Congratulations to all of those officials elected and reelected in Newburyport. Now that the election is behind us, I hope that they will turn their sights to what is truly the most vexing long-term issue facing our city: housing affordability.
Slowly but surely, Newburyport is turning into Nantucket North: a playground for the rich, where young families and the working class are simply unable to afford to live here.
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers on housing here in Newburyport. Under long-standing federal housing policy, housing is considered affordable if it costs no more than 30% of a household’s gross monthly income. The median household income in Newburyport in 2023 was $144,259 (data.census.gov.)
That means that in order to have affordable housing in Newburyport, the median family would pay around $3,600 a month toward housing. At current interest rates of 6.3%, the median family could afford (assuming they have saved a 20% down payment) to take out a 30-year mortgage for a house around $725,000.
But in 2023, the average single-family home in Newburyport was valued at $831,000, and in the two years since, it has risen by 24% to $1,030,000. (bit.ly/46Pld7q.) Very few families have seen their incomes rise by 24% in the last two years. And the monthly payment on a $1,030,000 home would be $5,100 per month, 41% more than a median family can afford.
A quick look at any housing website shows how tough it is to find anything affordable in Newburyport.
According to Redfin, 243 homes have been sold in Newburyport over the last year. Only 71 of those, 29%, were sold for less than $725,000. And of those homes actually affordable to the median family in Newburyport, only eight – 3% of the overall total – had three or more bedrooms.
Meanwhile, more than 10% of the sales in Newburyport this last year were more than $2 million, double the price of the median single-family home. This is also only looking at homes that might be affordable for the “median” family, but it is important to remember that, by definition, half of the families in Newburyport make less than the “median family income.” So there simply are not many homes available in Newburyport that are affordable at all to many families in town.
So what do these numbers mean?
First, they mean that the median family in Newburyport can no longer afford the median home in Newburyport. I cannot tell you how many people I talk to that share the story that they are so fortunate to have bought when they did, because there is no way that they could possibly afford to buy in Newburyport today.
But while rising home prices may be good for those lucky enough to have already purchased homes, what it means for our city’s future is deeply troubling. In order to afford the median single-family home in Newburyport, a family would need an income of at least $204,000.
That is not bartenders, servers or even most teachers and firefighters. As our housing costs continue to climb, the people who keep our city running every day will not be able to afford to live here.
We see this happening already. Children of longtime residents cannot afford to buy or rent in the city. Servers and teachers have to commute from far away because they cannot possibly afford to live here. Smaller cape houses ripped down and replaced by 8,000-square-foot, multimillion-dollar homes. Our city is slowly but surely changing from one with a diversity of incomes to one where only the wealthiest can live.
This goes against what has long made Newburyport such a wonderful place to live. Since Newburyport first became its own town in 1764, we have had prosperous and wealthy homeowners, most notably those who built the beautiful High Street mansions that remain some of our most valued housing stock today.
But we have historically also had middle- and working-class neighborhoods throughout the city. Those neighborhoods are being lost both to rising prices due to a significant housing shortage throughout the state and to developers who are tearing down affordable houses to build much more expensive ones in their place.
That gets to the crux of what we need from our mayor and City Council: more housing in general, and more affordable housing in particular. If we want to make sure that people of all ages, occupations and income levels can call Newburyport home, then we need to make sure that there are places in Newburyport where they can affordably live.
This starts with zoning. Under our current zoning laws, it is far easier for a developer to build a multimillion-dollar McMansion than it is to build starter homes on small lots that would be affordable for working families.
And under these same laws, over the past decade, we have seen a loss of large numbers of rental units in the city and a loss of homes at the lower end of the market that working families might actually be able to afford (at least without being forced to rely on state subsidies for the few, vastly oversubscribed, “affordable housing” units available).
There are many ideas for how best to address housing affordability, but it starts by recognizing that, while there are many pressing short- and medium-term issues, this is the biggest long-term issue facing our community.
If we do not do something about it now, then we may wake up in a decade or two to a place with familiar buildings but where the diversity and essence of what we love about Newburyport as a community has been lost.
Jared Hubbard is a member of the Newburyport Democratic City Committee.