In 2004, Symone Crawford and her husband bought their first home, a three-decker in Mattapan, with help from a program offered by the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance (MAHA). According to the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development (DND), the median price of a three-decker in Mattapan at the time was $495,000, slightly less than the citywide median of $525,000.

By 2021, the median price for a three-decker in Boston had doubled, to about $1 million, outpacing the rise in prices for one and two-family homes. That same year, Crawford became the executive director of MAHA, a Dorchester-based agency recently rebranded as the Massachusetts Affordable Homeownership Alliance.

Three years later, after more price increases and shrinking inventory, she is hailing a new source of help for first-time buyers, including many being priced out of Boston: the “One+ Mortgage” program announced on Nov. 26 by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership (MHP).

The shift had been gradual, and now it was more formalized: the map of homebuying opportunity had changed.

As of late November, Crawford counted 26,000 people who had bought homes through the original ONE Mortgage and earlier “SoftSecond” mortgage programs that were started more than 30 years ago by MAHA and administered by the MHP. Spurred by 1989 research on Boston’s racial gap in lending, with less access in predominantly Black areas, the programs offered more affordable mortgages to low- and middle-income first-time buyers who went through a series of classes. MAHA would later develop programs for first-generation homebuyers and the “ONE+ Boston” program, launched in 2020 to help bridge the steeper affordability gap for properties in the city.

Last week, more than four years after the creation of ‘”ONE+ Boston,” the MHP extended the model to serve low- and moderate-income first-time buyers in 29 Greater Boston communities. The program was launched with $11 million in public and private support, primarily from the state, Eastern Bank and the Eastern Bank Foundation, and The Boston Foundation’s Racial Wealth Gap Partnership.

The “ONE+ Boston” program offered mortgages at rates 0.5% to 1.0% lower than those offered by the ONE Mortgage. Like the earlier SoftSecond and ONE programs, ONE+ Boston resulted from a grassroots campaign, but exclusively for homes in the city. And the additional help for buyers would come from local revenue sources, such as the Community Preservation Act.

“Before One+ Boston was launched, the ONE Mortgage Program within the city of Boston was almost nonexistent,” Crawford recalled. “We were seeing some better numbers across the state, but in the city, because it was so expensive, no one was purchasing much with the ONE Mortgage. Once we launched One+ Boston, the trajectory was all the way up, so we knew that this program was integral in putting people into homes.”

According to MHP’s director of homeownership, Elliot Schmiedl, ONE+ Boston has “been averaging close to 200 loans a year” over the past few years. “The city of Boston,” he added, “has done a very good job building, helping to subsidize, and build affordable condos, mostly, which are available for purchase to first-time home buyers. But we’ve helped people close the gap between what they could conceivably afford and what the market offers, as well.”

The ONE+ program, which Gov. Maura Healey, Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Housing Secretary Ed Augustus, and other local and state officials announced in Lynn on Nov. 25, expands on the ONE Mortgage Program previously offered by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership. Shown (l-r): Robert Rivers of Eastern Bank, Lee Pelton of the Boston Foundation, Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson, Gov. Maura Healey, Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Clark Ziegler of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, and Housing and Livable Communities Secretary Ed Augustus. State House News Service photo

The Greater Boston “ONE+” program offers 30-year fixed mortgages with significantly discounted interest rates, lower downpayment requirements, downpayment assistance, and no requirement for private mortgage insurance.

Since the earlier “ONE+ Boston” started, the market has continued to climb, according to the 2024 Housing Report Card, compiled by The Boston Foundation, its Boston Indicators research center, and the Boston University Initiative on Cities. Citing figures from Zillow, researchers report that housing values throughout the metropolitan area have risen by 86 percent since 2015. “This widening gap, combined with higher mortgage rates and declining inventory,” they wrote, “has made homeownership an increasingly expensive proposition across the region.”

Recent Dorchester listings on Zillow include a three-bedroom unit on one floor of a three-decker on Talbot Avenue, near Ashmont Station, with an asking price of $699,000. Another listing, for a whole three-decker on Erie Street, five blocks from a stop on the Fairmount-Indigo rail line, had an asking price of $1,875,000. And, after a price cut, a three-decker on Pleasant Street was listed for $1,890,000.

