This same MassINC report, however, raised some serious doubts about how widely and evenly the benefits of Massachusetts' boom have been distributed among the population of the Commonwealth. MassINC's analysis of median household income (as opposed to mean household income) offers a more accurate picture of the income of ordinary households, since this figure measures the exact midpoint of all household incomes - below and above which 50% of all households fall. Their findings indicate that the top 20% of households are the ones who have gained the most from the late 1990s prosperity. For the average family, in contrast, real income has DECREASED a full 10% during the 1990s. As their report notes:

"In 1998-99, the median household income in Massachusetts was still nearly 10% below the historical peak of $48,483 in 1989. In real 1999 dollars, the typical household in Massachusetts earned about $4,700 less than the typical household had earned ten years earlier."

When compared to national averages, the Massachusetts figures look even more bleak. Nationally in the 1990s, median real household income rose 5.1%, with the Midwest region being the highest, at 10%. The Northeast, and especially New England, was the only national region that experienced a decline in real median household income. In fact, Massachusetts was 49th in ranking of all the states, second only in income decline to Connecticut.

The growing demand for housing, especially from upper income groups drawn to professional work in the city's booming business services, finance and high technology sectors, has led to widespread inflation of rents and housing sales prices, resulting in spreading gentrification throughout Boston's neighborhoods. Since 1995, as well, fully 80,000 units of rent-controlled and vacancy-decontrolled housing have been lost in Boston due to passage of a statewide referendum that resulted in the elimination of rent control laws in the city, as well as in adjacent Cambridge and Brookline. Speaking of Boston's housing affordability crisis, the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University has noted, "we face the equivalent of a natural disaster such as a destructive hurricane or flood."

A Boston Tenants Coalition report recently pointed out that in order to pay the median advertised rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Boston, $1400 a month, a household would need to earn $62,000 per year. Two thirds of Boston's households, however, earn less than $40,000 per year. It is no wonder that the Tenants Coalition concludes that "Boston is losing its ability to house working families and low income people." The Coalition notes that even in the most affordable neighborhoods - East Boston, Hyde Park, and Roslindale - a minimum wage worker would have to work 128 hours a week in order to afford the average two-bedroom apartment. In Boston alone, 20,000 households are on waiting lists for public housing and Section 8 vouchers. A report of UMass Boston's McCormack Institute of Public Affairs notes that "shelter poor" households, those "who cannot meet their non-housing needs at a minimal level of adequacy after paying for housing" are up 50% in Massachusetts since the early 1990s. The same report adds that homelessness in Massachusetts also doubled in the late 1990s, with more than 10,000 families and 25,000 individuals without homes to call their own. Most of the homeless are women, elderly, and people of color.

Nearly all significant civic groups in Boston have joined together to commit themselves to ameliorating the city's housing affordability crisis. In A NEW PARADIGM FOR HOUSING IN GREATER BOSTON (2000), for example, Northeastern University and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, in conjunction with FleetBoston Financial, and the Boston Greater Chamber of Commerce, call for the creation of 36,000 new housing units - some of them affordable - in order to raise the vacancy rates and decrease the upward pressure on rents. The Boston Tenants Coalition's report, TURNING NEW GROWTH INTO AFFORDABLE HOUSING, advocates the creation of 10,000 new affordable units. The McCormack Institute's SITUATION CRITICAL documents a range of successful housing models in Massachusetts that can solve the housing affordability crisis, including land trusts, capital grants, co-housing, limited equity cooperatives, and scattered site public housing, among others.