It is no secret that some on the North Shore are facing a housing affordability crisis.
Housing plans prepared by communities across the region underscore how 24 percent of Lynn renters are low-income and cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Another 27 percent are severely cost-burdened, spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent.
In Swampscott, more than 40 percent of all households are either cost-burdened or severely cost-burdened (including 80 percent of low-income households) while in Marblehead two-thirds of low-income households are cost-burdened.
In Saugus, this number is more than 33 percent; in Peabody it is more than 38 percent; and in Salem it is more than 45 percent.
A strong housing market in the region, spurred largely by an increase in population, has lasted for at least the past eight years and led to soaring rent prices.
“The rents are very, very high and have not come down,” said Robyn Frost, the executive director of The Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, who works closely with housing-insecure populations throughout the North Shore.
The average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Lynn rose to $1,750 by 2018, up nearly 25 percent in three years, according to data provided in the city’s proposed housing production plan, “Housing Lynn: A Plan for Inclusive Growth.”
“Even people who are working are just not making enough to pay their rents,” Frost said.
While Lynn has a comparatively large stock of subsidized housing — 4,435 units, or 12.4 percent of its total housing — this is not enough to match the substantial need of the city, with the plan stating that, for every one unit of affordable housing in the city, there are four families who need it.
As a result, many tenants have been left severely burdened.
The housing crisis has done damage beyond the surface level, affecting the health, stability and well-being of low-income families.
Housing and Health
“There’s a direct correlation with the communities that had the most overcrowding and those that were hit the hardest by COVID,” said Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development (LHAND) Manager of Planning and Development Jeffrey Weeden. “Multiple families living in one unit is just not safe or healthy.”
The data from Housing Lynn show that as the population of Lynn has increased, the number of total households have actually decreased, showing that more and more people were moving in with one another to make ends meet.
“What we’re seeing a lot of is people having to live with multiple people in one household to try to make the rent work,” said Frost. “Which is one of the reasons why COVID spread quickly.”
According to Housing Lynn, an estimated 2,043 homes, or 6.2 percent of homes in Lynn, are overcrowded using the federal definition. That is up from the 4 percent reported in 2010, almost certainly an underestimate, since most overcrowding happens without official acknowledgement by landlords or tenants, the plan states.
Lynn being hit so hard by COVID is correlated with the city’s density problem. The city has reported nearly 16,000 cases and nearly 200 deaths as of early March, with case rates consistently higher than many surrounding communities.
On March 23, state data showed over the previous two weeks, Lynn had 29.5 average daily cases per 100,000 people at 4.69 percent positivity — compared to the less densely populated Swampscott with 27.3 average daily cases at 2.37 percent positivity and Marblehead with 15 cases at 1.43 percent positivity.
Deciding between food and rent
Frost said her organization has been seeing a spike in requests for housing assistance in the past year — 10 to 15 requests daily — and that this had been a trend even before the pandemic, meaning that a significant amount more people were becoming at risk of homelessness.
However, Frost said that increased risk of homelessness was not actually leading to more homelessness.
Instead, it was leading to families making tough choices, such as having to decide “between rent and food, rent and heat, or rent and electricity.”
That has had a significant effect on food insecurity, with one in five Lynn residents being food insecure, according to the Lynn Community Health Center.
Dianne Kuzia Hills, director of My Brother’s Table, a Lynn soup kitchen, noted that as housing prices have increased in past years, she has seen an increased reliance on services like My Brother’s Table.
During the pandemic, it has become especially pronounced, with the number of meals the soup kitchen has distributed doubling its 2019 numbers in the first nine months of 2020. By September, 510,888 meals had been served.
“I see the effect of high housing prices in people not being able to afford food, or anything except their housing,” said Hills.
Those statements were backed up by data collected in the Health Neighborhoods Study, a local partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The study, which involved interviews with hundreds of Lynn residents, found that 69 percent of people in the city have found it “somewhat hard” or “very hard” to cover monthly expenses, and 29 percent had gone hungry in the month before they were surveyed because they didn’t have enough money for food.
Instability
The rising cost of housing leads to more instability for families, pushing many of them from apartment to apartment and sometimes even out of the region.
One Lynn resident struggling with that housing instability is Purita Perez, a Dominican immigrant who moved to the city 10 years ago to join her family.
In 2010, she rented a single room for $600. By 2016, she moved to a one-bedroom apartment on Harwood Street, which cost $950 at the time, but has since increased to $1,550. She currently lives there with her daughter and granddaughter.
The pandemic has made paying rent much harder, Perez said. She is a home-health aide who lost her job toward the start of the pandemic. When she finally returned to work, her hours were slashed, from 61 to 35 hours a week.
She has since fallen behind on her rent payment and said she feels lucky that she was able to remain in her apartment; many of her neighbors have already left due to their inability to pay rent.
When asked if she was able to find anything more affordable, Perez said that was the “million-dollar question.
“I understand my living situation now is really small for three people,” she said. “I’ve been trying to look for an apartment to afford, but it’s just ridiculous.”
She has been looking at communities throughout the North Shore, but has not been able to find anywhere more affordable, making her question whether she can stay.
“My family lives here and I don’t know how I would live without them,” Perez said. “I would like to stay, but I don’t know what will happen.”
Guthrie Scrimgeour can be reached at [email protected].
