The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Yesterday, at the latest Bisnow “State of the Market” presentation, Jim Rooney, the new President and CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, told a crowd of about 400 that the substantial cost of Hub housing is often a huge liability when local companies try to convince the country’s best and the brightest to come work in Boston.
Rooney described housing as “an issue that transcends economic status” and revealed part of a conversation he had with Peter Slavin, the President of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston’s biggest employer, who voiced to Rooney that his number one concern was the hospital’s ability to compete with booming medical centers around the country, like Cleveland, for medical talent. Why are cities the likes of Cleveland considered by some healthcare honchos to be better destinations than Boston? “They can get much more house in those cities,” explained Rooney.
This, of course, provoked me to look up the median price of a home in Cleveland, which according to Zillow is $53,300. Boston’s Zillow median is $467,200, which is roughly times as expensive as Cleveland.
Additionally, in the last nine years Cleveland knocked about 35% off the $84,400 median it experienced in the headier pre-crash market of 2006. In the same time period, Boston’s median rose more than 20%. Clearly, the Cleveland-Boston gap is getting wider.
I don’t know what to say. The price of housing in the Hub is a serious concern in many, many ways. I just wish Rooney had used a different city for comparison or cited a more realistic way we could smoke Cleveland in attracting gifted doctors. Because on the surface of it, competing against Cleveland in housing prices seems about as foolish as competing against China in manufacturing.