Sky-High Demand for Affordable Apartments in Allston Highlights Housing Crunch

BOSTON — There’s a lot to love about local artist Sarah Dylan Breuer’s micro-studio apartment at 525 Lincoln St., known as 525 LINC: a roof deck offering picturesque skyline views, community-building cocktail parties and brunches, and a fully furnished studio with electric appliances. The best part? Rent at $1,300 a month.

Not everyone is so lucky.

Breuer’s apartment falls under a city policy known as “inclusionary zoning,” which requires developers of large housing complexes to set aside units at below-market rates. The policy is one of Boston’s strategies to combat the wave of luxury development that has reached Allston.

But as a small fraction of affordable apartments open their lotteries to prospective residents, they are inundated with applications, creating waitlists that could stretch for years.

This year, five new buildings in Allston-Brighton — the Alder at Allston Yards, 1515 Commonwealth Ave., the Indie, 280 Western Ave., and 365 Western Ave. — opened city-run lotteries for a total of 88 income-restricted units.

According to a Crimson analysis of city data, roughly 10,500 people applied for one or more of the apartments — a ratio of nearly 120 to one.

Similar to Cambridge, where the city’s affordable housing waitlist exceeds 20,000 names, the startling demand highlights Allston’s long-standing affordable housing crisis.

It also reveals how essential — and insufficient — the new affordable units are for a neighborhood anxious about the future of its families, artists, and immigrants, who are struggling to keep up in one of the country’s toughest housing markets.

Even as Boston has extracted more affordable housing and renter benefits from developers profiting from luxury projects, low- and middle-income renters seeking affordable units must navigate a confusing web of city programs, housing lotteries, and nonprofit grants meant to support them.

Breuer, despite securing an apartment, isn’t fully out of the woods.

Though her apartment at 525 LINC certainly is “a nice place,” the nonprofit support she relies on to make rent — “affordable” in Allston can mean “reserved for people making around $80,000 a year” — won’t last forever. Plus, Breuer, who has a mobility impairment, needs more space to accommodate a backup wheelchair and other medical equipment.

Like thousands of others across the Boston area, she remains on waiting lists, hoping to secure another affordable apartment soon. And while she waits, she continues applying for more units.

“It leaves one on tenterhooks,” she said. “It's a constant state of at least low-grade alert.”

Even among Allston’s more established affordable housing nonprofits, waiting lists drag on for years.

At the Charlesview, a mixed-income Brighton development, the waiting list for its 200 units averages about four years. Some residents have waited up to eight, according to its executive director, Jo-Ann Barbour.

At the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation, more than 6,000 people are on a list for just 500 units. The average wait time has gone from a “very long time” to a “wicked long time,” Executive Director John Woods said.

Boston’s Section 8 voucher program, which provides direct financial assistance to low-income renters, is so backed up its waitlist is currently closed. According to the Boston Housing Authority website, the program receives over 10,000 applications annually.

And in terms of its public housing, the agency’s website puts it bluntly: ​“BHA has no immediate housing available.”

“The bottom line is that there’s woefully too few affordable housing units for the number of people eligible to live in them,” Chris Herbert, the director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said.

Yet the intense desire for real estate in Boston means the city has considerable leeway to impose mandates and fees on the real estate industry to support affordable housing without the risk of losing out, according to Herbert.

“The demand for life science, lab space [in Boston] is extraordinary because of the presence of all these universities,” he said. “You can impose a tax on lab space and still have a developer saying, ‘Sure, we’ll build it.’ If you were in Buffalo, New York, I don’t know.”

In recent years, Mayor Michelle Wu ’07 has made several efforts to wield that leverage and expand such mandates. She changed the city’s inclusionary development policy — which forces developers of large projects to set aside income-restricted units — to increase the number of projects it applies to, and the number of units which must be set aside.

Wu also negotiated with Harvard and Tishman Speyer to secure a commitment that a quarter of the nearly 400 apartments associated with Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus will be income-restricted.

The hope, Herbert said, is to one day create a housing market where the wait for an affordable unit isn’t much longer than finding a market-rate apartment — a world where “we had enough subsidized housing for everybody who needed it.”

But in the near future, he said, “you have an endless waiting list.”

—Staff writer Jina H. Choe and Director of Data Journalism Grayson M. Martin contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Jack R. Trapanick can be reached at jack.trapanick@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @jackrtrapanick.