Medfield Multifamily
Though the built environment of Medfield is dominated by single-family homes on large lots, there are more multifamily units than I would have guessed. The 2006 American Community Survey reports the following for the fraction of housing units that are single-family detached:
- Medfield: 81%
- Seattle: 48%
- Boston: 12%
The rate of home ownership follows a similar trend:
- Medfield: 78%
- Seattle: 52%
- Boston: 39%
When I was in grade school in Medfield pretty much everyone I knew lived in a single-family house that their family owned. And on the rare occasion I heard about a kid in our school who lived in an apartment, I remember having this sense that they were different from all the rest of us, that their families must be defective in some way. This wasn’t something I learned from my parents, or from any other explicit source. Ostensibly our widely held cultural bias against multifamily housing furtively seeped into my impressionable young mind from multiple, subtle origins.