Homeownership preservation must be part of our housing strategy.
Too many people struggle to stay in their homes after buying them.
MASSACHUSETTS HOUSING POLICY echoes a familiar three-part refrain. We need to build more homes. We need to ensure that rental units are safe and affordable. And we need to make buying a home more accessible to low- and moderate-income households. All three are crucial moves for dealing with our sharpening supply and affordability crisis, but they often neglect a quieter, equally urgent crisis unfolding in thousands of Massachusetts households: Too many of our state’s homeowners are struggling to stay in their homes after they buy them.
A coalition of partners, including the Boston Foundation, worked with The MassINC Polling Group on a recently released survey of 850 homeowners across Massachusetts. (The MassINC Polling Group is part of the nonprofit civic organization MassINC that publishes CommonWealth Beacon.) It asked households about the benefits and challenges of homeownership. It also inquired about the programs they participated in to become homeowners in the first place.
Let’s start with an important finding: For those who decided to buy a home, homeownership created significant benefits. Nearly all the Massachusetts homeowners surveyed expressed satisfaction with owning their home, and 72 percent said that it had helped build their financial resilience. For those who used state or local down payment assistance, the results were even stronger. Ninety-three percent of those households reported never facing foreclosure risk, compared to 81 percent for those without such help. Similarly, households who completed a first-time homebuyer course said they were better off across virtually every measure of financial and housing stability.
These data validate what the public and private actors in the housing ecosystem have bet on: Decreasing the cost and financial barriers to home buying gives homeowners greater stability and opportunities to build wealth.
Yet while Massachusetts has done a great deal to help residents buy homes, families are facing challenges in keeping them. Almost half of homeowners in the survey reported that it has been at least somewhat difficult to afford their housing costs over the past year. Nearly a third say they have had to skip or delay paying for food, utilities, or medical bills to cover their mortgage. And more than a third have deferred urgent home repairs.
These numbers are not evenly distributed. Black homeowners face particularly acute stress: 48 percent have skipped basic needs and 47 percent have delayed urgent repairs. For households earning under $50,000, the foreclosure risk rate climbs to nearly 30%. Gateway City residents say they face compounding hardship across nearly every indicator.
And then there is a looming intergenerational threat: Only 21 percent of homeowners have any legal arrangement—a will, trust, or life estate deed—for what happens to their home when they die. Among non-White homeowners, that figure drops to just 12 percent. The top barriers to these arrangements are the cost of legal fees (40 percent), not knowing where to start (37 percent), and lack of awareness about the process (32 percent). Without these protections, a lifetime of wealth wrapped up in home equity can evaporate in probate court, over contested claims or the forced sale of a property by a family that never meant to let it go.
It is time for Massachusetts to build and scale infrastructure to ensure homebuyers can become long-term homeowners.
We need to broaden access to programs that offer homeowners funding support to help them absorb economic shocks. The Homeowner Assistance Fund, the most recent and significant state intervention to prevent foreclosure, was a federally funded program born of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it ended in 2024. Other mortgage assistance and home repair assistance programs exist but are often subject to eligibility or geographic restrictions and carry long waitlists. Without the provision of these resources to communities across the Commonwealth, too many households remain one emergency expense away from falling behind on their mortgage.
We also need to expand the availability of post-purchase counseling. While first time homebuyer classes focus on the home buying process, post-purchase education helps homeowners learn how to navigate maintenance needs, build savings, and avoid predatory lending. Only 33 percent of homeowners surveyed have taken these courses, with participation dropping sharply among older and lower-income owners who are often the most vulnerable.
Lastly, we must develop accessible and affordable estate planning resources. Black and Latino homeowners—the very households for whom a home represents the largest share of total family wealth—are least likely to have legal protections in place. A promising pilot is underway: Boston College Law School’s Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights has partnered with the Massachusetts Affordable Homeownership Alliance and Harvard Law School’s clinical programs to offer estate planning services to MAHA homebuyers after closing. This is exactly the kind of innovation the field needs—and it remains, for now, a pilot that is serving a fraction of those who need it.
The survey confirms what we already know: there is a significant gap between making a homeowner and sustaining one. In our Commonwealth, a foreclosure, an inherited property tied up in probate, or a home that crumbles because repairs were put off each threatens the ability of a household to preserve its homeownership and build generational wealth. The Commonwealth’s housing sector has gotten good at opening doors. It is time for us to invest as much in keeping them open.
Courtney Brunson is director of Economic Equity Initiatives at the Boston Foundation and director of the Racial Wealth Gap Partnership, a broad-based coalition of more than 40 organizations convened by the Boston Foundation to close racial wealth gaps through expanded homeownership opportunities in Greater Boston and beyond.
CommonWealth Voices is sponsored by The Boston Foundation.
The Boston Foundation is deeply committed to civic leadership, and essential to our work is the exchange of informed opinions. We are proud to partner on a platform that engages such a broad range of demographic and ideological viewpoints.