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Report Finds Housing Permits Down In Greater Boston

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(Soe Lin/Flickr)
(Soe Lin/Flickr)

A new report finds that after years of increases, there's been a decline in the number of housing permits issued this year in Greater Boston, "especially in core cities and for multi-unit developments."

The report is the annual Boston Housing Report Card, from The Boston Foundation.

Its lead author, Barry Bluestone, told WBUR Tuesday morning that he hopes the permit decline is "just a pause," instead of a longer-term trend.

But, Bluestone said, "If this is a new trend, it means we're going to have a great deal of problem, not only finding the 53,000 units in Boston [that the mayor has called for], but we need 160,000 units of new housing by 2030 throughout Greater Boston."

Bluestone, a professor at the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, said those new units are needed to keep the costs of buying or renting housing under control.

Bluestone's particular concern is for affordable housing.

"Now that we've got enough of the luxury housing built," he said, "we're not seeing enough for workforce housing."

With reporting by the WBUR Newsroom. Click the audio player atop this post to hear the full Morning Edition conversation with Bluestone.

This article was originally published on November 29, 2016.

This segment aired on November 29, 2016.

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Bob Oakes was a senior correspondent in the WBUR newsroom, a role he took on in 2021 after nearly three decades hosting WBUR's Morning Edition.

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