SALEM — The city announced Monday that it will hold a second community forum on Jan. 25 to discuss the state of senior housing and the policies surrounding it as it is developing a Housing Road Map.
“We are just trying to make sure that as people age, there is a housing type and option available for them at a price point that they desire,” said Cassie Moskos, the city’s senior planner. “We are not looking at just assisted-living facilities or age-restricted places, but universal design and things that would allow as people age to age in place so that they can stay in their community that they know and that they enjoy as they go through multiple life phases.”
Moskos said that in addition to the general public, the project’s team has invited the City Council, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Board and a variety of boards and commissions that work with senior housing like the Planning Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals. They have also reached out to representatives at both the state- and the federal-government levels, inviting them to participate as they have an impact on senior-housing policy.
“This is a topic that affects everybody in some form or fashion. We are all going to age and we all know older adults. So this does affect everybody,” said Moskos.
The Salem Housing Road Map initiative started in the fall of 2021. The plan will be filed with the state of Massachusetts as the city’s official housing-production plan and will contain a set of goals and strategies that the city will use over the next five years to meet its housing needs, Moskos said. The project’s team anticipates that the planning initiative will span through the spring of 2022.
The first community forum that took place in November 2021 introduced residents to the project and the steering committee, and presented the preliminary findings on the city’s housing needs and constraints.
“We’re trying to kind of tie what we found in the data with what people are feeling and seeing in the real world,” said Moskos.
The project’s team has found that there is a large gap between housing prices and rents in Salem and what the city’s residents can afford. Almost half of the city’s households have low to moderate income and 42 percent of them spend more than half of their gross income on housing.
An average renter in Salem can afford to pay $1,013 a month for housing while Salem’s average rent is $2,014.
The average housing prices in the city have also grown much more rapidly than the city’s average incomes. While the average family income increased by 8 percent since 2010, the average sales price for a home grew by 49 percent. An average condo sold for $385,000 in Salem in 2020, while a single-family home for sale was priced at $490,000 on average.
Some of the affordable housing recently constructed in Salem is out of reach to the average household in the city, the report said. Salem’s average household earns about $68,800 per year while the affordable housing calculations are done using the average household income in the greater Boston area, which is $113,300.
The project’s team concluded that there is a need for more affordable ownership opportunities with sales prices at or below $276,000 and for more rental housing priced around or below $1,000 per month.
Some other constraints of the Salem housing market determined in the analysis are far greater growth of the population compared to the number of new housing units; only 13 percent of Salem’s land being available for multi-family development without special permits; and the need to take into account the rise of the sea level and more severe weather due to climate change for any future housing development.
The next community forum will be held on Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. via Zoom. The registration link is available on the city’s website. Live translation into Spanish or Portuguese will be available.
