It’s hard work making it in the middle class
Massachusetts is the richest state in the nation. So why does the American dream seem to be slipping away, especially for the next generation?
Published in CommonWealth Beacon on May 10, 2026
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THE THUMPING BASS and intermittent shrieks of delight coursing through the neighborhood do not particularly bother Kristina Boldebuck.
She’s charmed by the annual Billerica Lions Spring Carnival one street over, its scenes of classic Americana and the buzzy energy in the air. At night, Boldebuck can look out the window and see an illuminated Ferris wheel rising from behind her neighbors’ homes. The event is such a draw that her two kids came home from college just to attend.
It’s traditions like the carnival, the annual Yankee Doodle Homecoming, and a parade to mark Billerica Little League’s opening day that drew Boldebuck two decades ago to return to the town where she grew up. By all measures, it’s a good life, even a great life. She was able to raise her children near her parents, live within walking distance of a school, immerse herself in a community.
So does she feel like she’s “made it,” like she’s now living the American dream? For the most part, the answer is yes.
“I’m happy. I’m grateful for what I’ve been able to have and experience and have my children experience,” Boldebuck said, seated at her kitchen table on a sunny April day.
At the same time, she’s aware that, as much as Billerica feels like the picture of unpretentious, middle-class suburbia, it’s increasingly difficult to put down roots there when home prices are “so crazy.” “Buying in this town is very difficult, and it’s concerning to me for this generation coming up,” she said.
Despite its blue-collar trappings, Billerica is, arguably, on the upper half of the economic ladder. Its median household income of $148,200 is some 40 percent higher than the state as a whole, and about four in five homes are owner-occupied — something that is probably true for all of those on Heritage Road, where Boldebuck lives. The average property value assessment on the street was more than $650,000 last year, which is at once head-spinning and run of the mill when you consider prices in Massachusetts more broadly.
Of course, how you view Billerica — a Merrimack Valley town of 42,000 residents about 20 miles northwest of Boston — all depends on what constitutes the middle class these days. It’s long been a term for where upwardly mobile Americans hope to land, but there is no single agreed-upon definition. For many, it’s owning your own home and earning enough to squirrel some away for a comfortable retirement; for others, it’s simply having the financial stability to navigate the bumps along the way.
Heritage Road in Billerica. (Chris Lisinski/CommonWealth Beacon)
Boldebuck, a former Billerica star softball player who in 2010 was inducted into the high school’s athletic hall of fame, works as director of business applications at a human services agency. She knows the economics of upward mobility have changed dramatically. The model from her own childhood — her father worked in a factory, and her mother worked part-time as a school paraprofessional while devoting significant time to raising children — feels impossible to replicate today.
Even two professional incomes don’t necessarily provide a clear pathway these days into the life Boldebuck’s parents were able to carve out with working-class wages. While the state perches atop national rankings for income and education, many of the families who, on paper, should be able to “make it” instead feel themselves teetering.
The theme in Massachusetts today seems to be: It’s a great life if you can afford it, and if you don’t already have a foothold, good luck.
Households with two college-educated parents working full-time are struggling to pay for the most expensive child care in the country. Students who came here for world-class universities and want to stay longer are gobsmacked by the cost to buy a house. Retirees on fixed incomes who own increasingly valuable homes are largely unable to tap into those assets unless they move, and in the meantime, they’re smothered by a related rise in property taxes.
All of that is happening as Massachusetts has been steadily getting richer. The share of Bay Staters in the middlemost income tier is shrinking, but it’s not the kind of globalization-fueled hollowing out that has decimated manufacturing hubs where companies slashed jobs in favor of cheaper international labor. Most of the movement here has, in fact, been upward. More than one in five Massachusetts households now earn at least $215,000 per year, according to a recent Boston Indicators analysis, compared to just 4 percent with similar inflation-adjusted incomes in the mid-1970s.
The problem is that costs are growing even more quickly. Many Massachusetts residents, as a result, are largely not feeling much financial improvement, and they’re increasingly pessimistic that what once seemed attainable will be within reach for their kids. A new MassINC Polling Group survey found that Bay Staters think the next generation will be financially worse off, not better, by a two-to-one margin.
The consequences are existential. If people with solidly middle incomes can’t afford the lifestyles they want here, businesses will struggle to fill open positions, schools will bleed enrollment, and communities will lose their liveliness. Stretch that out over a period of years or decades, and the state’s economic engines face major risks. Boston Magazine illustrated a recent cover story about the growing sense of fragility with a massive wrecking ball looming over an otherwise picturesque Back Bay skyline.
For Boldebuck, who bought her home for about $470,000 when she was still in her 20s and is now 47, it was easier to get into the market in Billerica because she had equity from prior home purchases in Florida and Virginia. Even at the time, she recalls friends “struggling to try and buy houses in Massachusetts because the housing market was so high.”
Her fears today come from thinking about her kids. “Do I think that my children, who are now approaching the age that I was coming in here, could do it right now?” she said of her home purchase. “No.”
Heritage Road, where Boldebuck lives, is a three-quarter-mile span linking Pond Street to Boston Road, Billerica’s main commercial throughway. The comparatively tiny street and a handful of offshoots form the Heritage Heights neighborhood, whose several dozen homes are inseparably linked to CommonWealth Beacon: 30 years ago, the very first issue of CommonWealth (as we were formerly known) profiled the neighborhood in an effort to take the temperature more broadly of Massachusetts life for those trying to secure a measure of economic security. The cover of the magazine featured a smiling, stereotypical family of four, with the headline, “Making it in the Middle Class.” We returned to the neighborhood in 2001 and again in 2006, each time finding most residents content with their lot, yet that satisfaction was often accompanied by an undercurrent of financial unease.
