The need for more and more affordable housing in MA is excruciatingly well-documented. The middle- and working classes are squeezed. You know this because you live it. The Senate actually did the correct and bold thing, and passed a long-overdue bill reforming zoning, spurring development of affordable housing and smart growth. Excellent! Visionary!
Alas, our Speaker is hearing about it too.
But as the bill heads to the House, it faces long odds of becoming law by the time formal sessions end in July. House Speaker Robert DeLeo said Monday he heard from “a number of folks, developers, builders and what not” who want to bend his ear about the bill.
“So at this time I don’t know,” said DeLeo, whose chamber has its own priorities for the remaining weeks of formal sessions.
My emphasis.
So the Speaker is hearing from the developers and builders, because they have industry associations and lobbyists. On the face of it, they’re important stakeholders, and things have to work out in a business-sustainable way for them.
On the other hand, there’s … everyone else. Is the Speaker hearing from “a number of folks” who work at Dunks, pump gas, or provide child care? Generally they don’t walk around the State House looking for someone to buttonhole.
I’ve been told — so many times it’s a cliché — that you can’t blame the Speaker/Governor/Senate President for unwillingness to lead on X. And perhaps DeLeo’s unwillingness to move on this is representative of the consensus view of the members of his chamber. Or maybe this is his opinion which will be enforced top-down. What do I know?
The Big Three are the most powerful people in the Commonwealth. They are the stewards of the future. And we’ve been waiting for 15 years (or more) for action to let the non-rich breathe a little easier, with regard to keeping a roof over their heads.
Sen. Brownsberger sounds cautiously optimistic we can take this up next year with a few tweaks. May it be so.
The Senate’s doing its job. The House isn’t — so far.
johntmay says
is there a specific demographic that owns a majority of the rental property in Massachusetts? They seem to be the recipients of the transfer of wealth that our lack of housing produces. Is it companies like VTT Management, or are most properties owned by “mom & pop” types? I’m doing some searching and can’t find anything specific.
Also, what role do realtors play in this? They get a percentage of the gross and to them, the higher the gross, the higher their commission but then again, there is volume to consider.
Any economist will tell you that the mortgage tax deduction is a disaster for the poor, a break even at best to the middle class, and a huge gift to the wealthy. But then, that’s a federal issue, eh?
Mark L. Bail says
people who are in property management. They aren’t owners but work for landlords that have, in some cases, hundreds of units. This is just anecdotal, but until this year, I’d never heard of property management as a career.
Housing prices are so low in some cities that people don’t even want to buy the buildings since they would cost more to fix than they could get with sales.
SomervilleTom says
The home mortgage deduction, whether good or bad, is mostly irrelevant to rental properties.
Even for owner-occupied multifamily properties (those “mom & pop types”), it turns out to be irrelevant. We’ve owned our two-family (we live upstairs and rent the downstairs) for several years, and our tax people find each year that the schedule A home mortgage deduction is smaller than other approaches (including a home office deduction for our real estate business).
The home mortgage deduction is only available for a principal residence. That excludes most rental housing.
jconway says
That redevelopment project is the kind of project every municipality in the state should be pursuing, and it would be great if our Congressional delegation could get federal funding for that. I have no issues with any of them, but I do feel past delegations delivered more dollars. A different time to be sure, but this is the kind of stuff Markey should be going after since its green and he has the relationships to get it done.
This is also where I get annoyed with Baker. There is a lot of neat center right stuff he could be doing to integrate housing, push for transit development, pursue free market green energy and cap and trade, and a revenue neutral carbon rebate and isn’t. If he really wants to be a leader for the post-Trump center right that’s the kinda shit he has to be doing. He seems content with being a caretaker for now.
SomervilleTom says
I enthusiastically agree with this, and Assembly Square is a great example. There is a fly in the ointment. This strategy requires and assumes a functional MBTA. Our government still denies this reality.
