Boston Foundation calls for "revolution"

Local institutions must galvanize for a "sweeping revolution" if Greater Boston is to continue to flourish in the future in the face of increasing global challenges and competition.

So concludes a new report from the Boston Foundation, a large community foundation, and the report, titled "A Time Like No Other: Charting the Course of the American Revolution," is scheduled to be unveiled today at a Boston College Citizen Seminar.

"We are at the intersection of peril and opportunity," foundation chief executive Paul S. Grogan said in a statement in a press release advancing the seminar.

The region is threatened, Grogan indicated, by a loss of young people, partly squeezed out by high housing prices, and by "growing competition for knowledge-economy clusters," but given that "revolution" is in the Bay State's "civic DNA," there is hope that local ingenuity and the region's tremendous talent pool can find a way for Massachusetts to continue to flourish.

To successfully meet the challenges ahead, local institutions must become more "collaborative, efficient, and innovative," the report indicated, and they must figure out a way to build housing that is affordable to young workers.

For example, the report notes that the "region's cost of living exceeds the nation's by a growing percentage."

Between 1998 and 2006, the number of communities in Greater Boston in which "a median-income household could afford a median-priced home shrank from 148 out of 161 to just 27," the report said.

On the bright side, the report found that Massachusetts has "turned the corner" following job and population loss in the aftermath of the 2001 recession.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)