You’ve been saving kitchen inspirations on Pinterest, imagining perfect peaceful bedrooms and daydreaming about half baths. Then, you innocently go onto Zillow or stop by an open house just about anywhere in New England. With excitement in your chest, and a little money stored away, you ask how much it will cost. The realtor looks upon you, smiling brightly, “Only $700,000.”
You place that dream back on the shelf.
With graduation right around the corner, many college students are putting aside what little money they can, hoping they can continue into adulthood with full independence after school. Moving home after graduation often means a loss of independence and comes with a nasty connotation that doing so already makes graduates “less successful” than peers who can afford to leave.
However, there’s been a steady increase of new grads doing just that after seeing the price tags of both renting and buying in today’s New England housing market.
Lisa Paulette has been a realtor in New England for 23 years. “The age that I see people renting and buying has just gotten older and older. They can’t afford to leave home even if they want to,” Paulette explains.
New grads, limited by paltry entry-level wages simply cannot afford the over-inflated price tags to rent or buy in New England. There’s also a severe lack of accessible education around the home buying and renting processes as a whole. New England is at risk of losing its young workforce, as they will be forced to flock to more affordable regions if this housing crisis cannot be resolved soon.
Home prices have increased significantly faster than salaries. The average single-family sale price in Massachusetts is $588,621 — a shockingly high price for a new grad to be faced with.
It’s not just Massachusetts grappling with soaring home prices; this trend exists in the rest of New England as well. According to Amanda Blanco and Jay Lindsay’s research in Nowhere to Hide: Housing Costs Keep Climbing in all Corners of New England, “between October of 2016 to 2024, the average value of a single-family home in Connecticut has risen 69%, Maine: 102%, Massachusetts: 74%, New Hampshire: 102%, and Rhode Island: 89%.”
Common sense says renting is cheaper. Yet, many new grads want to be near the city, either for the lifestyle or to access more job opportunities. Proximity has a big price tag, however, with rent averaging $3,050 a month on the low end. With student loan debt and interest rates increasing by the year, roommates cram together like sardines, trying to scrape up the next month’s rent.
A study performed by Redfin reports that, to afford a medium-priced apartment with a minimum wage job, new grads would have to work 135 hours a week in Massachusetts, 224 in New Hampshire, 116 in Rhode Island, and 105 in Maine.
There are a total of 168 hours in a week.
Upcoming MCLA graduate Chloe Golebiewski voices her personal struggles with balancing both work with academic pressures, saying, “When I’m not working, I’m in class, and vice versa. Paying rent has absolutely impacted my ability to focus on school. Not only do you have to think about rent, but you have to think about your tuition bill that can be rather expensive twice a year.”
Another upcoming graduate, Avani Richardson, speaks for many of MCLA’s population with his worries about what comes next, saying: “I’m very concerned as to where I’m going to live after school is over. On the one hand, I’m so excited to finally be on my own, and work in the field that I love. Yet on the other hand, I know I can’t afford to live where all my family are in Nantucket. But even looking at other places in New England that I could afford, the options have been slim to none.”
Golebiewski and Richardson are in the same boat as most Gen Z graduates today, but we not the first generation to be priced out. Krista Maloney is a Gen Xer, born between 1965 – 1980. She says she also faced bleak housing prospects after graduation. “The biggest challenge was to find the price range that my husband and I could afford- I remember looking at houses that we could ‘afford’ with my mom, and when I got back into the car I just started to cry.”
Maloney and her husband were eventually able to buy a home by opting for a fixer-upper, electing to invest their time into a less expensive home that needed work. “Both times we had to fix everything ourselves,” she remembered. “When the house needed to be painted, we got up on ladders. My dad was a carpenter, so we would take leftover job materials and get creative with things that we could get for free. We spent our weekends doing this.”
Going the fixer-upper route is not nearly as fun as HGTV makes it look. It requires a huge amount of time and effort. But according to Maloney, the rewards are well worth it. “You can’t save the amount of money that you get in your house value. Your house builds equity, so your house becomes more profitable. We bought it for $180,000 and flipped it for $449,000.”
For new grads, finding their feet in the workforce, taking on a project of that size might be daunting. Renting may start to seem a little more appealing, but Bonnie Yacknick, a homeowner since 1969, says buying is the smarter way to go. “You’re just paying for someone else’s mortgage when you rent.”
Like Maloney, Yacknick and her husband bought a less-than-ideal home at first, but made it work. “It was a shoebox, but that’s what we could afford at the time.”
Together, the couple spent $16,900.00 on their first home. Both were teachers, with Bonnie making $6,400.00 that year, and Paul making $7,200.00. Of course, inflation makes these numbers almost unfathomable by today’s standards, but crucially, Bonnie and Paul’s salaries went much further in that time. “It was just different back then,” remembers Yacknick. “Things lasted, and prices of housing were affordable.”
Despite the current crisis in the housing market, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for the next generation of renters and buyers. Companies such as VHB are working closely with developers to get affordable housing for income-restricted households within the New England area.
Even locally, there has been a call to action amongst community members to get affordable rentals and housing. Lillian Zavastsy is president of the growing Northern Berkshire Community Land Trust. With this project, she and other volunteers help home buyers by purchasing the land so that the upfront cost of the house is more manageable, and the buyers then lease the land from the trust, typically a 99-year lease.
Zavasty, VHB, and many more community members work with the hope that, as they toss their caps and accept their diplomas, new grads can keep their home where their heart is and afford housing here in New England.
