Issues Facing Boston: 1984, Housing

The housing problem in Boston is one issue facing the new council which offers both opportunity and complexity. In a city where 70 percent of the households are tenants, where incomes are low and housing expensive, and where major demographic and economic changes are taking place, easy answers are not available. But housing, unlike other issues, is a matter over which the city has some leverage so that progress will be noted and appreciated by an increasingly attentive electorate. In recent years, the city has not faced the challenge of greater local discretion in housing policy (made available by the abdication of the federal government), addressed the worsening condition in the stock, or offered solutions to problems of affordability. As a result your tenure with the council begins not in the mode of fine-tuning a reasonably good machinery, but at a point when the situation requires developing from scratch a city housing policy and the machinery to implement it