There’s a new movement afoot for housing: Yes In My Back Yard:
… YIMBYs are a small but growing group of activists pushing for more housing and development, under the theory that building more is the only way this crowded and costly region can remain affordable to everyday people. One of the most active pro-growth YIMBY groups is A Better Cambridge, chaired by Jesse Kanson-Benanav, while others have sprouted in Roslindale, Newton, and Andover. They mobilize to contest zoning changes and other rules that discourage development and drive up costs. There was even a national conference in Colorado last year to share war stories and strategies. A second is set for July.
It has been extremely well-documented that there is very simply a supply shortage in Greater Boston; and zoning laws in Greater Boston prevent adequate housing stock from being built. It’s even more egregious in some of the suburbs: Two-acre minimum lot sizes; bans on in-law apartments, and so forth.
Why has housing supply not kept up with housing demand? This is the question we decided to finally tackle head-on in this edition of the Greater Boston Housing Report Card by undertaking an in-depth study of detailed housing cost data that we have collected from housing agencies and developers. The answer to our question is an unsettling one: We have failed to meet housing production targets because there is no way to do so given the high cost of producing housing for working and middle-income households. In part, this is because of the extreme barriers to new construction, especially in the form of severely restrictive zoning at the local level across much of Massachusetts. The cost of developing new housing requires a price point or rent beyond the pocketbooks of such households and therefore developers only produce such housing, in quite limited numbers, when they are required to do so by so-called “inclusionary zoning” regulations or when they are able to secure limited public funding and subsidies to support afford- ability The very high cost of land and site preparation, major contributors to prohibitive total development costs, will not come down until zoning restrictions are relaxed.
The lack of new housing then drives up the price and rent on all housing as the number of housing units demanded far exceeds the number of total units on the market.
Sounds pretty simple. Obviously if one is concerned about affordability, one would prefer that new housing be aimed at the non-rich. But even building “market-rate” housing is likely to have some effect.
Noah Smith addresses many of the arguments used against new development — namely, that new “market-rate” housing will be expensive too, and won’t solve the problem of affordability. Like Smith, I gotta scratch my head at that one. Housing prices are not fixed: Yesterday’s textile mill is today’s hipster condo. If there’s more supply at the high end, then the well-off won’t take over middle-class neighborhoods in as great numbers. Instead of condo-izing a triple-decker in Cambridgeport or Savin Hill, they’ll live in a downtown high-rise. Or, as Smith posits, imagine keeping the jobs and wealth — but destroying luxury housing? The rich would flood out of their high-rises and snap up your 1,000sf two-bedroom.
In fact, by preventing development, isn’t that the experiment we’ve actually been running?
Smith addresses the counter-argument that development will somehow induce demand for those existing properties as well; like building more highways doesn’t actually relieve congestion. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way: Absent an infusion of jobs and wealth — and the people that follow them — when you build, you’re simply meeting demand. And most people can’t or don’t actually inhabit multiple properties.
I’m reminded of the Yankees clubhouse manager in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, who ceases stocking orange juice: “If I get it, you guys just drink it up.” Does that … make sense?
It’s tricky because our economic development model has been geared towards high-end industries, with seemingly limitless reservoirs of wealth. How much housing could possibly make a dent in the demand induced by tech/biotech Monopoly money?
In the meantime, I’m YIMBY dammit.
jconway says
Jesse’s a friend so I’m a bit biased in supporting his efforts and candidates like
Sumbul and Quinton who are YIMBY. I hope those two get on the council and some of the NIMBY folks get off.
I might add YIMBY will really take hold when places Arlington have more section 8 than the brutalist and mold invested elderly housing in the middle of town. And places like Concord and Carlisle embrace density. There simply isn’t enough land in Boston and the adjacent communities to build the housing we need even if we scale up. And connecting housing to new transit is an even better idea to move people between where the new housing is and where the job and commercial centers are.
bob-gardner says
Trickle-down theory won’t solve the affordable housing problem.
Charley on the MTA says
Well … Keeping the apartment/house you have because the nouveau riche moved somewhere else instead of your neighborhood doesn’t seem like “trickle down”.
But yeah, neither is it the whole answer under the circumstances.
Christopher says
The question remains regarding what you say to people and towns who LIKE their two-acre zoning, thank you very much. “Too bad” is not an acceptable answer. Towns that are deliberately rural aren’t filled with evil people who don’t like the poor, but they do like their space.
kbusch says
Whether evil or not, the trouble is that the difficulty that cities like Boston and San Francisco have the side effect of depressing the economy in general and wages in particular. Zoning is not the sole culprit here. Transportation, too.
petr says
Look! Up in the sky…!
