Charlestown Housing, by the City's Own Numbers

I had Charlestown filed under rentals before I opened the table. The City’s own estimates say something different, and they’re free to read.

Where the numbers come from

The City of Boston Planning Department’s Research Division publishes Boston in Context: Neighborhoods, a set of tables showing Boston’s estimated population as of January 1, 2025. The Division builds the estimates from administrative data, including school enrollment, housing construction and vacancy data, and births and deaths, and offers them as an alternative to Census Bureau figures that the Division says continue to undercount Boston. Because the Census does not report data by neighborhood, the Planning Department approximates neighborhoods with census tracts. The report also notes that subtotals may not always sum to totals because of rounding.

Tenure

Charlestown has 9,657 total housing units. 9,010 of those are occupied, which the table reports as 93.3%. Among the occupied units, 4,688 are owner-occupied and 4,322 are rented. The owner share of occupied homes is 52.0%. For Boston as a whole the same table gives 318,477 total units, 294,982 occupied and 104,503 owner-occupied, a 35.4% owner share. Worth knowing when you read it. The renter column’s percentage is figured against total housing units, so the owner and renter shares in a row won’t add to a round hundred.

Bedrooms

The bedrooms per unit table splits Charlestown into 3,291 studios or one bedrooms at 34.1%, 3,764 two bedrooms at 39.0%, and 2,602 units with three bedrooms or more at 26.9%. The middle column is the largest, and the three columns add to 9,657, the neighborhood’s total housing units, although the table footer reads occupied housing units.

Population

The age table puts Charlestown’s population at 19,232 as of January 1, 2025.

What the City says about the place

The City’s Charlestown neighborhood page is brief. Charlestown is on the north side of the city, on the banks of Boston Harbor and the Mystic River, and the page describes a neighborhood with historical roots that has turned into a busy modern one.

How I use this when pricing

Two things change how I read a Charlestown listing. The first is tenure: the table puts Charlestown’s owner share of occupied homes above the citywide figure, so I check a building’s own ownership mix in its documents instead of assuming it from the neighborhood number. The second is the bedroom mix: a two bedroom there is competing against the deepest part of the local stock, while a three bedroom is competing against a much shallower one. Neither fact tells you a price, and none of these tables carry sale prices at all.

What these tables leave out

These tables count people and housing units. Nothing in them is a sale price or a market index, and they won’t stand in for a comparable sales analysis. If you want a price, that comes from what actually sold nearby and when.

Want the numbers for a specific street

Send me a Charlestown address and I’ll pull the public figures around it and walk you through how far they actually go. Diana Kim, REALTOR®, eXp Realty.