Finally, just a word of caution — I invite you to take public transportation to Assembly Square. Stand in the entrance to one of those glorious condos and ask at least the following questions:
1. Where do people who live here buy their groceries?
2. Where do people who live here buy the odds and ends they need around their house — shower curtain and rod, day-to-day cookware, things to clean the kitchen and bathroom, that sort of thing?
3. Where do the children of people who live here go to school and play, and how do they get there?
When you make the walk from the brand-new Assembly Square station to the new residential complexes, pay attention to what you’re walking through. How will it be to make that walk in driving rain, a blizzard, bitter cold, or blazing heat? There is a lovely new riverside park alongside the new station — a park that is completely blocked by the tracks, and no pedestrian access from the station has been provided.
I think you’ll find that Assembly Square as currently configured requires owning a car and doesn’t work for families at all. It’s also a TERRIBLE place to bike or walk.
I invite you to also make a field trip to “Station Landing” in Everett, at the intersection of routes 16 and 28. I notice the covered and elevated walkway to the Wellington station (also on the Orange line). A Super Stop & Shop is an 11 minute walk away (though it’s an awful walk).
Healthy and thriving neighborhoods require more than huge residential condo towers and upscale shopping malls with franchise eateries. Assembly Square, like the Seaport District, seems to ignore this basic reality.
Assembly Square and projects like it are vital. They are not sufficient.
jconway says
It was actually a great way to meet Cambridge based friends for drinks and movies without having to go all the way to the city when I was still in Wakefield. It was definitely not fun in February and your other points are valid, though I suspect developments like this will be a catalyst for future schools and grocery stores.
I totally agree about station landing, and in both cases it’s because the car centric design of these 1950s/60s suburban spaces still prevents the newer kind of development to take hold. You’d really have to rip up 16/1A to make these communities walkable again and that’s unworkable at present. But that’s the kind of thinking we need to embrace. The Greenway is a great example of the rewards of fixing past mistakes, while the Big Dig that created it is what most voters remember so cost containment is key in getting voter buy in.
In the 70s and 80s conservatives had interesting solutions to urban problems, now they just are so reflexively anti city in general that it prevents the give and take needed for good policies to emerge. Hopefully Baker can take this opportunity and run with it.
merrimackguy says
Some things don’t seem to have answers.
http://commonwealthmagazine.org/economy/double-whammy-for-gateway-cities/
ryepower12 says
If that isn’t this Speaker, there are plenty of other people willing to take the job.
Mark L. Bail says
jconway says
Gentrification and transit oriented development is the best possible way to achieve voluntary racial housing integration as well as improve schools, property values and residential quality of life. The GLX is good, as was the RLX to Alewife a generation before.
Davis is now a real destination and it was a bit of a dump in my own relatively short lifetime. On the other hand, I’ll never be able to live in the city I grew up in and my parents couldn’t find a two family anywhere closer than Wakefield. My brother has gone from being a rider to a driver due to this transition.
I am a Salem booster, but am aware we are getting a lot of Latinos priced out of Somerville, East Boston and even Lynn. And am I displacing them or helping them by eventually buying here? It’s unclear.
What is clear is these transitions are easier if we move millennials to where entry level housing is (Gateway cities) and move them to where the jobs are (Metro Boston) via new transit. We also have to build out the inner ring communities more and start building out further than that. Clinton was a cool town with interesting restaurants and two interesting museums, but it’s nowhere close to a transit line which severely limits its appeal and its housing stock is too aged. Build a light rail or BRT out there along with new mixed income developments that mimic the architecture of the downtown and you got a vision.
Baker and Polito say they want this for the stat, especially for Central Mass and the Southcosst gateways. But this vision needs revenue to implement and a real commitment from lawmakers honest to as all of us to help pay for it. And it’s just not there in a cohesive way. Losing the Olympics should have been a policy wake up call that we are not yet the region we think we are or want to be, and that the limitations reality inevitably imposed on that idea Re still here and aren’t going away.
JimC says
I think it was a great triumph of people coming together to oppose the Olympics?
