Walsh: Boston breaks 15-year housing completion record

Boston is buliding upon its success.

Mayor Marty Walsh announced that the city has set a 15-year record for housing completions in 2015.

Walsh said that in 2015 the city saw 3,292 new housing units, representing $1.4 billion in value. Before this high water mark, the record was 3,257 units, which was set in 2006.

While celebrating the groundbreaking of a new 380-bed student housing facility at Emerson College, the Mayor announced that nearly 1,200 dorm beds have been permitted to date as well.

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“In order to strengthen our city and our workforce, we must meet the goals of our ambitious housing plan,” Walsh said in a statement. “I appreciate the efforts of our development community and our colleges and universities in helping us meet these challenges and we will continue working to create and maintain housing that keeps up with our city’s growth.”

Boston’s Quarter 3 report showed that the city set the new record of housing units once the Lancaster building in Brighton was finished.Officials said that the city is working on developing more housing at a 122 percent rate needed to create the 53,000 units as called for in the Boston 2030 plan. In 2015, there are 1,243 affordable housing units under construction, which Walsh said is 109 percent ahead of the pace to build 6,500 new units by 2030. The city also issued 39 low income housing permits in Quarter 3.

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Another milestone mentioned in Walsh’s housing report showed that for the first time under the Walsh Administration, the city has been able to collect significant data on students living off-campus, in order to better understand and reduce the pressure on Boston’s local housing market generated by the city’s large number of off-campus students.This will grant city officials a better chance of enforcing the No More Than Four law, a 2008 ordinance that forbids more than four full-time college students from living in one apartment, and requires universities to compile a masterlist of all of the off campus students’ addresses.