Expensive Housing Holding MetroWest Back
The MetroWest region continues to be an economic powerhouse compared to the rest of the state and the nation, but its preeminence is threatened by high home prices, according to panelists at an economic forum put on this morning by the 495/MetroWest Corridor Partnership.
Timothy Flanagan, president of Framingham State College, presented economic data from the college's MetroWest Economic Research Center. "This area has seen a pattern of growth over the last 25 years of tremendous growth," he said. "In every sense, the MetroWest area is driving and leading the economy of the commonwealth."
The MetroWest region provided one out of every ten payroll dollars in the state in 2006, and has climbed from $2.6 billion in total payroll in 1980 to $16.4 billion in 2006, a 540 percent increase, according to Flanagan. Nearly 50 percent of the region's payroll dollars come from the manufacturing and professional and business services sectors, he said.
Although the region currently has more jobs than workers, that is slowly changing, Flanagan said. But housing affordability is still difficult and drives FSC faculty to live a distance west of the Framingham campus. The affordability problem, Flanagan said, must be solved to keep employers in the region.
Jeffrey Fuhrer, executive vice president and director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said the Boston area has not been hit as hard in housing prices as other parts of the country and he expects the second half of the year to be slow here and across the nation but that inflation should remain manageable.
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