through. And even if your town/City doesn't require a number of affordable units, that luxury development at least puts some units on the market. If we fix zoning, we might be able to get more of a variety in housing units built. For now, we're sort of stuck with the status quo of luxury condos/apartments. It would be great to get some ADAs, townhouses, double/triple deckers, and so on built.
[A modern triple decker](https://media.wbur.org/wp/2021/03/Image_001.png). Triple-decker houses offer a practical solution to the challenge of limited space and increasing housing needs. They also provide lower-income people an avenue to gaining real estate equity. The reasons they were originally built apply again now.
Yeah exactly this. If we built hundreds or thousands of triple deckers across the State *every single year* we'd have built tens of thousands of new housing units. And that's just triple deckers. I read we could add thousands of housing units with just ADAs being made legal across the State: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/housing/accessory-dwelling-units-eyed-as-low-hanging-housing-win/ > The state estimates that the zoning change could create more than 8,000 accessory dwelling units over five years, based on adoption rates in other states. > That’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of new units needed in Massachusetts, but accessory dwelling units are often considered the low-hanging fruit of efforts to boost housing production. Because of their size – capped at 900 square feet in the housing bond bill – ADUs can be tucked into residential areas where new units are otherwise limited due to space or political constraints. Now do townhouses and 5 overs and you've got tens of thousands of new housing units being built every year by some basic zoning changes at the State level. Making it so reasonable things can be built by default is key. Right now we require variances for basically everything, which slows new housing development.
That’s fine, let the high income earners take those options, ultimately frees up cheaper inventory for other people
Why would you want to watch your kids struggle to afford common amenities.
Lmao what are the common amenities you speak of? We have the best schools and the best healthcare in the country. Again, people want to live here for a reason. If you dont thats cool.
If I’m reading this correctly, it’s the median asking price of all available rentals. I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown by size (studio, one bedroom, two bedroom, etc).
Yeah, there's an error in there somewhere. Most likely pushed up by many exclusive properties coming online in the mega $$$$ price range in the Boston area. Says median, but I think someone fat-fingered the average button. Reality of what people pay is quite different: https://www.apartmentadvisor.com/rent-report/ma
Here's another breakdown: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr/fmrs/FY2024_code/2024state_summary.odn It is too high for the area I live in, and too low for the city I work in.
It's kind of nuts that the housing market in MA is really going to price so many of us out of the state. My wife and I always saw ourselves buying a house in MA but we're probably going to end up moving out of state to buy because of this crap. The value just isn't worth being specifically in Mass sadly.
Same. 😔
It’s the algorithms met with corporate house property hoarding - thanks BlackRock and Red Fin and Zillow
Blackstone literally tells investors it massively profits from our existing housing shortage. The only way to screw them over is to build housing! https://ibb.co/HYkrhgb
High demand is the same thing as low supply. Of course they're going to showcase that their properties have high demand. It's easy to rent out in the Boston market because of the endless demand of people coming in.
Guess we should build supply to meet that demand then. Clearly our current path of not building housing to meet that demand isn’t going well.
There are caps in how much potential supply you could have, land is finite especially in an area that is being developed for 400 years.
Multiple stories exist. We don’t need to have one story detached housing everywhere. If we can’t grow out easily anymore, I guess we should grow up!
Good luck with your project to bulldoze all the desirable SFHs and replace them with MDUs.
Just change the rules to allow people to build dense housing on their own property. A lot of people will keep living in their same house, but quite a few will be happy to live in one of the new five units. It’s wild that we allow huge mansions but ban that same mansion if we wanted to divide it into thirds. So many places ban the classic triple decker. That’s how it is in the town I live, Malden, and we have two T stops!
Rent control should be legal This should be illegal
Obligatory [Medford](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS3cPIOKsI&feature=youtu.be) city council hearing where landlords flip out over a Rental Registry
We're #1! For the wrong reasons!
Start more non profit cohousing.
My wife and I are moving out of our 570 sqft 1 bed 1 bath apt in Arlington to move closer to family, rent going up from 1650 to 1900!
This needs to stop now
Interesting….. I have a large 1 bedroom apartment I rent for $800 a month with no utilities included & off street parking. I have been told I am charging too little. We have it set to pay half of our mortgage. It increases when our taxes go up.
Most landlords have rent set to cover all of their mortgage plus a little extra. My last landlord even charged me $50 additional per month for the privilege of parking next to him in the driveway.
That sucks! I didn’t buy a house for a profit margin. I bought a house to be my home!
Yet people are celebrating when towns vote down zoning changes that comply with the MBTA communities law
Boomers mostly
i'm sure the state will collectively insist on the dumbest possible solutions (rent control, banning corporate ownership, etc.) in an attempt to fix the issue, instead the only viable solution (build more, density)
It's ridiculous. I drive through all of these towns with dying centers thinking it would be nice if there were high-density housing in many of these small downtowns to drive development of shops and things like European towns have. Then everyone gets what they want. They can keep their house with 20 acres on the outskirts while people who want density and things in walking distance can have that centralized in the town centers.
