A cooling of Needham’s real estate market, at least in terms of the number of single-family home sales, has led the school department’s consulting demographer to lower his projections for Needham’s long-term school enrollment numbers.
Jerome McKibben, principal of McKibben Demographic Research, presented his most recent estimates to the Future School Needs Committee Tuesday night. He lopped off nearly 200 students from his prior year’s long-term projections.
Needham’s current enrollment is 5,542. In last year’s report to the committee, McKibben had forecast that the Needham schools would continue to run counter to regional and national trends and slowly but steadily add students between now and 2039. One year after forecasting that Needham would have 204 additional students in 2039, he anticipates the system will net just 16 students over the next 15 years.
In his presentation to the committee, McKibben explained why his forecast numbers are “substantially different from last year’s and much lower. The main driving force for that is existing home sales and housing turnover,” he said. “The elderly still continue to not downsize. This is not just a Needham problem or New England. We’re seeing this all over the country.
“The fundamental reason for that is they have no place to go,” he said of the trend of empty-nest seniors remaining in their homes. The cycle of older folks moving out and younger families moving in to replace them has been altered, he said.
“This is a marked change from what you told us in 2022 and 2023,” said John Connelly, the Finance Committee representative to the Future School Needs committee. “In neither of those two years did you tell us that we would be projecting a decrease in students the way you’re telling us today.
“What has changed in our town between last year and this year to cause such a change in your analysis for the enrollment now declining as opposed to staying constant?”
McKibben said the main driver was the decline of single-family home sales, which he had projected to be around 280 in 2024 and 2025. McKibben said the actual number fell short by 50 sales. “That’s 50 kids that you won’t have,” he said.
Those numbers did not account for any impact from zoning changes proposed to comply with the MBTA Communities law. McKibben was asked to perform additional analyses to assess the impact from any new housing units created by zoning changes that come out of the town’s compliance process.
McKibben did not do his own analysis on how many new housing units are likely to result from the rezoning, relying instead on forecasts that had been done by the town’s consultants.
“One thing about these units … is they’re all apartments,” he said, noting that they appeared to be targeted to young professionals. “The yield of school-age kids per unit is actually rather low.”
Applying the “likely build” unit count of the so-called Neighborhood Plan, McKibben estimated that school enrollment by 2040 would increase by 246 to 5,742 total students — or 14 more than Needham schools’ total pre-pandemic enrollment.
Applying the “full build” unit count of the Neighborhood Plan, which McKibben called the “high scenario,” the yield increased by 350 students to 5,846 — or 118 above pre-pandemic levels.
McKibben further explained that, with the exception of pockets in Texas and Florida, school populations are almost universally dropping all over the country. He was highly dubious that the full-build unit count would be achieved. “If the high scenario comes to pass, this will put you in rare company for growing enrollment in any city, town or suburb in the United States,” he said.
“It will have much more of an impact on your population than on your enrollment,” he said of the MBTA-related zoning. “The types of households you’re going to be building are not households that are going to push a lot of kids into your school system.”
He added that if single-family home sales rebound in Needham, his projections will increase accordingly.
Later Tuesday evening, the subject of declining annual home sales also came up at the Select Board meeting during its discussion on certifying the town’s fiscal year 2025 tax rate. The Board of Assessors offered a chart showing that annual single-family sales have gone down every year since 2016, when there were 430 sales. By 2023, that number had fallen to 248.
Over that same period, the median sales price of a single-family home nearly doubled, from $859,000 in 2016 to $1.55 million this year.
“I’m always suspect of building plans anywhere in Massachusetts,” McKibben said. “It takes an act of God to get things built up here. I do think they’re going to build something. I don’t know about the pace of it.”
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