Michelle Wu’s Pinocchio Moment on Housing

The high cost of housing is the number one issue I hear about from people in every neighborhood in our city. It is the reason my very first post on Substack was a detailed discussion of my comprehensive plan to stabilize rents and make housing more affordable for the average person in Boston. Click here if you missed it.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the massive gap between what Mayor Wu says she’s accomplished on housing – and what she’s actually done. I want to talk about her shifting numbers and figures – and what’s behind them. And, I want to describe why what she’s saying on housing is so much worse than simply another politician whose nose is getting longer when describing their accomplishments.

A Big Housing Exaggeration

Under Mayor Michelle Wu, the creation of new housing in Boston has dropped off a cliff. Meanwhile the median cost to buy a home in Boston has risen to $900,000, and rents have soared to a monthly average of $3,400.

It is a remarkable record of failure from a candidate who in 2021, promised the people of Boston she would make housing more affordable and would enact rent control.

To confuse and distract the public into believing she’s been doing a bang-up job, Michelle Wu has been making a series of misleading claims about her housing record over the past three years. She’s made so many different and contradictory claims it has been hard to keep up at times. Here’s a sample:

· Mayor Wu claimed to create 20,000 housing units in her first three years.

· Recently, she downgraded that figure to 17,000 housing units.

· Then last week in a forum, she introduced a new number -- 11,000.

· On affordable housing, she previously claimed to have created 6,098 affordable housing units from 2022-24.

· More recently, she claimed that her administration saw the highest affordable housing production than any preceding three-year period since 1998, with 5,455 income-restricted units.

You might be wondering what publicly available data supports these claims. Well, prepare to be disappointed. In fact, data from her own administration suggests she is not telling the truth.

So … What Are the Facts on Housing in Boston?

The best and most accurate way of tracking housing units created by a mayor is to track the number of building permits pulled each year. So, we went to the source that keeps track of those numbers: the City of Boston’s Inspectional Service Department (ISD). And what we found is not surprising.

According to the data available from the ISD, the total number of building permits pulled in her first three years as mayor is 7,803. Of that number, 2,261 of those units are income restricted or affordable units.

That means that according to figures provided by her own administration, Mayor Wu is off by 9,200 in her claims of creating 17,000 housing units. In addition, she has created only 38% of the affordable units she has claimed.

A Clear Downward Trend on Housing Production

What’s worse: the facts show a disturbing downward trend under her stewardship. For each year that Mayor Wu has been in office, the numbers of permits pulled have fallen drastically. In 2022, 3,890 building permits were pulled. Most of these projects were due to the policies of Mayors Walsh and Janey and permitted under their administrations.

In 2022, 2,586 of the building permits pulled in her first 6 months. In the last 6 months of 2022, as the mayor’s new housing policies were unveiled that year, those numbers dropped by 50%, with a mere 1,234 units pulling permits.

Source: City of Boston Inspectional Service Department

The trend continues downward. In 2023, 2,064 building permits pulled for all units which was 47% less than 2022. A year later, in 2024, 1,859 building permits were pulled through November, a 52% reduction of housing created from 2022.

NOTE: Notwithstanding this clear downward trend, there has been no media coverage of the mayor’s wild claims. The lack of media interest is especially puzzling given the cost of housing has been consistently ranked the top concern among voters in every public poll conducted about the mayor’s race. Go figure?

Why Mayor Wu’s Housing Tall Tales Matter

Of course, it’s hardly news that politicians exaggerate their accomplishments and steal them from their predecessors. But Michelle Wu’s deceptive statements about her housing record is especially alarming as it represents a clear signal that the mayor doesn’t understand that the lack of housing production is a big problem. If you listen to Mayor Wu, housing production is going great in Boston!

But there’s another reason the tall tales the mayor is telling about her housing accomplishments matter: because the clock is ticking.

The high cost of housing in Boston, due to the lack of production under Mayor Wu, is placing financial strain on our families, reducing the stability of our communities and harming our economic future. Without the production of new housing, the value of existing homes will continue to rise, rents will continue to soar, and living in Boston will become a luxury item, something that is only available to those that can afford it.

We can’t afford to waste any more time while rents go up, housing production goes down, and we fumble away talent to other places because it is too expensive to live in our city. Boston deserves a mayor that understands that when it comes to housing, availability is affordability.

No matter how many whoppers Michelle Wu tells, that’s one truth she can’t avoid.