No place to live

Success created Boston's housing crisis. Now's the time to take some sensible steps -- and to plan for the future.

Boston is a tiny place. Even when inner urban "suburbs" such as Cambridge, Brookline, Somerville, and Chelsea are included, Greater Boston is still unusually small in scale for a major population center. That gives Boston much of its special flavor. Unfortunately, during times of great prosperity it also creates special challenges.

Perhaps the most pressing of these challenges is housing. As the Phoenix's special package on housing shows, the apartment shortage in Greater Boston has reached crisis proportions. Since the mid 1990s, rents have gone up by 50 percent or more in some neighborhoods. And even at these grossly inflated prices, apartments are still nearly impossible to come by.

Major economic and social trends are not easily reversed by rigid government solutions. Some activists want a return to rent control, which was abolished by Massachusetts voters in 1994, thus sweeping aside ordinances that regulated the cost of housing in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline. Two observations: 1) the voters have spoken; 2) as the current shortage shows, what's needed more than anything is additional housing, and rent control creates disincentives for developers to build new units.

Nevertheless, some modest steps can be taken.

Involve the grassroots. It's the old not-in-my-backyard syndrome: everyone knows there's a housing shortage, but no one wants to see new housing come into his or her own neighborhood. Such opposition can be eased by involving local residents in planning for new housing, as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative has done in Roxbury. Consider, too, the ongoing construction of apartment buildings in the Fenway. This couldn't have been done without neighborhood involvement. The lesson is that bottom-up solutions invariably work better than top-down edicts.

Back to school. Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University, and MIT have taken major steps toward building housing for their students on their own campuses. This is a trend that should be encouraged. During the 1960s and '70s, student housing spread into neighborhoods such as the Fenway (near Northeastern) and Audubon Circle (near BU). Students kept such neighborhoods alive during those difficult years. But as neighborhoods become able to thrive on their own, universities should be encouraged, wherever possible, to pull back, thus opening up neighborhood housing to long-term residents.

Policy review. The government can and should take specific small steps to ease the housing crisis. The legislature is currently considering a bill that would give local communities some say over whether developers should be allowed to prepay their federally subsidized mortgages and thereby opt out of the affordable rents they initially agreed to charge. That bill should be passed. Likewise, lawmakers should look at a proposal that would discourage real-estate speculation by imposing a new sliding-scale tax on the sale of housing units: the longer someone holds on to a property, the lower the tax. Revenues would go toward the creation of affordable housing. Such legislation, provided it includes protections for small-property owners, could help hold down the sky-high housing prices that lead to sky-high rents.

Improve public transportation. Some relatively affordable neighborhoods don't even get considered by apartment-seekers because of poor public transportation. Two examples: Arlington and Waltham, both very close to the city but served only by traffic-plagued bus lines. Of course, no one is going to build a new subway line into those communities. But better transportation planning could make them an option for people who are simply being priced out of neighborhoods such as Allston-Brighton, Cambridge, and Davis Square.

Think big. In his State of the City address in January, Mayor Tom Menino identified the housing crisis as his number-one priority, and named a respected legislator, Charlotte Richie, as his housing czar. In a recently published interview, Boston Redevelopment Authority head Tom O'Brien spoke of the need to preserve the diversity of Boston's neighborhoods, and identified the city's residential character as one of its saving graces. Yet the city has been missing in action. At the very least, Menino should make a concerted effort to ease the housing shortage in neighborhoods where the problem is particularly acute -- such as Fort Point Channel (where several hundred artists face eviction over the next few years), Chinatown, and the Back Bay.

More important, Menino has to realize that he cannot deal with housing as an "in box" mayor, taking on an issue here, an issue there as they come up. He should work with officials in surrounding communities and convene a housing summit to consider a wide range of ideas. How are other hot cities, such as San Francisco and Seattle, dealing with their housing problems? As urban living becomes a more attractive option for suburbanites, what happens to long-time city dwellers of modest means?

Success made the housing crisis. With proper planning and creative thinking, that success can be much more widely shared than it is today.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.