JimC says
n/t
JimC says
n/t
jconway says
The people rightly defeated it because it was a tax payer boondoggle that was ill conceived and ill informed. That’s clear. My point in bringing it up
is that our leaders routinely put the cart before the horse. Boston is not a city with 21st century infrastructure or any kind of regionalized planning to enable it, so it was always a stretch of the imagination to picture something that global and grand coming here.
Our T can’t handle snowfall, it was never going to handle those crowds. But if we want nice things we have to pay for them and put the building blocks in place for them to work. I still find it mind boggling that our policy makers thought this was a moonshot idea yet they routinely differ action as DeLeo is on the real shots in the arm our region needs to stay competitive.
stomv says
No there isn’t. There are loads of middle class folks who oppose the Senate bill. Why?
Because they like their neighborhood the way it is, thankyouverymuch. Lots of people like their neighborhood the way it is, and any change to reduce zoning restrictions puts that at risk. People who live near transit don’t want more people to squeeze onto the T during rush hour. People in the burbs don’t want more autos on their roads. People in rural areas don’t want buildings that peak above the tree line or require any more roadway than a double yellow lined two lane road.
SomervilleTom says
When I was a suburbanite with kids choosing a house, our standard was a “no-line” road. No lines in the middle, no lines on the edges. That is, by construction, a road with very little traffic.
We landed in Dunstable MA, on a no-line road. Today, thirty years later, it remains that way.
Andrei Radulescu-Banu says
DunstableTom, then?
🙂
Christopher says
…but he’s right about Dunstable. No traffic lights in town either, I’m pretty sure.
Andrei Radulescu-Banu says
I’ve advocated and will continue to advocate for affordable and mid-range priced housing in suburban Boston. The Senate zoning bill is a step in the right direction – however, it does not provide adequate funding for the extra municipal and school infrastructure, and for the extra teachers that will have to be hired when/if housing counts are increased.
Unless the state will step in to back stop increase in capital and operating costs for schools, the towns and the developers between themselves to not have the capacity to cover the costs.
Maybe this was overlooked in the Senate bill because it was known the house was not going to pass zoning reform – thus the Senate had more freedom to ‘send a message’ than to come with a comprehensive solution.
Different towns have different problems; for example some towns do not have adequate public transportation tying them to the Boston hub. Some towns have a problem with mansionization – and the loosening of special permitting processes will only serve to allow builder to construct even larger homes for small-sized but very wealthy families. Yet other towns are fighting to preserve what open space they still have. Finally, other towns have already-overcrowded schools and are awaiting Prop 2.5 overrides to fund existing increases in school population. These tax overrides may pass or not; if they don’t, the result will be a drastic loss in school space quality and program quality, with school personnel laid off.
Out of all these problems, a successful zoning reform bill will be one that allows for more affordable house construction; while not exacerbating the other problems above.
The Senate zoning bill passed, and that got everybody’s attention. That is good, but I think it needs more work before it is a functioning solution to our problems.
Danny says
Though towns provide the most primary services (school, water, police, fire), the state gets by far the bigger piece of tax $$$. To fix this the state must pick up of the cost. What they should do is create a new program that gives money to cities and towns for education- and only give it to place that have a decent % of affordable & moderate housing. Partially fund it by taking a flat % out of chapt. 70. Towns can have a 5 year grace period to come into compliance. To just give $ to town to pay for the cost of new students is basically punishing the place that already have affordable housing and rewarding this places that have little to none for their long-time obstinance.
nopolitician says
Please don’t disregard the problem in many Gateway cities, which is that the rules for affordable housing are designed with Boston in mind. Those same rules don’t work for a gateway city surrounded by wealthier suburbs. For example, something like a permanent low-income housing restriction on a redevelopment assumes that the low-income housing will always be needed. In a gateway city, that restriction simply adds permanence to the poverty that currently exists.
jkw says
The Boston area can’t handle its current population. Adding in more dense housing will only make the problems worse. The T is already at capacity when it is running on schedule during rush hour. We would need substantial upgrades to increase train service. And the roads can’t handle our current traffic. So how will we function with even more people?