The cover of the first issue of CommonWealth, published in the spring of 1996, featured the Timmins family, which at the time lived on Heritage Road in Billerica.
Today, it doesn’t feel like all that much has changed in Heritage Heights, other than an expansion here and there to some of the homes sitting on lots of half an acre or more. Evidence of kids dots the landscape, bicycles fearlessly left unattended lying on the sidewalk. Two adjacent backyards have strikingly similar playground sets, the turrets peeking up at one another over the fence. It’s quiet enough on a Sunday afternoon to hear the birdsong as a conversation in stereo. Ring a doorbell, and you’re more likely to be met with a dog’s barks than not.
One of the most distinct characteristics seems to be that many of the neighborhood’s denizens have been here for decades. Talk to anyone and they’ll mention multiple neighbors who have owned their homes since the subdivision’s construction in the 1970s. In several cases, the current generation of residents grew up on the street, moved away, and then returned in adulthood to take over their parents’ houses.
That’s the story for David McLaughlin, a 31-year-old who’s more or less a Heritage Road lifer. His family — father, mother, and five siblings or stepsiblings — moved to the neighborhood from Somerville in 1997, when he was about two. His parents got married years later in Las Vegas, and their wedding picture is still in the house today: both grinning in Red Sox jerseys, his David Ortiz, hers Johnny Damon, basking in the joy of the 2004 curse-breaking World Series.
The house is now in a state of transition. McLaughlin’s father died in 2021, and his mother fell ill, too, prompting him to move back home to care for her. After her death in February, McLaughlin is still there with his fiancée, Julie Martin, one brother, and their two cats, Monty and Misty. McLaughlin and Martin would like to make the home their own, but they need to jump through a series of legal hoops first.
McLaughlin graduated from Emerson College in 2017, and he’s working part-time while on the waitlist for a union job in the film industry. Martin works at a historical conservation center, and she moonlights as a stop-motion animator. There’s been no shortage of adversity, but they’re making it work, planning a wedding for this fall.
It seems like a comfortable middle-class life, and McLaughlin thinks of his neighborhood as a modern-day Norman Rockwell painting, pointing out the various details that would feature in the tableau: one neighbor keeps the school bus he drives parked on the street, another advertises his contracting company on his front lawn, and Amazon trucks cruise up and down the road delivering packages to those who are out at work.
“This is what everyone at least would hope for as a baseline,” he said. “We have enough. It’d be nice to have more always, but I feel like it is enough.”
That doesn’t make him starry-eyed, though. McLaughlin notes that he has a college degree and is still only working part-time. His parents put significant work into the house, setting him up for success, but he still feels people his age more broadly face a tough outlook. “I don’t think we have the same opportunities” as earlier generations, he said.
“It seemed like they made more of a sacrifice of their time to keep building this up as something,” McLaughlin said of the family home. “I just hope I can continue that and not let the house fall into any disrepair now that they’re not here.”
Heritage Road residents Julie Martin (left) and David McLaughlin (right) are interrupted by their cat, Monty. (Chris Lisinski/CommonWealth Beacon)
If there’s a single unifying theme to the Massachusetts middle-class outlook in 2026, it’s contradiction: We have more than ever, and in many cases, that’s not enough to enjoy the stability of prior generations.
During CommonWealth’s first decade, Massachusetts was a very well-educated and pretty well-paid state, landing toward the top of state income rankings after a period of sustained growth in the 1980s known as the “Massachusetts Miracle.” Technology, education, and health care were important sectors, but the so-called innovation economy had not yet fully taken flight.
Today, the Bay State is a different place. Our economy now revolves around high-paying jobs in research, medicine, technology, and higher education. Since 2014, the size of the state’s scientific research and development workforce has expanded at more than twice the national rate, according to UMass Amherst’s Donahue Institute. More than one in five people working in Massachusetts are directly or indirectly linked to “eds and meds,” according to a report released last year by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
David McLaughlin and Julie Martin keep a framed picture of David’s parents, David and JoAnn, in the family home where they now live. The pair were married in Las Vegas wearing matching Red Sox jerseys around 2005. (Chris Lisinski/CommonWealth Beacon)
In 2010, about 38 percent of Massachusetts adults over the age of 25 had at least a bachelor’s degree, the highest rate in the country, according to US Census Bureau data. By 2024, the share had climbed to 47 percent, still more than any other state. And in recent years, Massachusetts has overtaken all states to secure the highest median household income in the nation — nearly $104,000 in 2024.
Our collective self-image is now much more office- or lab-based professional than it is Casey Affleck at Dunkin’. The accents are fading, and the tough-guy world depicted in so many movies set in and around Boston is, for the most part, long gone.
Mark Melnik, director of the Economic and Public Policy Research group at the Donahue Institute, often gives talks to Massachusetts audiences about the state economy. He points out early on that we have the highest income in the country. Reading the room, he quickly adds, “Naturally, what you’re thinking is, ‘Well, why don’t I feel that rich?’”
“It’s because of the high cost of housing, high cost of energy, high cost of child care, and all these different things,” Melnik said in an interview.