Population growth is slowing in Greater Boston, and expensive housing is said to be at least partly to blame. Housing analysts say that a big factor is the relatively low number of houses for sale in Boston’s inner suburbs. The fear is that this will send too many Millennials out the region, hurting economic growth.
I think that’s an exaggerated fear. Greater Boston’s huge and internationally prestigious higher-education complex and its quality of life will keep these younger adults coming. A bigger threat to the region’s prosperity may be President Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. Immigrants, most of them legal, have played a big role in eastern Massachusetts’s boom. Many of these immigrants are very well-educated and do a disproportionate percentage of the work in the Greater Boston’s powerful technology, engineering andhealth-care sectors.
