Boston has come up with a solution to its affordable housing crisis: build special communities to get those darn Millennials to stop renting multi-bedroom apartments. A Massachusetts State Senate committee on housing advised in a March report [PDF] that the city should build “Millennial Villages” to entice young professionals (20 to 34 years old) out of housing markets meant for families.
"Between 2000 and 2008-2012, 20-34 year olds were responsible for 73.9 percent of the population growth in the inner core region of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville—more than 24,000 additional young residents,” the report states. “To afford housing, many of these ‘Millennials’ share rented apartment units in what has been the region’s traditional workforce housing stock—‘triple-deckers,’ duplexes, and garden apartments,” driving up the price of those units for both other single professionals and for working-class families, the committee argues. More than half of the city’s renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent—qualifying them as “rent burdened.”
How exactly the Boston metro area should go about developing these “Millennial Villages” isn’t clear. The report advises creating “appropriately-sized and priced housing for the 20-34 year olds” as a way to “draw out” young people from three- and four-bedroom apartments in older rental stock, making The Youth sound kind of like a poison that needs to be sucked out. (Some folks might agree with the sentiment.) Achieving such an urban design feat “will require collaboration between developers, architects, builders, the construction trades, universities, teaching hospitals, and state and local government officials,” the committee admits—a tall order.
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