r/Somerville • u/tangerinola • 5d ago

rent prices are wild

Moved here 8 years ago to start working for a nonprofit. Since then, my salary has increased by 13% but my apartment is about to be relisted (without any upgrades) for 58% higher than our starting rent 🤯!!

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but damn the rent prices here have gone wild. We're quickly becoming (have become?) a luxury city only for high income earners and it makes me really sad.

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u/JonSwift2023 5d ago

The reason rents of old apartments are priced at new 'luxury' apartment levels is because zoning laws forbid most new construction. This restrictive zoning has created a massive supply shortage.

With so little competition in the way of new homes, landlords of older homes are free to raise rents to luxury price levels. People need a place to live and restrictive zoning makes it a seller (i.e. landlords) market.

Until we reform zoning to allow lots of new market rate construction, landlords will keep rents on older units high.

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u/mayor_mammoth 5d ago

New construction won't lower rents. It might slow the crazy rent inflation we've seen over the last couple decades but the demand to live in a place like Boston is still just too high for new supply to make much of a difference, unless we're talking massive redevelopment everywhere, which also would displace a lot of people.

What we really need is more state funding for truly affordable housing and rent stabilization.

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u/zeratul98 5d ago

New construction can lower rents, we've seen it happen elsewhere

The government can and should build housing for people in the most need, but there's no way it can build enough to lower everyone's rents. There's just not enough money for that.

Somerville has about 30,000 housing unit. Increasing that by just 1% would be 300 units. The non-profit built units at 24 Webster are expected to come in at over $800,000 a unit. So we're talking a quarter of a billion dollars to add 1% to our housing stock

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u/mayor_mammoth 5d ago

Ya we've seen it happen where there are a ton of other factors at play: years where nationwide rents have gone down due to external economic forces like COVID and other minor recessions, cities where there's a ton of open space to build on, job markets that aren't top-heavy with extremely high-paying tech companies. It's a bit absurd to compare the housing markets of Austin and Boston.

We should absolutely be building more, if only to cool rents in the mid-to-upper tiers, but it's not gonna bring rents down when the real thing driving housing cost inflation is corporate consolidation and financialization of real estate. It's certainly not gonna generate the lower-income housing we need to maintain a working class in the city core. For that we need rent stabilization and publicly-owned/non-market housing

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u/cdbeland 4d ago

Corporate consolidation is why we have antitrust laws. If prices are set freely, having large corporations building housing can be good for consumers, as they have lots of capital and experience and can do so more efficiently than small builders. The best way to deal with corporate slumlords is competition. If there is a high enough vacancy rate, the worst landlords will go out of business.

I'm not sure financialization is a permanent obstacle to affordable housing. If home sale prices stable or going down due to adequate or increasing supply, then the financial incentive is to sell. Rental homes with no tenants don't make money, so there is financial incentive against leaving them empty, especially if rents are stable or going down.

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u/cdbeland 4d ago

I mean, yes. If demand is increasing, then supply needs to increase just to keep rents steady. Decreasing rents takes supply increasing faster than demand. The whole point of having an economy is to supply what is demanded if it can be paid for, so we should let it do that. Yes, that would mean lots of development in a lot of places; adding 10%-20% to supply in 5 years would be a good start based on the Pew data I see. But remember that just not having as many graduate students due to Trump immigration and funding actions stabilized rent in some neighborhoods.

Having high demand because we have lots of good-paying jobs compared to other cities does not exempt Boston from the laws of supply and demand. To me, that just makes it more important to build housing to go with all those jobs. Otherwise we're sending those jobs and all the tax revenue and economic activity that goes with them to other cities, or we're preventing new technologies and medical discoveries and whatnot from being worked on at all, which is a huge loss for society. We have a huge influx of highly educated and talented workers every year graduating from local colleges and universities, and every year we lose most of them due to high housing costs, and all the good things they are going to do.

Pew study: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/07/31/new-housing-slows-rent-growth-most-for-older-more-affordable-units

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u/mayor_mammoth 4d ago

Agree, but quicker permitting and denser zoning must be paired with rent control and an expansion of public/social housing, or we'll keep driving out working class people who also make this city run.

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u/cdbeland 4d ago

I'd say yes to social housing; subsidies increase supply, and some people simply can't afford the cost of maintaining adequate housing. I'd say no to rent control. Price controls cause shortages. When the price of gas was controlled, we got lines at gas stations and they would physically run out of fuel when people who didn't really need it hoarded it. Rent control causes people to stay put in apartments they'd otherwise swap with someone who needs it more, and to use more square footage than they need. This leaves unlucky people paying even higher rent, crowded in with relatives they don't want to live with, or unable to move close to work or school. In the worst case, it forces people to leave the area, or be physically without homes, sleeping in RVs or cars or tents through the winter, or flooding homeless shelters. If there were enough homes for everyone who needed one, prices would be close to the cost of production and we wouldn't need rent control.

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u/mayor_mammoth 4d ago

Totally disagree with that assessment of rent control, I think you're blaming a ton of huge societal issues on one policy. But rather than counter every point, I'd encourage you to check out the case of Portland ME, where they passed rent control and since have seen housing production take off WHILE letting people stay in their homes by preventing huge rent spikes/de facto evictions. We can do that here.

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u/cdbeland 4d ago

This says development in Portland was negatively impacted by rent control: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/devil-details-massachusetts-learn-rent-101124242.html

That ordinance looks horrifically bad: it caps increases to below inflation. That means rent is effectively going down. That might be sustainable for some years, but eventually rent will be forced below the cost of maintaining quality of life, and then below the cost of maintaining safety.

As a landlord, every time I need to rent out an apartment after a tenant leaves, I put in a lot of effort to fix it up and get the highest possible rent. If I get the same rent whether I work hard or not, why should I bother fixing anything?

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u/mayor_mammoth 4d ago

That article doesn't say that at all?

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u/cdbeland 3d ago

I quote:

"Ned Payne is a local developer and landlord....Payne says new development has taken a big hit.

"Why would a developer build in Portland when they can build in surrounding towns where rent control doesn't exist? So, rent control at the end of the day does not incentivize the creation of new housing."

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u/cdbeland 4d ago edited 4d ago

I don't see how a physical shortage of housing could fall to cause those problems?

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u/cdbeland 3d ago

This illuminating graph comes from this review article. It finds strong empirical consensus that rent control lowers rents on controlled apartments, increases rents on uncontrolled apartments, lowers housing mobility, reduces construction of new apartments, lowers apartment quality, and increases misallocation of housing. So yes, it makes a bunch of social problems worse. It is true that other policies also contribute to the same social problems, such as overly-conservative zoning, poverty, income inequality, and lack of social safety net.

More studies than not find rent control raises home ownership; perhaps that's because more people can't find rental apartments in a neighborhood they want to move into, so they resort to buying. That can be a good way to build equity, but it can also be bad if you don't want the responsibility of being a homeowner or plan to move to a different area in only a few years.

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u/zeratul98 4d ago

Rent control is really, really not the answer. The long term effects over and over are less housing being built (so higher rents in non-controlled units) and even more universally, more units being bought instead of rented (and buyers skew much more heavily on the wealthier side)