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Marty Walsh's housing policies fail most people earning $35,000 and less

So this is what he says.

Boston has been on a bender building luxury condos. This involves taking assorted lots including rental housing and razing them and building luxury condos plus 18% affordability requirement. That policy plus 14 years of wage loss for people earning less than median income, plus housing cost inflation, plus half a decade of foreclosures after the financial crisis and great recession makes Boston unaffordable for people working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Affordable is defined in the US as 30% of median income in a neighborhood for housing cost. So a person earning $36,000 a year would have affordable housing if they paid about $1000 a month or 12,000 a year in rent.

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Comments

Thanks for writing this today. I've been thinking about this because I'm one of the lucky ones. However that was not always the case. Ever since the voters approved to remove rent control in Boston life changed for those in the lower income brackets. I 'owned' a property and could have charged huge rents and chose not to because it would have displaced those that couldn't pay. I still had a mortgage to pay. Yes, it would have made my life easier at the expense of another but I was raised by depression era, immigrant parents that worked hard too and if it weren't for someone sponsoring them to come here I don't know what their story would have been like. So, I made a choice to help another too. I mention this because we now have the hindsight to look back upon and see what our city has become. If you like it, fine. You know who you'll be voting for. If not, you can do something about it. Otherwise continue the cycle that repeats itself over and over and over throughout history.

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I hope voter turnout is higher than normal tomorrow. Business as usual is only helping our widening wealth gap.

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