…. it’s jus a bird!
A very easy, cost efficient and tried-and-tested, method of adding housing is to just build up. You would think that some clever entrepreneur in Boston could make an absolute killing by putting in tall apartment buildings like they do in almost every other major city in the world.
But no. Boston has a city wide height limit of 155 feet. There are exceptions and variances are allowed in principle but almost never in practice (mostly for corporations and their towers and almost never for residences…). If you make it past the BRA, and If the FAA doesn’t object to something possibly in the way at Logan[1], then restrictions upon where and when shadows may fall are invoked… or, as in the case in the Back Bay, existing residents just say…ahem,… “NIMBY”.
And, of course, memories are long and people remember that last skyscraper to go up in 1978, the Hancock Tower, started shedding some of it’s window panes very shortly thereafter.
So, Boston has a height phobia. So, let’s not try to pin ALL of the blame, for a shortage of housing on zoning laws outside the city. The squeeze is on, and residents of Boston don’t want to build up… they’ll tell you they don’t want to live in canyons of shadows, and that’s fair… but residents of other places will tell you they don’t want to live cheek by jowl on all sides, and that’s fair also…
1: It is a passing strange objection from the FAA since the tallest buildings in Manhattan sit pretty much equidistant from Newark and LaGuardia Airports and if that doesn’t suite, JFK international is but 10 miles further than LaGuardia…)
bob-gardner says
” zoning changes and other rules”
This YIMBY stuff is a crock of yuppie shit. I tried to downplay my utter contempt for this fraud by being succinct but I guess I should be more explicit.
First of all, what zoning changes are you talking about? Do you advocate turning the Middlesex Fells, for example, into luxury gated communities, or high density condos? Or do you advocate expanding the supply of housing by ignoring environmental hazards?
If the answer is no, then you haven’t really unleashed the free market and it is an illusion to think that you have exerted downward pressure on housing prices.
If we’re not building on parkland or on superfund sites, where is all this vacant land in Cambridge that is available for high density luxury housing? Usually it’s property where people are already living, people who won’t be able to afford the new construction.
That’s where those “other rules” come in. It’s profitable for developers to be able to empty out the homes of less wealthy people, either through evictions, or by harassing tenants. The rules protecting tenants are constantly under attack. The contribution of . the YIMBY crowd is to declare that tenants are being displaced for their own good.
If you think that any of this is theoretical, think again. There are currently proposals that encroach on the Fells. Before Matt Carroll won his Pulitzer, he wrote eloquently about how deleading urban apartments actually hurt tenants, because if only tenants would tolerate the brain damage caused by lead paint, the poisoned apartments would increase the supply of housing and exert downward pressure on rents.
In Allston-Brighton, where I lived for twenty years, the population was harassed and and priced out of affordable housing by developers who used front groups to claim that this was for the greater good because housing supply and free market.
Except for the catchy acronym, dammit, I don’t see anything new about YIMBY.
Charley on the MTA says
Well ok. What’s your solution then?
bob-gardner says
A mix of policies to provide much stronger protections against displacement. The more direct the approach, the better. Above all , progressives should recognize the fallacy of expecting the free market to magically provide the solution once you implement a few pro-developer policies.
No one on this blog would advocate that we let medical institutions charge whatever they want, whenever they want , in the belief that someday, market forces will provide us with the medical care we deserve. Medical care for all should be a right and so should decent housing.
Charley on the MTA says
You might find this article pertinent — it’s about the Bay Area but definitely applies to some of your concerns: https://medium.com/@tdfischer_/the-progressive-disinformation-machine-7281184cac3f
jconway says
It’s the Cambridge yuppies in West Cambridge who are choosing their giant houses and yards over the kind of density that would actually alleviate the housing market crunch. Not to mention many of their preferred city councilors are property owners and realtors who are making money off the existing status quo. The entire CRA slate is a classic example of NIMBY-so is the departing David Maher and his likely successor Paul Toner. They use euphemisms like protecting ‘green space’ and the ‘village like character’ of their manses but it means the same thing. This is the only area in the city that hasn’t been completely penetrated by new housing and it’s one of the reasons the houses that are there are the most expensive.
Now the Slate is also funded by developers and are not interested in a proper mixture-they are just pro-development and favor designating some of it as affordable. Nadeem and his New Slate was more concerned with quality of life issues like bike lanes and youth employment-but I have faith my friend Sumbul and folks like Quinton Zoldervan, who know and work with folks like Jesse over at ABC and the Cambridge Progressive Democratic Committee are the kind of folks who will work with Mike Connolly and develop some out of the box approaches to zoning and housing construction.
