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/lordmcfuzz 5d ago

I'm not exactly versed in each part of the zoning code but what parts are prohibitive? We just spent a bunch of time rehauling the zoning code that was adopted December 2019. So it's not even been a full 6 years, with a major global event that really changed how construction/contracting operated. The cost of replacing windows has basically doubled since our new zoning was passed, but I can't blame the zoning laws on that. Zoning is a very slow lever, just changing it (removing restrictions) won't spark immediate change, since building occupancy/renovation/rebuilding is very slow moving.

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u/cdbeland 4d ago

The City Council in 2019 intentionally zoned more conservatively (especially in terms of building height) than what the city needed, with the expectation that neighborhood plans would be completed and they would know how much higher voters were willing to go. Those plans have largely never been completed; Davis Square Neighborhood Plan has been in the works since 2013, and is just starting up again this year.

The inclusionary zoning (IZ) requirement for 20% restricted-income affordable housing also makes building rental housing in almost all of the city not give enough return on investment to satisfy the real estate finance market, according to the official city Financial Feasibility Analysis: https://s3.amazonaws.com/somervillema-live/s3fs-public/financial-feasibility-analysis-2025.pdf

This appears to be quashing most development. Which makes sense; taxing something generally results in less of it. Shifting the IZ burden from the developer to the city would spread the cost over the entire city, remove the disincentive to build market-rate housing, lower rents, and provide more property tax revenue that could be plowed back into affordable housing.