The problem Massachusetts has isn’t that we don’t have enough housing. It is that the state is too eager to attract high paying jobs without providing the infrastructure needed to support those jobs. That then drives up the cost of housing for everything near Boston, making it unaffordable for anyone without a high paying job, including people who work in restaurants and retail providing necessary services for the people with the high paying jobs. This is a completely disfunctional way to run a metropolitan area.
The Boston area is trying to be a big city and a small town at the same time. It is failing at both. We need to collectively decide that we want to be like New York or that we don’t. If we want to be a big city, then we need to commit the several billions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades that we have been putting off since the big dig fell behind schedule 25 years ago. If we don’t want to be a big city, then we should stop offering tax breaks to companies that we can’t actually handle moving into the area.
jconway says
Here here!
stomv says
So what about adding housing capacity in the Seaport, nearby in Southie, and in downtown? You’d add people who will walk or cycle to work much of the time, thereby possibly reducing stress on transit as folks who used to live in Allston or Newton or Quincy now live within 0.5 miles. I’ll also add that the Blue Line does not seem to suffer from overcrowding; it would be nice to see significant upzoning and mixed use development along that stretch.
To be clear, I’m all for beefing up transit, especially in the core (more bus and subway, less focus on commuter rail into Boston). But housing is a permanent thing — if we don’t allow more in the places where it ultimately requires less CO2, we’re permanently relegating it to the places that necessitate the wasting of more oil, more public health, and more time.
SomervilleTom says
Conservative estimates (such as from the IPCC) speak of a mean sea-level rise in Boston of 0.5 to 1 foot by 2100. Other sources estimate 3-5 feet, based on more recent data showing the effects of climate feedbacks — the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets may be less stable than previously estimated.
The image below — of the Seaport district with a five-foot sea-level rise — may help us visualize what these numbers mean.
Boston Harbor Hotel with five foot seal level rise
We are discussing 100-year+ regional changes. I think we must more explicitly take climate change into account in those plans.
merrimackguy says
or storm surge protection, or pumps.
jkw says
We are adding more housing in those areas. But that doesn’t really help solve the problem of adding more dense housing to the surrounding communities. And people who live in the Seaport district still want to be able to get to other places, so they still need the transportation infrastructure.
Also, while our transportation infrastructure is already insufficient for the people who already live here, we will need other infrastructure upgrades to support a growing population. We need bigger water pipes, more power plants, more gas supply (or some alternate heating fuel), more or bigger power lines, more waste disposal capacity, more airports/runways, etc. At some point, we should determine what kind of a population the Boston area can actually support and then upgrade the bottlenecks if we want to keep growing. As far as I can tell, this has not been done and nobody is planning to do it. We need an actual regional planning authority that can develop zoning plans based on available infrastructure, and can reward and penalize communities based on how well they cooperate.
Passing a law that lets developers build more affordable housing will help the lucky few who get the cheap housing spots, but it doesn’t address the underlying problems and may even make them worse.
stomv says
Efficiency knocks down an awful lot of your purported “needs”.
Neg. Water consumption has trended downward far faster than population has increased — the MWRA has excess capacity in terms of pipes. Electricity sales in New England are expected to decline even with a (slight) population increase because of energy efficiency. More gas supply isn’t needed because we are on track to switch from natural gas fired generation to more wind and solar, thereby freeing up the gas pipeline capacity (to say nothing of switching from gas-fired heat to air-source heat pumps). The electric distribution grid is just fine for more local growth; any additional power lines will be regional in nature, be needed whether the person moves to Windsor or Winthrop. MSW needs have also declined, particularly as communities switch to PAYT. Runways? There’ll be some push to handle bigger planes and increase the BOS hours by 30 minutes a day, but there are there are other options.
I agree that we need to look at the bottlenecks — but I propose to you that most of our infrastructure needs are not growing with more population because efficiency has driven down need per capita. The MBTA is carrying more people than ever before, but it appears unable to keep up with demand, unlike lots of other infrastructure.