Cambridge can afford to subsidize middle class housing again-and if it can’t do it through rent control maybe it can do so through an expanded voucher model, inclusionary zoning changes, and community land trusts to preserve existing affordable enclaves. It will have a horrible effect on the social equality of the community. I am fearful for the kind of racial tensions a stratified Cambridge will have in 10-15 years time when its affluent white professionals and new Americans.people of color in public housing and nobody in between. It will make our schools-a five decade model of integration that truly shaped the kind of character I have-into a dumping ground for those that can’t afford Shady Hill and BBN. The elementary schools are already headed in that direction-thank god CRLS got stabilized since I graduated. But I have deep concerns. And it’s a microcosm of what the rest of the area will look like.
After my wife and I get gentrified into Malden or Dedham-literally the only two Boston adjacent communities where we could afford new homes on our projected salaries-what happens to the folks that grew up there? It’s a vicious cycle. And we might opt out entirely since Portland and Providence have better bang for the buck. Let alone Austin, Richmond or San Antonio.
Christopher says
Is there a way people can express preference for green space and village character without your getting suspicious of motives? I for one see open space as a progressive value which goes to quality of life.
jconway says
Public open space is absolutely a progressive value. The CPA is a great tool to protect public spaces from developers or make market rate private spaces into new public spaces for parks, and I was proud to help pass one in Chelsea. Danehy Park in Cambridge was a critical part of my childhood and was literally a garbage dump when my mom was a kid. I’m glad it got converted to an innovative park rather than another condo development. Preserving big lots through zoning isn’t about preserving public land but about limiting housing stock to artificially inflate property values. And it’s the definition of regressive.
Christopher says
So if I want a two-acre lot and prefer to be surrounded by the same, does that make me a bad person for wanting my space? (For the record, I probably wouldn’t since I’ve never been a fan of yard work!)
SomervilleTom says
I don’t know if wanting a two-acre lot and preferring to be surrounded by the same makes you a “bad person for wanting [your] space”. I do know that there is compelling evidence that the resulting patchwork of houses, driveways, lawns, streets, and so on is absolutely devastating to the local environment.
I also know that “cluster zoning”, where the same number of dwellings are built closer together and sited so that they are to share a smaller footprint for utilities, vehicle access, lawns, and so on is far less intrusive.
Communities built with 2-acre “regular” zoning (like Dunstable and Carlisle) discover that houses are so far apart that kids can’t walk to play with their friends or play ball in the school yard because homes are simply too far apart. Families have to buy multiple vehicles, because nothing is within walking distance. Towns can’t build sidewalks because the housing density is so low that nobody can use a sidewalk even it it’s there.
We’ve tried building out towns with two-acre lots. The result has been terrible for the environment and terrible for the families who live there.
johntmay says
The two acre lot is just for boasting, just as the McMansions that sit on top of them. It’s madness. There is an obsession with expansive green lawns, a fixture of the well to do English who live in a warmer, wetter climate! In my town of Franklin, we have a constant battle with the lawn owners and the public’s right to water. Pro-tip: If you need to water your lawn weekly, you live in an area that does not support a large green lawn.
And then there is the McMansion with “media rooms” and dining rooms that are rarely used, sitting rooms and and so on that are always void of human beings….and of course, the massive kitchen with granite tops and enough cabinetry to hold appliances and food for a small army….but no one cooks!
(thanks for letting me get this off my chest….)
petr says
I think the academic term for that is ‘the city.’ I think if people wanted to live in a city they would live in a city. If they want to live in a town, they live in a town.
Most of the zoning in small towns is, strictly speaking, done by amateurs with stakes: property holders who volunteer to sit on the boards or zoning commissions. A lot of the zoning in the city is done by professionals for a paycheck (that is to say, without property stakes.) So I don’t know that you can ask these same amateurs to appropriately zone for clusters and maintain open spaces elsewhere in the same way we might ask that of professionals: I think many small towns start out with various clusters, sort of like the kind you describe (just because a bang-for-buck implementation of new utility) but then, over time, developers gradually chip away at the spaces between the clusters and before you know it it’s all density, density, density and you’re no longer living in a small town but in a city.
I lived in rural Connecticut for a time when I was very young. We had a house that had to be on at least three acres, maybe four… only, the lot was narrow and long, and with a large yard extending back into the woods behind. The street facing side was only wide enough to accommodate a driveway, the house, and a narrow strip abutting the neighbors… the rest was this huge yard with a barn and app[e trees. My dad cut the grass occasionally, but he never watered it that I can recall. His theory was to let it be… and all his life he laugh at people who, going for a certain ‘look’, imported grass seeds from elsewhere, like Kentucky Bluegrass or some semi-tropical blend from the Bahamas that liked higher humidity and/or wasn’t very drought tolerant: he said that they would end up doing four times the work and get less than a quarter of the return… I don’t remember the back yard ever going brown.
