Boston rents were up 4.6 percent in January from a year earlier, according to new data — an ongoing trend that tenant advocates say is pricing more people out of the city.
Boston's median rent last month was $2,149, compared to the national median, which was up 3.3 percent to $1,350, according to the research branch of Zillow, the real estate and rental market website.
"It's a crisis," said Kathy Brown of the Boston Tenant Coalition. "Think about how many living-wage — let alone minimum-wage — workers it would take to pay $2,149 a month, especially if you factor in all your other bills. This is why we've seen so many people getting pushed out of Jamaica Plain and across the city."
Renting is often considered a stepping stone to home ownership, but since 2000, rents have grown about twice as fast as wages, leaving many renters further and further away from their goal of saving enough for a down payment on a house in Boston, said Svenja Gudell, Zillow's senior director of economic research.
Greg Vasil of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board said the answer is to build more housing.
"It really is a supply-and-demand issue," Vasil said. "If there was more of a supply, it should cause rents to drop."
But Brown said that the majority of apartments being built in the city are luxury units, well beyond the grasp of even the middle class.
Under the city's Inclusionary Development Program, a developer is supposed to either make 13 percent of the total number of units being built affordable, or pay $200,000 per unit into a fund the city can use to build affordable housing. The coalition wants the city to increase the portion of affordable units to 25 percent, and says the amount per unit a developer can alternatively pay should equal the building's price per unit.
Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement, "In 2014, we announced a robust housing plan, with a goal to build 53,000 new units of housing by 2030, including 20,000 middle-income units. We are laying the groundwork to get to that number, making funds available for affordable housing development, creating incentives for developers to invest, and evaluating our IDP program. With 8,000 units of housing under construction now, we're creating new supply to answer the demand for housing, which will drive down the cost of housing in the city of Boston."
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