Last week, the WestMetro HOME Consortium, a partnership of 13 regional communities of which Watertown is a member, released the results of a fair housing audit study that it conducted from March 2023 to January 2025. The Consortium worked with Suffolk Law’s Housing Discrimination Testing Program to test the prevalence of illegal race- and income-based discrimination in the housing market, pairing an applicant with a white alias with another with a “racially identifiable” Black, Hispanic, or Asian alias, or an applicant who posed as someone offering to pay market rate with one who posed as a housing voucher recipient.
The study’s results are sobering, to say the least. In 65 tests of race-based discrimination (conducted across the Consortium’s 13 communities), applicants of color experienced discrimination 22 percent of the time. In 69 tests of income-based discrimination, voucher holders experienced discrimination a whopping 35 percent of the time. And while the testing was not designed to measure community-specific results, Watertown nonetheless holds the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of discrimination of any of the Consortium’s 13 cities and towns: fully five in 10 tests in our city demonstrated race- or income-based discrimination.
Unfortunately, this testing simply brings systematic data to a phenomenon that we know to be all too pervasive in Watertown. At Housing for All Watertown, we have heard about repeated instances of this type of discrimination since we began our advocacy work in 2023, and while we always encourage people to report the violation to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, we are often left feeling that these efforts are insufficient, a mere bandage on the gaping wound that is housing discrimination.
The City administration has already laid out immediate next steps, including supporting further testing, and undertaking local education efforts to inform property owners and real estate agents about housing discrimination laws. These efforts are a necessary first step, but more work is needed to ensure that our community takes these findings seriously. We suggest two policy directions in particular.
First, Watertown residents need a front door for housing stability services. Our recent Health and Human Services Assessment laid out the fragmented state of our current housing security and tenant assistance programs: resources are spread across multiple city agencies and non-profit organizations, leaving residents without a single place to go when they need housing assistance. Watertown plans to hire a Director of Human Services in the coming months, and one of the Director’s first actions should be to develop and highlight a one-stop shop where residents can seek help with all of their housing needs, whether it’s dealing with an abusive landlord, rental assistance, or illegal discrimination. This should include hiring a staff person who can be that point of contact, or supporting the funding of such a position at a local social services agency.
Second, Watertown needs to zone for the ability to build more housing and, in particular, more affordable housing. In a housing market as tight as ours, landlords can be choosy about their tenants to the point where they can get away with illegal discrimination; put another way, with a healthier housing market that has fewer applicants for each available unit, landlords are simply less able to afford to discriminate. The reasons for expanding the supply for housing in Watertown have always been ample, but the results of this study are yet another argument why residents need more options to choose from.
These grim findings should serve as a wakeup call to anyone who believes that housing discrimination is a relic of generations past. Watertown needs to do better. However, there’s action we can take to address this issue, even at the local level. First, write to your city councilors by emailing citycouncilors@watertown-ma.gov and tell them that you want to see the new Director of Human Services prioritize housing stability services. Second, join our forum, What will it take to build 100 percent affordable housing in Watertown?, at the library this Sunday, Feb. 23, from 2-3:30 p.m., to learn more about what Watertown can do to support the construction of more 100 percent affordable projects. The evidence of housing discrimination laid bare by this study should be met with concern, but that concern should be met with action. Let’s act together to address this problem as a community.
— Housing for All Watertown steering committee
Rita Colafella, Sam Ghilardi, Dan Pritchard, Josh Rosmarin, and Jacky van Leeuwen
How about assistance with abusive and irresponsible tenants? Watertown going to assist with that. Real easy to lump all landlords together as abusive and discriminatory.
Good point. I’d reckon the HRC ain’t gonna be it.
As someone who has written here frequently about applying the law equally and fairly (to shoplifters, drunk drivers, road ragers, illegal aliens, etc.), I am both puzzled and surprised that Watertown fared so poorly in this test. Most other towns had 1-3 violations out of 10, our fair city had 5. Forget unacceptable, the results are deplorable. Are our landlords more ignorant of the law, or more brazen in trying to get away with breaking it? Reading the anecdotes in the report, I have to believe it’s the latter. But again, why?
I wrote a comment to another story in which I noted that Watertown admits it has nothing significant to offer people who suspect of being discriminated against in housing. The state handles that. I have also written to question the value of a town HHS director, even more a HHS cabinet: I would rather resources be put to services rather than bureaucracy, and I have been called calumnies and imprecations for holding that view. As the insults can’t get much worse, I repeat the suggestion. Save money on a coordinator between town departments that already exist, and presumably already coordinate (ditto for the DEI director the plan also calls for), and put the savings toward something genuinely useful to residents. Calumniate and imprecate away.