Did you know that the median income for a Lynn family of four is $119,000 per year?
At least it is according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which determines area median income (AMI) by grouping Lynn with 110 surrounding cities and towns.
Of course, anyone who lives in Lynn could tell you that the city’s actual median family income is much lower than $119,000.
Data provided by the city’s drafted housing production plan shows that the median family income in Lynn is actually less than half of the HUD number — $53,500.
So why does this matter?
Because it makes the conversation about affordable housing in Lynn so much more difficult.
Take Gov. Charlie Baker’s new CommonWealth Builder program, a $60 million initiative that subsidizes the production and purchase of homes for homebuyers with incomes between 70 to 120 percent AMI based on the HUD calculation.
Baker describes the initiative as an effort to combat “systemic inequities” and incentivize “new housing development and home-buying opportunities for middle-income residents of Boston and our Gateway Cities – particularly for people of color – empowering more people to become homeowners.”
At first glance, this characterization might seem fair.
But when you consider that a home at 70 percent of AMI is only affordable to households making $83,300 a year, while 120 percent is affordable to those making $142,800 a year, you realize that this program isn’t actually doing anything for the middle-income residents of our city.
The initiative starts to seem less like an effort to help middle-income Lynn residents, and more like a giveaway to developers building housing that specifically is not affordable to your average Lynn resident.
This makes the conversation about housing much more confusing.
Take the recently released “Housing Lynn: A Plan for Inclusive Growth,” which consistently refers to affordable housing as “for households with low incomes at or below 80 percent of AMI.”
This seems reasonable until you realize that, as the executive summary of the plan states, “affordable housing based on this regional definition is not affordable to many Lynners.”
What 80 percent affordability actually means is affordability for the Cambridge tech bro making nearly $100,000 a year.
Based on the census data, housing would have to be offered at 44 percent AMI to actually be affordable to the average Lynn resident.
For the 17.3 percent of Lynn residents who live below the poverty line, an affordable unit would cost less than 22 percent AMI.
We all know that there is an affordability problem in Lynn.
Lynn commissioned a housing study in 2016 that found affordable units “pale in comparison” to need, with just one subsidized unit for every 4.4 low- and moderate-income households in the city.
According to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, more than 46 percent of Lynn households are cost-burdened, meaning they pay 30 percent or more of their income on housing.
Roughly 21 percent of Lynn households pay more than half of their income toward housing.
And rents continue to rise too. According to the “Housing Lynn” plan, “the median asking rent in Lynn rose 25 percent, from $1,435 in the fourth quarter of 2015 to $1,790 in the fourth quarter of 2018.”
This crisis, compounded with the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, means evictions, foreclosures, and more people being priced out of the city that they call home.
There is a real and important conversation to be had about development and affordability in Lynn and on the North Shore.
We shouldn’t ignore the potential benefits of bringing investment and the tax dollars that come with development into Lynn, but we also shouldn’t ignore the desperate need to address what has undoubtedly become a housing affordability crisis.
The absurd way we classify Lynn’s area median income makes that conversation much more difficult.
Guthrie Scrimgeour is a staff reporter with The Item.
