HUD still considering an FMR adjustment?

A local paper in the Boston suburb of Milford reports today that HUD has agreed to suspend a cut in the town's assigned Fair Market Rent figures until a random dialing survey of local rents can be conducted. It says the area lost up to $300 per unit when it was reclassified out of the Boston metropolitan area, resulting in an outcry that has been echoed by the town's representatives in Congress. HUD's 2006 "final" Fair Market Rents, published on Monday, granted FMR increases to two other Massachusetts (OK, Massachusetts/Rhode Island) metropolitan areas -- Taunton-Mansfield-Norton and Providence-Fall River -- but HUD denied an FMR increase to the New Bedford area after conducting a rent survey there.

It's interesting that Taunton, Fall River and New Bedford are not far from Milford, and all are located near each other in southeastern Massachusetts between the base of the Cape Cod hook and the Highway 95 route from Boston to Providence, R.I.

So why are rents coming up in that whole general area? Well, yr humble blogmother, being a long-absent ex-Easterner, is going to guess that perhaps Fall River and New Bedford have been brought out of their 1980s post-industrial funk by the effect of urban housing prices on urban professionals' willingness to live farther away from Boston, and by the more or less concomitant rise of Providence as an urban center. Any Massachusetts readers here want to tell us if that's right? The comments section is open...