I loved it. My brothers and I knew all the neighbor kids and we would walk for miles to get together. In the woods we played soldier and hunted butterflies in the summer and built incredible snowball forts in the winter and ranged far and wide. But that was decidedly ‘rural’.
After a time, though he loved it too, my dad succumbed mothers importuning and we moved back to Massachusetts. Instead of the three or four acres with forest behind, we ended up with a house on a quarter acre of rocks and the entire Atlantic ocean in front, and I loved that too… Interestingly, however, when we lived in higher density neighborhoods, with more children our age, I noticed more friction and more factionalism. Back in CT, with about 8-10 kids around, every kid hung out with every other kid. We got into fights sometimes but went back to being friends shortly thereafter. In Ma, with probably 20 or more kids just within a stones throw there was more cliques and judgements about what you did, or how you looked… And once you crossed someone, they were an enemy.
When my grandfather purchased a house in on an acre plot in Meriden Ct., he also purchased the two adjoining lots, one on either side. He never built on them. Every other lot on that side of the street is now occupied with a house. Some of the acres have been parceled out to 1/2 and 1/4 sizes each with a house on them. You can go there today (My aunt and uncle still live in the same house) and see that the street is tightly packed except where my grandfather refused to build. One of my grandfathers sisters lived three houses down and I vividly remember a visit as youngster where, sitting in the parlor I looked out the side window straight into the house next door where an elderly man was sitting eating something. I remember thinking I could reach over and grab a forkful of his meal, I was so close. I didn’t like that. It didn’t seem to bother the elderly man… so some people might like that. I did not. Neither did my grandfather.
SomervilleTom says
Please beware the false dichotomy.
“Cluster zoning” is most emphatically NOT “the city”. When well-done, there is as much or more open space after development as with an old-fashioned 2-acre zoning approach. The difference is in where the structures are located and how far apart they are.
While anecdotes about family history are interesting, they may not help viable illuminate land-use policy today. There are several aspects of your anecdote worth mentioning.
One consequence of 2-acre zoning, sometimes quite intentional on the part of a town, is that it causes the price of each new home to significantly higher. Banks do not write mortgages on land, and so require that the price of the lot be a fixed maximum percentage of the amount financed. The effect of forcing large lots is therefore to force builders to erect 4+ bedroom McMansions. These are not starter homes. Each is purchased by a family with two or more children, and so as night follows day the development of these 2-acre parcels forces more schools to be built, and more school buses to be run to service those schools (because the 2-acre lot-size means the children cannot walk to their school).
In a similar vein, it is very unlikely that most first-time home-buyers can afford to pay cash for a lot on each side of a house they want to buy.
Whatever pressure there is to subdivide lots will surely be as high or higher when significant parts of the town are built on 2-acre parcels as for any other approach.
I suggest that successful zoning requires a town to establish a commonly-held vision of what the town wants to be 10, 20, 30 or 100 years in the future. We already know what happens when towns in Massachusetts impose 2 acre zoning.
I think we can do better.
petr says
I think that such is the ideal, and, while laudable, is not reachable. You seem to admit as much when you qualify it with “When well-done.” Well, yeah, anything done well will be better than similar things done, erhm, not-well. With, as noted, amateurs in the driving seat it’s really really difficult to get to ‘well-done.’ Massachusetts town meetings, selectmen and other mechanisms are essentially conservative in the barest sense: resistant to change, risk-averse.
This is just my point. There is significant pressure to develop. This pressure comes from banks and from developers. This is why, exactly and precisely, ‘cluster zones’ are so difficult: developers and bankers exert significant pressure to develop vacant land. Zoning boards in ‘small towns’ aren’t always equipped to handle that pressure. So they default to cookie cutter parcel zoning… some of those cookie cutters are two acres, some one, some less.
I don’t know if my grandfather paid cash. My grandfather was not particularly wealthy and it was either during the depression, or just after. I think, maybe, his brother and sisters helped him, either with cash or to get a mortgage and when he gained enough equity he either paid them back of helped them purchase their homes. It’s entirely possible he bought the lots to build on them, initially, or as a fall back, to sell if things got bad, but later decided he didn’t need to do that.
