The City of Boston unveiled a new program Thursday that aims to save 1,500 Boston renters from displacement in its first five years.
The Boston Acquisition Fund will provide developers with low-interest loans to purchase multi-family housing in the city to protect current occupants from being uprooted. The intention of the fund is to stabilize rising rents and stave off speculative investors from buying up rental properties and converting them to pricey condos.
“This innovative solution prioritizes equity, ensuring that residents – especially communities of color – are not pushed out by rising costs or outside investors,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement.
Along with stabilizing housing, the fund also aims to permanently keep “naturally occurring” affordable housing off the speculative market and promote local diverse development teams. The city would subsidize the purchase of the buildings under an agreement to retain the current occupants and limit rent increases.
The fund has a fundraising target of $25 million, with $13 million already raised. The city supplied $5 million with the other $8 million coming from local organizations such as the Boston Foundation, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation, which will administer the fund.
Moddie Turay, the corporation CEO, said that the preservation of affordable housing is just as important as building new affordable housing. “If we don’t also focus on preserving what we have, then that is, as some I’ve heard someone describe as a hole in the bucket,” he said. “We have to do both. We have to build and we have to preserve.”
The city says the new fund will support the acquisition of 500 homes, helping 1,500 people ward off displacement in its first five years. It is designed as a “public-private revolving loan” fund — a pool of money used to make loans which is then recycled back into the fund once the loans are repaid.
It continues the work of the existing Acquisition Opportunity Program which was launched in 2016. That program has provided $90 million in funding, which has created and preserved over 1,000 units of affordable housing.
The new fund is one of many efforts to address the housing crisis in both the City of Boston and the entire Commonwealth.
The Massachusetts Senate Democrats announced a five-year, $5 billion housing bond bill in June with $800 million going toward the state’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund to support housing for middle class incomes.
At a Thursday press conference, Wu said “The last three years in Boston, we’ve invested more money and created more programs to make housing affordable than at any other time in the last 30 years.”
