Boston Indicators, the research center at the Boston Foundation, released a research brief and interactive map of the Greater Boston region highlighting “rental deserts” where few opportunities to rent housing exist.
Rental deserts tend to have higher-income residents and far fewer residents who are Black, Hispanic, or AAPI. These disparities appear in national work led by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and in the Greater Boston region specifically, where differences in tenure across neighborhoods are even more pronounced than in many other metro areas.
Multifamily housing is more likely to be renter-occupied than single-family dwellings, so when communities prohibit multifamily development, they implicitly suppress production of rental housing. Even modest increases in rental options would ease pressure across the region. If more multifamily homes were built in current rental deserts, the tenure mix would more closely resemble that of other areas in the region and more rentals would be available in communities with good schools, short commute times, and strong economic opportunity.
In Greater Boston’s rental deserts (tracts where fewer than 20 percent of homes are rentals), 86 percent of the housing stock is single-family homes, and only 6 percent of units come from buildings with 10 or more units. The statistics are similar for rental deserts nationwide.
Mixed-tenure neighborhoods look very different, however: Single-family homes make up 43 percent of the stock, with the rest spread across 2–4-unit buildings (28 percent), mid-size multifamily, and larger apartment buildings. High-rental neighborhoods are dominated by larger multifamily buildings; just 8 percent of their stock is single-family, and more than half of all homes are in buildings with 20 or more units. On average, mixed-tenure neighborhoods in Greater Boston are even more heavily multifamily than their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
More data and insight on rental deserts in Greater Boston is available here.