This is part two of a two-part series on transit lessons from Tokyo. Read the first part here.
As a child growing up in Watertown, Jade Harrelson dreamed of owning a home. She remembered strolls past beautiful properties with yards, and thinking that one day she — like generations of relatives before her — would be able to buy a house in Greater Boston.
“I always imagined I’d live in one of those homes,” she said recently.
But that dream has collided with the harsh reality of the region’s real estate market. Buyers with a limited budget have been pushed further and further outside the city. Harrelson, now 42, is getting ready to close on a home nearly 100 miles west of Boston in the small city of Agawam outside of Springfield.
Living so far outside of Boston will be a major inconvenience, especially for her husband who can’t drive due to a medical condition. But Harrelson said with a budget under $350,000, they couldn’t afford something closer to public transit.
“This will be the first time in our lives where he doesn’t have good access to public transportation,” she said of her husband. “So we got him an e-bike, and he’s gonna be looking for a job locally. And we’re going to become very familiar with the backroads in Agawam.”
Harrelson’s experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Greater Boston house hunterse. In June of last year, the average price of a single-family home in the region reached a record high of more than $960,000, a 500% increase from 1980, with adjustments for inflation.
Rents also are soaring, with the median monthly rental price in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton area hitting nearly $4,000 in 2024.
Research points to severely limited housing stock as the main source of the climbing prices.
“We need a whole suite of reforms to address the issue,” said Jonathan Berk, a housing consultant and founder of ReMain, which works with communities on revitalization efforts. “And it gets worse the further out you get from downtown Boston.”
According to Berk, high housing prices are increasingly forcing homebuyers into communities with limited access to public transportation. As a result, more people are taking cars, contributing to gridlock, increased carbon emissions and a decreased quality of life for commuters.
The idea that housing, transit and environmental policy are inextricably linked is part of a recent report from Boston Indicators and TransitMatters, which found that the region urgently needs to realign its transportation and housing priorities.
“While thriving in many ways, Greater Boston faces interconnected challenges: rising housing costs, residential segregation, chronic underinvestment and mismanagement of the MBTA, and climate change impacts resulting from car-centric development patterns,” the report said. “A growing body of evidence shows that increasing population density around transit hubs is essential for creating the human capital and economic dynamism that support thriving neighborhoods with reliable, well-funded transit service.”
So where to start?
Tokyo: where planning intersects
Unlike in most major cities in the United States, the world’s largest city — Tokyo, home to 37 million people — is remarkably affordable, even for low-income workers.
The average monthly rent for one-bedroom apartment is roughly ¥113,100 ($762.26 in U.S. dollars) , a manageable price for a couple living on the city’s minimum wage. In Boston, the average one-bedroom apartment rents for more than four times that price, or about $3,415 a month.
In Tokyo, a complex web of trains — above and below ground — carry some 40 million people through the city every day. The system’s maps are confusing, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a neighborhood that doesn’t have a train stop within walking distance.
The busiest train station is Shinjuku Station where Hari — who only provided her first name — met a friend on a recent Tuesday evening. Despite the fact that she can drive, Hari, like most Tokyo residents, said she doesn’t.
“The train is just more convenient,” she said.
Housing and transportation are deeply intertwined in the city, with train stations serving double duty as major residential, economic and transportation centers.
“In other countries, a railway is just a railway. It’s just a place to ride on the train,” said Shunzo Miyake, who heads international affairs at Japan’s largest railway company, JR East.
Tokyo’s private rail companies compete for passengers, he said, and develop real estate around stations to turn them into social hubs — places where people want to stay after they disembark.
Residents can spend an entire day perusing hundreds of restaurants, shops and bars at busy stations like Shinjuku and Shibuya.
“We run a retail business, food and beverage business, shopping centers, hotels, real estate, etcetera,” Miyake said.
In Japan, railway companies are effectively real estate companies, contributing to a closed-loop system of
development
that helps keep the city affordable. Train companies that see a need for more housing, build out an area with new homes, shopping centers and rail lines that allow people to travel to other parts of the city.
Flexible zoning laws
in Japan smooth the process, and there is little opposition to construction that mixes residential, retail and transit.
Recreating a system like that in Greater Boston would be virtually impossible. Decades of investment in highway infrastructure has made the region acutely car-dependent. The publicly operated MBTA faces a major deficit, and
restrictive zoning policies
that favor single-family homes have made it difficult to build any new affordable housing across Eastern Massachusetts.
What Massachusetts can learn
“The problem, I think, with this region in particular, lies in how we restricted our ability to produce housing really anywhere near any of our mass transit, even in the dense urban core on some of the rapid transit lines,” Berk said of Greater Boston.
Massachusetts adopted the controversial MBTA Communities Act in 2021 requiring cities and towns with transit stops to rezone for more affordable housing. The measure has faced a slew of legal challenges, with some communities arguing that the act goes too far. Housing advocates believe the reforms don’t go far enough to address affordable housing shortages.
Massachusetts needs 222,000 new housing units by 2035, according to a recent state report. Berk said the MBTA Communities Act won’t address that shortage fast enough, and the number of homes needed in the state is only expected to grow.
Berk said the state could see a major population exodus without change, especially among young people. The net out-migration of adults age 26-34 was the highest on record last year.
“It is a real thing that we have to worry about here,” he said. “There are folks leaving because of the housing prices.”
And for those who are staying in Massachusetts, they’re finding far-away homes in places like Agawam, and traveling greater distances by car.
