Boston’s Beloved Triple-Deckers Are Next-Level Affordable Housing
May 24, 2024 by As the city of Boston grapples with an affordable housing shortage, triple houses are serving as a boon and solution. Many of them have been renovated with the help of city-sponsored programs such as the Boston Home Center’s HomeWorks Home Equity Loan Program. A once underappreciated structure, there are approximately 10,000 of them and the city has plans of maintaining and improving especially since they are great candidates for clean-energy retrofits. Local designers are participating in competitions like the Massachusetts Clean Energy Coalition’s Triple-Decker Energy Challenge and Co-Creating Boston’s Future-Decker, sponsored by the City of Boston and the Boston Society for Architecture, to come up with retrofit protocols. Oil-heated original homes are being converted to electric heat and given green add-ons like solar panels and charging ports.