I brought it up to illustrate the point that, in the late -1930’s/ early 1940’s when he bought the house and lots it was one of maybe three or four houses on the street (either side). Today, on each side of the street, there are twenty or thirty homes, a goodly portion of them multi-family, and the only open spaces are the lots he didn’t build on… The town, essentially, now was the density of a city. This density is, I think, what people who live in towns that zone for 2 acres, fear and dislike. I don’t think the fear is misplaced… My grandfather didn’t want to live that close to other people, and I don’t either.
SomervilleTom says
I think all the voices in this discussion are correct, that’s why this is a tough nut to crack.
When people want to live someplace, that makes the price of housing go up. Efforts to counter that by brute force — such as rent control — fail because it is a fundamental market dynamic.
Massachusetts has a long tradition of steadfastly and absolutely REFUSING to do any sort of regional planning — especially regional transportation planning. Our absurd patchwork of town-by-town zoning and land-use regulations exacerbate an already tough problem.
It doesn’t make sense to build high-density housing in the Middlesex Fells. The only place that high-density housing makes sense is where there is convenient, affordable and safe public transportation so that the people who live in that high-density housing don’t have to own automobiles.
The sorts of things that may help in already-dense places Cambridge are incentives for owner-occupied housing and perhaps incentives to slow condo conversions. Neighborhoods where owners actually LIVE are likely to be more livable than neighborhoods where the owners are people who live somewhere else or — worse — faceless institutions like Harvard or BU.
I agree with Bob that I’m dubious about “YIMBY”. While there are serious — even devastating — consequences of Carlisle-style 2-acre zoning, those consequences have to do with land use and environmental impact. The opposition to 2-acre zoning that I’m familiar with has nothing to do with an animus towards personal use of automobiles.
Fundamentally, it remains true that we are trying to cram too many people into too small a space here in Massachusetts. In the long term, I think the solution demands that we revitalize our outlying cities and towns and grow our population away from Boston proper. I think that radically improved public rail transportation is the most immediate obstacle towards accomplishing that. People MUST be able to live happy, healthy, and satisfying lives while NOT owning an automobile.
jconway says
I’ve argued this as well. Build up as much as you can in Boston and its inner suburbs and then do more regional planning to link Gateway Cities with one another and to Boston. Transit is the key to do this. Salem is already getting revitalized as an affordable bedroom community for Boston.
A lot of the regional institutions it had when my grandfather worked in its downtown are long dead-but the downtown is thriving precisely since its a place for the creative class and student population to wind down and play, And they hop on the T or ferry to Boston again in the morning. Salem’s issue is retaining families because of school quality-an issue Somerville had to address too. Weymouth and to a lesser extent New Bedford is quietly copying this strategy.
Why Revere hasn’t taken off has a lot to do with the eyesores left over from beach party heyday and the isolation of its vibrant and more attractive downtown from the waterfront transit. But its definitely another area primed for a transition. And I think communities learning to work cooperatively on these issues is critical-the region needs to plan.
While we can’t fulfill my annexation fantasies thanks to quirky New England sentimentality for town government-we can and should create more regional institutions to facilitate coordination and planning. Cambridge and Boston City Councils created a joint committee on business relocation so they’d stop fighting each other for jobs. Other communities should do the same on housing, transit, and schools. Our three biggest challenges that have to be dealt with at the state and local level.
SomervilleTom says
I envision enhanced public rail transportation reshaping Salem into a thriving community on it’s own, rather than as a bedroom community for Boston. I envision the neighborhoods in an near Salem filling with families who love the proximity to the waterfront, who love being able to walk to and from work, and who rely on the rail network when they want to come into Boston for evening events and special occasions. Indeed, improving the school system of Salem is a key step.
In my view, this vision works for Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, New Bedford, Fall River, Worcester, Pittsfield, Greenfield … lovely smaller-scale cities and towns that can provide many or most of the amenities of urban living at a fraction of the cost.
I think the key element is to focus on making these cities and towns thriving places for families to live, work, and play, rather than bedroom communities for Boston.
People need to public rail transportation so that are not isolated from each other, and so that they have access to the entire region. I suggest that premise of moving large numbers of people to a remote office every morning and back every evening fails in the economy and environment of today and tomorrow. I suggest that we strive to find ways to move those jobs and employers outwards, rather than building out expensive infrastructure to pull people inwards.
We certainly agree with the vision of improved public transportation. Salem is an example of a city that thrived for generations as its own center of life and commerce. I envision reclaiming and revitalizing that role for Salem and cities like it.
jconway says
Sounds like a great vision. Greenfield is on my list of day trips for when my wife and I move out here.
JimC says
Hmm. I agree that it’s a positive development, but I share some of Bob’s skepticism. Let’s see how it goes.