The city spent about $7.6 million on homebuying assistance programs in 2024, said Sheila Dillon, chief of housing for the City of Boston. The most popular neighborhoods for buyers participating in the programs this year were Dorchester, where about a fifth of the homes were purchased, Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Mattapan.
Dozens of the new homeowners who bought this year using the assistance celebrated at a downtown Boston breakfast event with city officials Saturday morning.
“We want to make this the most common story: Buying your first home, here in Boston, as a convenient and achievable dream,” Mayor Michelle Wu said at the event.
Almost 700 residents have become homeowners through the city’s homebuying programs since 2021. In one of the key programs, the city provides grants ranging from about $30,000 to $50,000 that home buyers can apply to downpayments. Another program provides low fixed-interest rates on the mortgage and closing cost assistance.
The city’s programs generally target families that make less than 135 percent of the area’s median income (income limits depend on the program). In Boston, that’s roughly less than $220,000 per year for a family of four. Also, prospective buyers must first take a class on the homebuying process.
Bringing down the cost of housing in Boston — one of the most expensive markets in the country — and increasing home ownership rates among low-income families has been a key focus of Wu’s administration.
The city has permitted more affordable housing since she took office in 2021 than in the last 25 years, and the Boston Housing Authority plans to add almost 3,000 public housing units to its program with the federal government, Wu said.
On Friday, the city also launched a loan fund for “mission-driven” developers to acquire and preserve multi-family affordable housing in Boston. The fund will deploy up to $25 million in loans.
“It’s easy, in one of the most expensive cities in the country, for people to feel discouraged and like there’s no chance of staying here,” said Kenzie Bok, the administrator of the Boston Housing Authority. “That’s why, from a policy perspective, we’ve really had to throw the kitchen sink at it.”
Approximately 600 people have applied for homebuying financial assistance this year, said Karen Rebaza, director of the Boston Home Center. About 300 were approved, and 235 closed on their homes.
Ivelisse Minlletty moved to Boston 25 years ago from Barcelona, Spain. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Minlletty said she was excited to become part of a community that felt like a melting pot of different cultures.
Using the city’s financial assistance programs, she was able to afford a two-story multi-unit home in Roslindale, where she and her son, a student at UMass Boston, now live.
The process, though, was too complicated, she said. The banks she was working with didn’t initially embrace the city’s assistance programs, and “it can be very scary and intimidating,” to buy a home, Minlletty said. It took her two years to close, but “I don’t take no for an answer,” she said.
“There needs to be more education on how to combine their products with those programs,” Minlletty said. “Maybe [the city] needs to invite more financial institutions to be part of those grants. There’s a lack of awareness.”
Overall, though, she and others said their dream of home ownership would’ve been impossible, or taken many more years of saving, without the city’s financial assistance.
Nikola and Jemimah Kovacevic — both immigrants, he from Serbia, she from Uganda — said that the city’s assistance totaled about $70,000, since they were able to qualify for multiple programs. Nikola Kovacevic said that help was crucial to being able to afford the condo, where his parents now live with them.
“Otherwise, it would probably have taken us five years of renting, or possibly even moving out of the state,” he said. He works at a nonprofit in Quincy and his wife works at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“We’re so happy that we were able to stay in Boston,” he said.
Erin Douglas can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @erinmdouglas23.