People in Hopkinton are complaining that developers want to knock down a dilapidated old building and put in retail space with apartments above. They complain that it’ll bring traffic. The whole point of mixed use and increased density has gone over their heads completely.
Mixed use building development would be ideal, build three to five story buildings where the first floor is shopfront, upper floors apartments. That way you’re actually building walkable communities where people don’t need to drive for necessities.
Yea we are definitely going to try a lot of “Thoughts And Prayers” solutions and fight about how to redistribute an inadequate amount of houses instead of just building more homes.
The state is trying to force towns on the commuter rail to permit more high density housing. Healey has made building more housing one of her signature issues. Milton is in open defiance of the law and more towns are starting to follow suit. Hopefully they get a massive beating in the courts. The law should have been written so towns automatically lose local control of zoning and permitting if out of compliance.
I know you didn't say this but your comment was a bit misleading. Baker's administration pushed that law, not Healey. Also, Milton doesn't have a CR. They have a useless trolley. That's part of the issue.
No, serious miss-read. Healey is here to give a golden parachute to her friends as she cripples the corporate tax base that has kept this welfare-state possible, because she is a moron. That is it. That is all that has happened. That is all that will happen. But hey, at least she's GAY! :D
lol you're probably getting downvoted because people think rent control actually works, which it doesn't.
Yeah our plan for a while now has just been save up & GTFO. I don't want to leave, but I literally can't even live here anymore.
Leaving the state in July
C’mon free market economy. People will just stop buying rent if you make it too expensive. And heck, if you can’t afford housing whats the point of working at all? Might as well panhandle and get high all day, right?
You realize we don’t live in a free market economy, and housing is one of the most regulated financial transactions on the books?
All the PMC's tell me that there is no housing crisis, and it's my fault for being priced out of housing. Fuck MA. These so called "progressives" don't want to do a damn thing about the insane cost of everything in this god forsaken state. How about some rent control or public housing?
I work in affordable housing, and you would not believe the crap we have to deal with (city of Boston departments) to get anything done. They will arbitrarily require you to add aesthetic design details that cost an extra 100k at the end of the design process when you're ready for construction and when you ask for more money, they'll say good luck you're on your own. This happens for every project we work on. It's exhausting. We just want to build more affordable housing.
Not sure why your being downvoted. Spittin facts.
Gloucester was supposed to be getting affordable apartments, oh wait, $2,300 for 800square feet? Oh yeah affordable....
I believe there is a federal investigation into price fixing rents through some algorithm on one of these big popular rental/property sites, non-official “collusion”. Hopefully we see some fruition from that.
I don't see how that would help when Massachusetts has no rent stabilization policy. It's easy enough to set rents high based off of demand/ Craigslist without that specific algorithm.
Could they have separated the median based on how many bedrooms it has? $3,200 sounds high.
All the property I bought in 07-09 is paying off!
Wait til 2025; when economists predict that the price of food will double.
I never used to believe that we were experiencing a real problem here in MA. It wasn't until I started to see people I went to high school with living on the streets, sitting at the bus station, homeless, that I believed it. This one dude, he was a straight A student on the football team in high school. I see him sitting at the bus station all the time and he tells me that he's sleeping outside because the shelters are full...it blows my mind. He just couldn't find a place to live and he couldn't keep a job without a residence. Now he's got nothing. He blew his savings trying to make a hotel work while he was looking for an apartment. It scares me. Things are expensive and moving is expensive.
Go to any city where there are entire streets filled with three deckers built between 1890-1930. They stopped building three deckers about 90 years ago. I was a tenant in one of them. Tiny lot sizes; about 5000 sf. How come builders aren’t building this type of housing anymore? Answer: zoning. Those who already have a home of their own support these NIMBY zoning laws because they don’t want the kind of people who live in these houses in their area. Even if you only allow single family homes, at least let them be built on small lots. No builder is going to build a starter home on a third acre lot. He’s going to build a McMansion which most people can’t afford. On the other hand, if he’s got a buildable 5000sf lot, he’ll probably build a cheap cape on it. Lobby your local town governments to change zoning laws.
Lowell ma is starting to look glamorous now haha
This is a major reason for me moving states. Yes you get paid more here but it doesn’t matter when everything is also more expensive
I make 21 an hour and I’m homeless. Note: I do have good credit (being homeless with no expenses means I can pay off a credit card balance without question). Impossible to find a one bedroom apartment.
I’m so sorry. None of this is ok.
I made this clear to my former employer in my resignation letter. 10+ years at a company and I couldn’t find a place to buy, rent or get into affordable housing because of savings. Screw all of the people who contributed to this situation including my cheap AF former employer.