Housing questions, honest answers

Because Allston-Brighton’s biggest housing problem is that there aren’t enough homes, and most new homes are built by private builders.

Allston is a neighborhood of renters: about 82 percent of households here rent. When more people want to live in a place than there are homes, renters compete for the homes that exist, and the people with the least money lose that competition. That shows up as rising rents, crowded apartments and neighbors forced to move.

Income-restricted housing is essential, and we support funding more of it. But public money alone can’t close a gap this large. Our research estimates that Boston needs roughly 100,000 to 120,000 more homes to bring rents back toward what a freely building market would charge. Allowing private builders to add homes, under clear rules, is the only realistic way to reach that scale.

We’re optimists about Allston. Every generation here has built homes for the next one: the triple-deckers, courtyard apartments and homes above shops that we love today were once new construction. We want our generation to do the same.

Sources: AHF, A market-clearing housing strategy (2026); Boston Planning Department, Boston in Context: Neighborhoods (2025).

New homes usually rent at the top of the market because they’re new. Over time they become the mid-priced homes of the future, and in the meantime they take pressure off older apartments.

Nearly every building is most expensive when it’s new. The well-kept brick apartments on Commonwealth Avenue were the new construction of their day, and today they are some of the neighborhood’s most attainable homes. Economists call this process “filtering”: as buildings age, they tend to house people with progressively lower incomes.

The more important question is what happens if the new building isn’t built. The higher-earning households who would have rented it don’t disappear. They rent an older apartment instead, often outbidding a family or longtime tenant for it. New homes at the top of the market give those households somewhere to go other than your building.

Sources: Rosenthal, “Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing?” American Economic Review (2014); Mast, “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market,” Journal of Urban Economics (2023).

We should build more income-restricted homes. But each one costs public money, and there isn’t nearly enough of it to meet the need on its own.

Building new housing in Boston is expensive. Our cost research puts the full development cost of a mid-size apartment building at roughly $620 to $700 per square foot before parking, or about $525,000 to $600,000 for an 850-square-foot home. At those prices, a $25 million affordable housing fund pays for only about 40 to 50 homes.

That’s why we want both: public dollars for families who need deep help, and rules that let privately financed homes be built for everyone else. Every household that finds a home in a new privately built building is one less household competing for the limited supply of subsidized and older homes.

Under Boston’s current inclusionary zoning rules, market-rate projects of seven or more units must also include income-restricted homes. Those homes exist only when the market-rate building around them gets built.

Sources: AHF, Traditional housing costs and by-right design (2026); Springer, “Harvard’s Development Can’t Leave Allstonians in the Dust,” Harvard Crimson (2025).

The best recent research finds the opposite: large new apartment buildings tend to lower rents nearby and reduce the risk that nearby renters are displaced.

It’s a reasonable worry. A shiny new building can feel like a signal that a neighborhood is changing. Economists have studied this carefully in the last few years, using data on rents and moves around thousands of new buildings.

• A study of large new apartment buildings in low-income neighborhoods across 11 U.S. cities found that rents in nearby older buildings fell by about 5 to 7 percent relative to comparable areas, and that more people moved in from low-income neighborhoods.
• Research in San Francisco found that new market-rate construction reduced the risk that nearby renters were displaced or evicted.
• In New York City, new high-rise buildings slightly lowered rents in their immediate surroundings.

What really drives displacement is the competition for too few homes. When there’s nowhere new for higher-earning newcomers to live, they bid for the homes our neighbors already rent.

We also support tenant protections and anti-displacement programs alongside new supply. More homes and stronger protections work best together.

Sources: Asquith, Mast & Reed, “Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas,” Review of Economics and Statistics (2023); Pennington, “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement? The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco” (working paper, 2021); Li, “Do New Housing Units in Your Backyard Raise Your Rents?” Journal of Economic Geography (2022).

Because Boston and the region still build far fewer homes than people need. Cranes in the sky don’t add up to enough homes.

New buildings are visible, so it can feel like a lot is happening. But the numbers tell a different story. Our analysis estimates that bringing rents down toward a market-clearing level would take about 47,000 new homes a year across Greater Boston for a decade. That is several times the region’s recent permitting pace.

Places that have allowed much more building show what’s possible. After Auckland, New Zealand, broadly upzoned residential land in 2016, home construction surged. In the U.S., markets that let housing supply respond to demand tend to see much smaller rent increases when their economies grow.

Allston-Brighton can’t solve the region’s shortage alone. That’s why our plan spreads the work across every Boston neighborhood and the whole metro area, including wealthier places that have built little.

Sources: AHF, A market-clearing housing strategy (2026); Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips, “The Impact of Upzoning on Housing Construction in Auckland,” Journal of Urban Economics (2023); Glaeser & Gyourko, “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2018).

Through “moving chains”: each new home starts a chain of moves that frees up older, cheaper homes, often in lower-income neighborhoods.

When a household moves into a new apartment, it leaves another home behind. Someone moves into that one and leaves a home behind too, and so on. Researchers have traced these chains using address records.

One U.S. study estimated that building 100 new market-rate homes opens up roughly 45 to 70 homes in below-median-income neighborhoods. A study in Helsinki found the same pattern: new market-rate homes quickly set off moves that reached lower-income areas.

In other words, a new building on Western Avenue can help a family on a side street in Brighton, even if that family never sets foot inside it.

Sources: Mast, “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market,” Journal of Urban Economics (2023); Bratu, Harjunen & Saarimaa, “City-Wide Effects of New Housing Supply: Evidence from Moving Chains,” Journal of Urban Economics (2023).

No. Today’s system rewards whoever can afford years of lawyers and negotiation. Clear rules let small owners and local builders compete, and our plan asks more of big institutions, not less.

