Metro HousingBoston
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Mission Statement
We mobilize wide-ranging resources to provide innovative and personalized services that lead families and individuals to housing stability, economic self-sufficiency, and an improved quality of life.
About This Cause
Metro Housing|Boston was founded in 1983 through a partnership of business, government, and community leaders in Greater Boston. At that time, Boston faced a housing crisis triggered by a glaring lack of affordable homes in the Metropolitan area. In the first few years of its existence, the new organization – then called the Boston Housing Partnership – oversaw the creation or rehabilitation of nearly 2,000 affordable homes. In 1991, the Partnership merged with Metropolitan Housing, Inc. to form the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership, turning its focus to the administration of federal and state rental assistance vouchers on behalf of the Commonwealth. Over the past four decades, Metro Housing has consistently evolved with the changing times and challenges. Our organization is responsive and imaginative, modifying programming and approaches to fill coverage gaps and adapt to emerging trends. When Community Development Corporations begin developing and financing affordable housing, we pivoted to direct service and voucher administration. In the 2008 financial crisis, we provided free foreclosure counseling for struggling homeowners. In response to the unprecedented community health and economic challenge of COVID-19, Metro Housing focused on emergency assistance to meet the immediate and existential needs of at-risk residents. Now, as we look beyond COVID relief toward COVID recovery, our “People First, Housing Always” philosophy drives us to craft comprehensive solutions to housing instability and economic inequality that center the needs and goals of our participants in all that we do. Today, Metro Housing|Boston serves the housing needs of more than 25,000 Greater Boston households annually. Our programs and services collaborate with an extensive network of property owners and fellow service providers to help families and individuals attain and maintain safe and suitable housing. We administer approximately 11,000 federal and state housing subsidies for families with children, people with disabilities, and the elderly. In addition to voucher administration, we also provide both walk-in and call-in support to more than 14,000 housing-insecure individuals on a yearly basis, dispensing emergency transition funding to more than 10,000 households facing housing crises. Our educational workshops reach tenants, homeowners and service partners across the region, and we co-locate services with Greater Boston community stakeholders including hospitals, housing providers, and direct service organizations. In addition to voucher administration and emergency rental assistance, Metro Housing delivers a diverse suite of housing support services directly to our participants. Our Housing Supports division is an interrelated and holistic group of programs and services designed to help low- and moderate-income Greater Boston residents find safe, affordable homes and access critical benefits to stabilize their housing. Housing Supports is the realization of Metro Housing’s comprehensive commitment to “housing first, not housing only,” providing eviction prevention/rehousing resources, longer-term case management, and connection points to opportunities for financial skill building, income maximization, and educational and workforce training. Housing Supports assists residents with the highest barriers to housing stability, regardless of the severity or duration of their needs. Participant referrals come from a wide range of sources, including government agencies, hospitals, nursing homes, social service agencies, schools, legislators, friends, and family. Our participants have diverse backgrounds, needs, and challenges, and Housing Supports programs meet them wherever they are on the road to financial self-sufficiency, helping them achieve their greatest possible level of independence. Metro Housing serves 25,000 Greater Boston families annually, with a coverage area inclusive of Boston proper and 29 surrounding communities and neighborhoods. Our participants are predominantly families and individuals with low to moderate incomes, with an average annual income of $16,677, and 80% have household incomes under $30,000. Our constituency is majority-minority: 47% of our participants are Black/African-American, and 30% identify as Hispanic irrespective of race. Almost 60% live in Boston, 39% contain at least one child, and 52% have a household member with at least one disability. These households are overwhelmingly female-led (73%) and more than 90% of the families we assist with emergency rental assistance and stabilization services are headed by single mothers with multiple children. Metro Housing uses the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Area Median Income (AMI) index to define LMI status. Households with annual earnings that are at or below 30% of AMI are classified as extremely low income, those earning less than 50% of AMI are considered very low-income, and 80% of AMI is the upper threshold for low-income status. Our participants are predominantly LMI families and individuals with an average annual income of $16,677, and 80% have household incomes under $30,000. This harsh financial reality was not created by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the resultant climate of economic uncertainty has accelerated this existing crisis into an existential threat. To compensate for the inescapable economic burden of residing in one of the most expensive rental markets in the country, these vulnerable families often must devote an untenable percentage of household income to maintaining housing, leaving them without adequate resources to meet basic needs or acquire necessary healthcare. Even with these sacrifices, many struggle to meet rent payments and can easily fall into homelessness. Without appropriate guidance, navigating the bureaucracy of rental housing search and financial assistance can be an opaque and convoluted journey. Shortcomings in targeted outreach leave many at-risk populations out of the communications loop for available supports and benefits. While most of our constituency is classified as very-low income or below, some participants fall into an income range that exceeds the limits for state and federal assistance but is insufficient to weather a housing crisis. This gap in coverage fails to account for the many working LMI families that can be as little as a minor unexpected expense away from financial disaster. For those participants, case managers strategically and creatively utilize the Emergency Assistance Fund to preempt homelessness or secure new housing. While our mission is not explicitly based around racial equity, our implicit focus is on the elevation of traditionally underserved racial and ethnic minorities. Our constituency is majority-minority, and we predominantly serve at-risk families from communities of color. As a result, Metro Housing views the services we provide – and the manner in which we provide them – through a lens of social equity. The ongoing racial justice movement has prompted a great deal of sobering self-reflection, however. While we emphasize representational hiring by prioritizing bilingual applicants and those living within two miles of our Roxbury Crossing headquarters, we recognize that more work is required to align our culture with our values. We have contracted with YW Boston to lead us in a 16-month organization-wide program that will help enshrine Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) principles throughout the organization and the work we do. We have expanded our internal Fair Housing team, recognizing the critical role that those principles play in the movement toward social equity and housing justice. The Senior Advisor overseeing that department has been concurrently elevated into a directorship role with a greater voice in organizational decision-making. In addition, we have prioritized the diversification of our Board of Directors. Since 2019, we have added five new members to our board of directors, all of whom identify as people of color. We believe that adding a broader range of perspectives and lived experiences to the leadership of our organization will ultimately facilitate a greatly improved participant experience. These moves are the leading edge of a thoughtful, measured, and permanent evolution of our culture, not simply a “quick fix” designed to respond to the current moment of racial reckoning in America. It is our belief that if we were doing it fast, we would be doing it wrong.