“From a home-buying perspective, there’s almost not an undesirable neighborhood anymore,” Schmiedl observed, pointing to a trend that has spread from Boston to outlying communities, prompting an upgrade of the original “ONE Mortgage” to the “ONE+ Mortgage” for the metropolitan area.

“The One+ program,” he said, “is designed to be offered more broadly because something we’ve been experiencing in Boston for the last many years has also started to take hold in some of the gateway cities around the state, too. We used to do 40, 50 loans a year in Lawrence. No problem. Two- and three-families in Lawrence were very affordable. Folks would buy those, become landlords – a great, great opportunity to build wealth. Those properties are becoming out of reach, and that’s just Worcester.”

According to Crawford, rising prices force many homebuyers assisted by MAHA to move outside of Boston, though now with more help available from the new ONE+ program. “I would say about 60 to 70 percent of the people that we serve who would have remained in Boston had it been affordable have moved out of Boston,” she estimated. “That’s much higher than would normally have moved out willingly.”

According to the Housing Report Card, higher interest rates and construction costs have also led to a fall-off in new production, with Boston’s three-year total of units added in 2015-17 falling in 2021-2023 by 31 percent. The Report Card also cites analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston showing that, as of July of 2023, the city had 23,000 units that were permitted but whose construction was stalled.

The Report Card shows the largest amount of new housing permitted in Greater Boston since 2010 has been in projects with at least five units. There was a more modest increase in single-family homes, but the number of houses with 3 or 4 units – the “missing middle” – has stagnated.

Though interest rates have recently begun to moderate, the Report Card describes them as an added hurdle for people looking to buy, and for owners wanting to sell but reluctant to swap one mortgage with a lower interest rate for another with a much higher rate. The “rate lock” effect results in smaller inventory and tighter competition for potential buyers. For graduates of MAHA’s homebuyer classes, according to Crawford, there have been more bidding wars, often with would-be owner-occupants losing to investors.

“We have helped several overcome the emotional barrier that comes with being told ‘No. No’ 20 times, 24 times, bidding on homes and getting outbid because investors are offering cash to sellers,” she said. “You can’t tell sellers not to take a sure bet, even though our programs are sure bets.”

And Crawford argued that MAHA’s homebuyers, as owner-occupants, would be more engaged in the community, and possibly more attentive to the condition of their property. “There’s not enough homes to go around,” she said. “There’s not enough education to sellers to understand the dynamics of selling to an investor, versus someone who would actually live in the home.”

In the decade before the pandemic, Boston’s surge in housing production, including income-restricted units, helped meet demand from a growing population. But production also came with new concerns about higher housing costs in surrounding areas, increasing demand for parking, and sometimes conflicting needs in transportation. With her “Squares + Streets” initiative, Mayor Wu has tried to pave the way for development that could include more “missing middle” housing, but there have also been neighborhood concerns about the risks of displacement and added competition for scarce parking.

On Nov. 19, Wu and District 4 (Dorchester/Mattapan) City Councillor Brian Worrell announced a proposal to use $110 million of the city’s budget surplus to “jump start” housing production and support homeownership opportunities in Boston.

Functioning as a revolving loan fund, the money would be used to help finance redevelopment of public housing in Charlestown into a mixed-income community, along with supporting multiple-investment homeownership projects – at a time when most new development has taken the form of large buildings, often used as rental property. And, according to a release from Worrell’s office, the money could help ease the logjam on what he estimates are 30,000 permitted units still awaiting the start of construction.

“We have an opportunity with this development fund to invest in home ownership in a way that has never been done before,” Worrell said in the release. “This will create stability in our neighborhoods, and the byproduct of that stability is going to be wealth for our residents.” 

For her part, Crawford emphasized the difference between the advantages of homeownership and the uncertainties of renting.
“It’s about stability,” she explained. “It’s about making sure that the family members, whether they’re children or not, understand that they, too, can do this. They can become homeowners, they can build generational wealth, they can bring more thought as it relates to education by finishing high school, going on to college, because they’re no longer moving from place to place to place, looking for rents, because rents are always going up.”