Under Boston’s current process, almost any meaningful project needs case-by-case approvals. That favors large, well-financed players who can afford to wait and to negotiate. A small owner hoping to add a few apartments over a store often can’t.

Our model zoning would replace much of that bargaining with rules written in advance: if a building meets the published standards for height, design and use, it can be built. Everyone plays by the same rules.

For universities and hospitals, our plan would raise expectations. It would require institutions such as Harvard, Boston University and Boston College to measure how many of their students and staff need housing and commit to plans that reduce pressure on the neighborhood’s rental market.

Sources: AHF, A market-clearing housing strategy (2026); AHF model legislation.

We’re not asking anyone to trust a slogan. We’re asking for fair rules that let more homes be built, plus public support for the neighbors who need it most.

A housing market is simply millions of households and builders making decisions. Boston’s problem isn’t that the market is too free. It’s that rules written decades ago make it very hard to add homes in the places people most want to live. Those rules have quietly protected the value of existing property, and renters have paid the price.

The goal is practical: homes that can actually get built and pay for themselves, so public money can go further for families who need deep help. We also support tenant protections, fair-housing enforcement and funding for income-restricted homes. Those aren’t in tension with building more. They work better when there’s enough housing to go around.

Sources: Glaeser & Gyourko, “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2018); AHF, Traditional housing costs and by-right design (2026).

Because it has the transit, the jobs nearby and the large underused sites. But our plan asks every Boston neighborhood, and the whole region, to do its part.

Allston-Brighton is home to large parcels such as Western Avenue, Beacon Park Yard and Allston Yards, plus main streets lined with one-story buildings and parking lots. Building homes there keeps most new growth off quiet residential side streets.

Our plan allocates a ten-year target of 110,000 new homes across all of Boston, including about 6,600 downtown and in Back Bay and Beacon Hill, 16,000 in Dorchester and 11,000 in South Boston and the Seaport. It also sets targets for the suburbs. Allston-Brighton’s share is 14,500.

Sources: AHF, A market-clearing housing strategy (2026)

Students crowd into two- and three-family houses largely because there aren’t enough apartments and dorms built for them. More homes, and more university housing, take that pressure off family housing.

Many longtime residents have watched triple-deckers become student rentals, sometimes poorly maintained by absentee landlords. That’s a real loss. It happens because when apartments are scarce, groups of students sharing rent can outbid a family for the same unit.

New apartment buildings near transit give students and young workers somewhere else to live. Our plan also asks universities to plan for and build housing for their own students, graduate students and staff, so the neighborhood’s family housing can go back to families.

Sources: AHF, A market-clearing housing strategy (2026)

Allston’s character was built by new construction, and much of it was dense, middle-class housing. We want new buildings that look like they belong, and our research shows that’s affordable.

The courtyard apartments, commercial blocks and triple-deckers that define Allston were the new, dense housing of their era. They were built quickly and efficiently for working families, and they’re beautiful.

Many neighbors dislike recent buildings, and we understand why. Our architecture program studies what makes the old buildings work, and our cost research finds that traditional-looking street design (brick facing, ordered windows, clear entrances, a defined roofline) can be built for roughly $420 to $500 per square foot. That’s within ordinary Boston apartment costs. We propose writing those features into clear, measurable design rules, so good design becomes the default rather than a fight.

Sources: AHF, Traditional housing costs and by-right design (2026); AHF, Allston’s urban heritage.

Ending parking requirements doesn’t ban parking. It lets builders decide, so renters who don’t drive aren’t forced to pay for spaces they don’t use.

Underground parking in Boston costs roughly $106,000 to $152,000 per space to build. Requiring it adds that cost to rents, whether or not tenants own cars, and it can make smaller projects impossible.

Our plan would remove minimum parking requirements near transit and set sensible maximums, along with secure bike parking, loading zones and better bus stops. Builders can still provide parking where residents want it. Homes near the Green Line, bus routes and jobs let more households live well with one car or none, which means less traffic than if those same people lived farther out and drove in.

Sources: AHF, Traditional housing costs and by-right design (2026) (citing Cumming Group, Q4 2025); AHF, A market-clearing housing strategy (2026).

Shops get squeezed when commercial space is scarce. New mixed-use buildings add storefronts and bring more customers within walking distance.

Allston’s local shops and restaurants are part of what makes it special. When a neighborhood adds no new commercial space, existing storefronts become more valuable, and longtime tenants can face steep rent increases when buildings change hands, as several Harvard Avenue businesses did this year.

Our plan allows homes above ground-floor shops on main streets. That adds new commercial space, and the people living upstairs become customers for the businesses below.

Sources: Boston.com, “3 longtime tenants to close or move after Alpha Management buys prominent Allston commercial building” (July 2026).

We’re an independent research group founded by Nick Pellow and Daniela Gómez Treviño, who bring training in law, economics and public policy.

Our founders bring backgrounds in law, policy analysis and rigorous program evaluation. You can read more about them on our About page. Our work reflects our authors’ own views, not those of their employers.

We publish our assumptions, our sources and our caveats so anyone can check our work. If you think we’ve got something wrong, please tell us at [email protected].

Read the research, talk to your neighbors, and make your voice heard as the City rewrites Allston-Brighton’s zoning.

The City of Boston is preparing the Allston-Brighton Community Plan, the neighborhood’s first comprehensive rezoning in more than 30 years. Public comment matters. Attend meetings, submit comments and tell your city councilor what kind of neighborhood you want.

Share our FAQ and street concepts with neighbors, and get in touch if you’d like to help with research or outreach.

Sources: Boston Planning Department, Allston-Brighton Community Plan.