Tom Keane

Let’s face it. There will never be room for the middle class in Boston

The city’s soaring real estate costs, plus better schools in the ‘burbs, make it hard for ordinary folk to stay.

The middle class — especially middle-class families with children — is vanishing from Boston. Policymakers and politicians long for a fix. “In my second term,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh proclaimed in his January inaugural address, “I will prioritize the fundamentals of middle-class opportunity in our world-class city.”

Forget it, Mayor. The fundamentals of middle-class opportunity are cheap housing and good schools. That’s not going to happen in Boston. And it’s not your fault.

Boston is demographically complicated, as becomes clear if you look at reports by the city’s Planning and Development Agency. Most of its downtown neighborhoods are young, rich, and predominately white. Others — such as the onetime working-class areas of Charlestown, East Boston, and South Boston — are heading in that direction. At the same time, neighborhoods such as Mattapan and Roxbury and sections of Dorchester are decidedly poorer and mostly of color.

Advertisement

 

Boston is also a city of immigrants. New residents arrive, speaking a multitude of languages, using the city (one hopes) as a launching pad to the American Dream. And it’s a growing city. Folks with money used to flee cities — largely because of fears over safety (and also, to be blunt, over race) as well as a desire for more space. That happened to Boston: From 801,444 residents in 1950, it hit a low of 562,994 in 1980. Then, in the 1990s, a miracle occurred — indeed, the “Boston Miracle,” sparked by then-Mayor Tom Menino’s Operation Ceasefire. Violent crime dropped and a new urbanism took hold. From that 1980 low, Boston’s population surged to about 670,000 in 2016. 

But the newcomers aren’t like the folks who left. They’re more educated, relatively well-off, and young. They like the restaurants, bars, and nightlife. They relish the city’s cultural and economic dynamism. They enjoy the proximity to new ideas and others like themselves. And that remains true even as they couple up.

Everything changes, however, when another miracle occurs: kids. That’s when the exodus begins. The reasons go back to those fundamentals: housing and schools.

Depending on household size, a middle class family as defined by the Urban Institute makes somewhere between $35,000 to $100,000 annually (this does not include the upper middle class, the “poor” rich, with household incomes up to $349,000). If you apply the conventional rule that housing should cost about 30 percent of total income, the middle class household has somewhere between $875 to $2,500 a month for a home. Yet the median rental price in Boston is $2,800 — well above what even the highest-paid members of the real middle class can reasonably afford. And it gets worse when you look at square footage: Boston real estate averages $681 per square foot. In the Boston metro area, the price is $263, well less than half. Think about it: more than double the space for the same price. Move to the ’burbs and the kids get their own bedrooms!

Why does Boston cost so much? Demand by those new urbanists, for one. So too, it’s far more expensive to build in the city than outside of it. Land is at a premium and multistory construction is costlier. And the recent tax law will bring more pain. Its sharp limits on mortgage deductions effectively make more expensive the carrying cost of loans that middle-class folks need to purchase a home.

Advertisement

 

Education compounds the problem. Forget private schools: Their tuition averages over $20,000 a year. And the public schools? Boston fares poorly. SchoolDigger, for example, ranks the Boston Public Schools 305th out of 334 districts statewide. Granted, some parents hang on, hoping their child gets into one of the city’s three exam schools (Boston Latin, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science). But the exam schools are intensely competitive. And the dismal performance of the regular, non-exam high schools means few middle-class families would accept them as an alternative.

So, what can be done, Mr. Mayor? You trumpet that 5,000 new homes were built in 2017 — 1,000 of which were restricted to those with low and moderate incomes. But that’s hardly a solution. Lower-income housing, by definition, is for those who don’t make enough money to be in the middle class. And the rest of that housing is luxury housing, built for the rich. The middle class is left in the lurch.

So too, you promise to improve schools. But as you know, the crying need is not for more classrooms catering to middle-income white kids — it’s for stepped-up services for the least well-off. It’s hard to imagine a political environment where you or the city would favor the better-off at the expense of those in need.

Sure, it would be wonderful to have genuinely mixed-income neighborhoods. But getting there is like pushing water uphill: The economics and the politics are rushing the other way.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? The virtue of the rich is that they tend to demand less in the way of city services but have the means to pay a lot in taxes. Those taxes in turn power a city budget that allows you to focus on residents who are poor, working class or newly immigrated. It’s not a perfect model — the income stratification of neighborhoods and the threat of increasing gentrification are genuine worries. But you’re not going to solve them by hoping the middle class will return. They’re out along 128 and 495, cutting their grass, driving their kids to practice, and cursing their commute. And there they shall remain.

