Avon tops in homes affordable to families

The secret about Avon, Wilmington, and Dracut is out.

The communities are among Boston's suburbs with the largest supply of homes that are affordable to families seeking good schools and proximity to jobs, according to a study being released today by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thanks to a 79 percent increase statewide in the median price of a single-family house, to $325,000, between April 2000 and today, there is growing concern that residents' incomes have failed to keep up.

Home prices ``are at that point where you have a lot of people who are priced out and have to make difficult decisions" about whether to stay in the Boston area, said Henry Pollakowski, director of the Housing Affordability Initiative at MIT's Center for Real Estate. ``This has repercussions back to the economic base and whether firms stay or leave."

MIT developed a computer model that ranks 142 Boston suburbs by affordability. The model can produce a list of communities affordable to any size family or any income. It was designed as a guide for employers, policy makers, and prospective home buyers.

Each community was ranked by the percentage of its entire stock of houses, condominiums, and apartments that a four-person household could afford. Affordability was based on the cost of a monthly mortgage payment and property taxes. Also factored in were the quality of schools, proximity to jobs, and supply of open space, an indication of qualify of life.

Avon was rated the best place to buy a house, because 50.7 percent of its total housing stock is affordable to a four-person household with $79,000 in annual income -- which is 80 percent of the statewide median household income.

``Unfortunately, our secret is out now," Frank Hegarty, a 54-year resident and chairman of Avon's Board of Selectman, said about his town's number one ranking in MIT's study.

Communities at or near the bottom in MIT's study had few, if any, properties within reach of the typical four-person household.

They include Brookline, where the median price of a single-family house was $1.1 million in 2005, and Duxbury, where the median was $610,000.

(Medians were provided by the Warren Group, which also provided data for MIT's report.)

While housing prices are lower in cities like Chelsea and Lawrence, they ranked low because the school systems are not well regarded, so families in those communities might have to spend more of their income on education.

David Luberoff, executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard University, a policy think tank, said a limited supply of housing drives prices up sharply, because communities are loath to build housing for families that would draw more children into financially strained school systems. These communities ``are protecting existing homeowners" and ``protecting the public fiscal situation," he said. Building reasonably priced housing ``is going to take some form of concerted action," he added.

Town administrator Richard Kelliher said Brookline, which ranked last in MIT's study, has 2,170 subsidized units of housing, one-fourth of them preserved or developed since 1995, when rent control was lifted.

MIT included in its rankings only privately developed housing because the study was designed to provide information about working families and employers, not very-low-income families.

While Brookline is an easy commute to Boston, and the public schools are well regarded, the town had no homes available for $441,000 or less -- the amount a four-person household making 80 percent of the median income could afford to spend on a home there.

Brookline, Kelliher said, ``understands that diversity makes a difference and affordability is a major aspect to that. We're working at all levels to try to do more."

The Romney administration has beefed up incentives to communities and developers to build multifamily housing. The number of multifamily starts more than doubled, to 9,604, between 2002 and 2005. Lawmakers have also passed legislation to subsidize communities for the added costs of educating additional students when multifamily housing is constructed.

``There's more to determining if it's affordable to live in a community than the cost of a house," said Andrew Gottlieb, chief of the Office for Commonwealth Development.

Chelsea is known for diversity -- its population includes Latinos, Bosnians, Brazilians, Somalians, and others. But the city's median house price has surged nearly 60 percent, to $317,000 since 2001, as condos sprout along the waterfront, which has skyline views of Boston. Yet, the public schools are being overseen by Boston University and struggle in a city that emerged from receivership in 1995.

Chelsea solicitor Cheryl Watson said the city is trying to rise to the challenges upscale communities do not face.

Numerous city programs include free day care for all children ages 3 through 5 and new commercial developments, such as a Home Depot.

``I don't think it's fair people tend to view the past -- what Chelsea was -- and are unable to see what Chelsea can be," she said.

Pollakowski said MIT's study shows housing development may be less important to economic development in places like Chelsea and Lawrence than improving schools to make them more appealing to families.

``We're not dismissing these places," he said, ``but different types of investments may be more valuable in different places."

In Avon, there are just 720 students in the school system, which falls ``midpoint" in scoring for the state's standardized tests, Hegarty said.

People like Henry and Lucyna Wiktorowski can afford to live in Avon, where the median price of a single-family was $319,000 in 2005.

Last year, they moved there from Brockton so daughter Natalia would no longer have to attend private school. The couple were comfortable sending her to Avon's public schools.

The town's location -- one of the first exits on Route 24 -- is also close to Lucyna Wiktorowski's bartending job in Boston and her husband's work as an electronics technician in Newton.

``We love it," she said, ``and finally I don't have to pay" for private school.

Kimberly Blanton can be reached at blanton@globe.com. Peter Schworm of the Globe staff and correspondent Joyce Pellino Crane contributed to this report.