By Geralyn Magan
One UMass Boston PhD student tried to answer that question this summer.
A second-year student in UMass Boston’s Gerontology PhD program spent the summer of 2021 crunching numbers for the Neighborhood Housing Development Division within the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development (DND).
Setarreh Massihzadegan, a public policy summer fellow with the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, spent 10 weeks researching the operating costs of affordable housing plus services for older adults in Boston and creating a descriptive analysis of her findings. Her work will be used to support DND’s process of evaluating developer requests for support and to inform future underwriting policies at the department.
Massihzadegan’s summer fellowship also involved several other tasks, including:
- Providing recommendations that led the City of Boston to change its annual Request for Proposals covering housing development assistance for this year.
- Creating guidance that helped explain the wide range of service levels among different development plans and the nuances of how different service providers might interact.
- Speaking with officials from cities across the country to collect information about new ways they are helping to finance affordable housing development and preservation.
Visit the Gerontology Institute Blog to learn more about Massihzadegan and her summer fellowship.