This column was first published in the Boston Globe Magazine's February 20, 2018 edition.

Trump Gets A Reset. For Now

This may be the week Donald Trump saved his presidency. A good speech — as well as decent atmospherics and some strong data — can do that.

The 80-minute State of the Union was not, it should be stressed, a great speech.

Trump kept cocking his head upward, preening, his fleshy neck too much on display. He had this unnerving habit of clapping at his own applause lines, the smack-smack of his hands far louder than the cheers from the often-boisterous Republicans on the floor.

Nor was the language itself particularly stirring. Trump’s media folks may well try to tell us this was the best speech ever, watched by more folks than ever, destined to be carved into marble and memorized by grade-school children along with the Gettysburg Address. But honestly, I think not. (Although I will grant that his hands-raised ode to the Capitol itself – “And freedom stands tall over one more monument:  this one.  This Capitol.  This living monument to the American people” – did give me the shivers.)

But it was a good speech. For one, it sounded like many that have come before it. Heart-tugging name checks. Glorying in what has been done. Promises of what will come. And lots of mom-and-apple-pie language (“heroes,” “family” and, yes, “moms”).

Most importantly, it was measured, well-paced, clearly spoken and seemingly rational. This was not the crazed man of the early morning tweet. In sounding like his predecessors, Trump was sounding -- dare one say it -- presidential. (Indeed, John Kelly, any way you could persuade your charge to now use a TelePrompTer while on Twitter?)

As we all know, this first year of the Trump presidency has been a soap opera — one documented well in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” — but one had the sense that, kicking off the second year, there was some sense of stability. Trump, perhaps, may finally be getting his footing, and his Tuesday address was a strong statement to that effect. (This, of course, doesn’t mean the soap opera is over; even now, the Stormy Daniels-Melania Trump plotline continues to play out.)

And then there were the Democrats. Dour, sour and clad in black, they looked more like a morticians’ convention that ended up in the wrong building rather than the exciting, appealing alternative.

Yes, I know black was intended to be a political statement — a reminder of #MeToo, Times Up and (most importantly) Trump’s own alleged incidents of sexual harassment. Maybe some viewers picked up on that. But to most, the Democrats just looked mad. Angry they had lost. Furious at Trump. Unwilling (with some exceptions) to smile or give a small handclap to even the most innocuous of lines. “I wanted it burned into my eyes,” wrote Massachusetts’ own Sen. Elizabeth Warren in an email I received. “America isn’t prouder when Donald Trump embraces bigotry, hatred and fear – and calls that patriotism.” “OK,” I was thinking as I read her words. “What’s your proposal?” There was none; her email ended quite simply: “Donate Now.”

Ahh, politicians. Never miss an opportunity for a buck.

The last two months have not been good for Democrats. Around Thanksgiving, it seemed as if they were riding high. Trump’s approval ratings were low and getting lower. A few key fall elections spoke of voter discontent with the Trump brand, leading to hopes of a Democratic surge in November 2018. But then the tax bill passed — and in the process, the Obamacare mandate was gutted. It was a GOP two-fer. In January Democrats forced a weekend shutdown of the government over immigration policy — and promptly caved on a Monday morning. They looked inept. They were inept.

Most telling though, have been the numbers. Trump’s raison d'etre is economic. The chest-thumping, the hostility towards immigrants, the America First attitude — all of that comes back to the economy and especially to the plight of those at the lower end of the spectrum, the white, blue-collar workers seemingly left behind.

Their man, it seems, is delivering. The economy is at full employment. Wages are finally starting to climb. Companies — perhaps spurred by federal policies, or perhaps because they would have anyway — are announcing openings of new plants and headquarters. Maybe this is just the fruit of Obama’s eight years but in politics, we credit or blame the guy in office and that guy is Trump. (And, by the way, if the economy were tanking right now, Democrats would be loudly crowing about the Doncession or the Trumpression.)

A CBS poll taken after Trump’s State of the Union found 75 percent of viewers approved of the speech. I have little doubt that in the days to come we’ll see the president’s favorabilities begin to climb. With the State of the Union, Trump has managed a reset. He can mess it up, of course – Russia or an errant tweet could undo everything. Yet today, Groundhog Day, I have this image in my mind of millions of Democrats opening their doors, walking out, seeing their shadows and running back inside. Three more years of Donald Trump.

Or perhaps, seven.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on February 2, 2018.