Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Repealing Chapter 40B: Why it’s the only way to create real affordable housing!

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The developers have good reason to spend so much money protecting 40B, it is their cash cow.  Inspector General Gregory Sullivan estimated that more than $100,000,000 was owed back to cities and towns in 40B fraud.  In order to protect their cash cow, those who support Chapter 40B will be putting out a series of misleading statements and attempting to disguise their “money machine” as a system that produces much of the state’s affordable housing.  

Unfortunately, this is simply not true.  In fact, over the last ten years, Chapter 40B has produced an average of less than one affordable unit per community, according to the state’s own numbers.  

However, Chapter 40B is responsible for almost 35% of all new housing statewide each year.  Another way of stating these facts is that Chapter 40B has produced virtually no real affordable housing, yet produced tens of thousands of market-rate units, using public money that SHOULD be spent on real affordable housing.  This is quite a stark contrast from what 40B supporters would have you believe.

But how is this possible?  How can the numbers be so different?  Surely someone must be fudging the numbers, right?  Right.  State regulations allow for many non-affordable units to be counted as affordable.   For example, if a 40B project is a rental development, they are able to call all of the units “affordable” even though in reality, 80% of the units are NON-affordable.  The regulations also allow for the manipulation of statistics.  For example, in many communities a $250,000 40B condo is considered “affordable”, but the $175,000 condo down the street is not.  

Those who support and regulate Chapter 40B are so greedy that repealing the law is the only way to create real affordable housing and change our status as one of the least-affordable states in the country.  

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  1. Massachusetts needs more affordable housing, not less. And while there is always room to improve any law, the fact is 40B is the single-most effective tool in creating affordable housing in the state. Approximately 56,000 homes for working families and seniors have been produced under 40B (29,000 affordable units).  The facts are compelling and indisputable.  Repealing this critical law would be irresponsible and harmful to people who are in need of affordable housing and further complicate the economic challenges facing Massachusetts and our working- and middle-class families.

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    p>In an effort to ensure that all Massachusetts residents have access to affordable housing now and in the future, The Committee Against Repealing the Housing Law has come together.  This broad-based, state-wide coalition is comprised of more than 70 business, civic, religious, academic, civil rights, environmental and healthcare leaders, as well as municipal officials. The current list, which is still developing, is below:

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    p>Committee Against Repealing the Housing Law

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    p>Chair:  Tripp Jones

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    p>Treasurer:  Ellen Feingold

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    p>Community Advisory Committee (in formation)

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    p>Lisa Alberghini, Planning Office for Urban Affairs, Archdiocese of Boston

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    p>Mayor Thomas Ambrosino, City of Revere

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    p>Cheri Andes, Greater Boston Interfaith Organization

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    p>Jay Ash, Chelsea City Manager

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    p>Rev. Robert Bachelder, Worcester Area Mission Society

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    p>George Bachrach, Environmental League of Massachusetts

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    p>Larry Bacow, Tufts University

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    p>Eric Belsky, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University

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    p>William Berman, Suffolk University Law School

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    p>Barry Bluestone, Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, Northeastern University

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    p>Rachel Bratt, Tufts University

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    p>Tracy Brown, Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston

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    p>Tom Callahan, Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance

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    p>Ed Cameron, Newburyport City Council

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    p>Bernie Carey, Massachusetts Association for Mental Health

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    p>Joe Carleo, AIDS Housing Corporation/Victory Programs

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    p>Karl Case, Wellesley College

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    p>Nadine Cohen, Greater Boston Civil Rights Coalition

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    p>Kelley Cronin, Acton Housing Authority

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    p>Norma D’Apolito, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights

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    p>Sheila Decter, Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Justice

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    p>Joe Diamond, Massachusetts Community Action Program Directors’ Association

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    p>Larry DiCara and Jerry Rappaport Jr., Commonwealth Housing Task Force

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    p>Vicker DiGravio, Association for Behavioral Healthcare

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    p>Barbara Dougan and Jeff Stone, Greater Boston Civil Rights Coalition

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    p>Lew Finfer, Massachusetts Community Action Network

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    p>Lynn Fisher, MIT Center for Real Estate

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    p>Toby Fisher, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Massachusetts

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    p>Maureen Fitzgerald, Regional Housing Network of Massachusetts

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    p>Evelyn Friedman, City of Boston

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    p>Robyn Frost, Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless

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    p>Chris Gabrieli, Massachusetts 2020 Foundation

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    p>Steve Gartrell, Natick Affordable Housing Coalition

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    p>Vitoria Goldsmith, Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod

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    p>Michael Goodman, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth

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    p>Paul Guzzi, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce

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    p>David Harris, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, Harvard Law School

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    p>Robert Healy, Cambridge City Manager

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    p>Bill Henning, Boston Center for Independent Living

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    p>Michael Jaillet, Town of Westwood

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    p>Judy Jenkins, Homebuilders Association of Massachusetts

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    p>Susan Jones Moses, Planning Consultant

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    p>Nancy Kaufman, Jewish Community Relations Council

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    p>Alexander Kern, Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries

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    p>John Klimm, Barnstable Town Manager

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    p>Henry Korman, Fair Housing Specialist

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    p>Joe Kriesberg, Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations

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    p>David Levy, Housing Corporation of Arlington

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    p>Stan Lukowski, Eastern Bank

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    p>Alan Macdonald, Massachusetts Business Roundtable

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    p>Josephine McNeil, CAN-DO, Newton

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    p>Ed Moscovitch, Cape Ann Economics

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    p>Chris Norris, Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership

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    p>Vince O’Donnell, Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association

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    p>Ellen Pader, Housing Discrimination Project, Western Mass

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    p>Maribeth Perry, Lawyers Clearinghouse for Affordable Housing and Homelessness

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    p>Sheila Pransky, Needham Opportunities, Inc.

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    p>Allan Rodgers, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute

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    p>Chris Ross, Housing for All, Framingham

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    p>Steve Ryan, Massachusetts Association of Realtors

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    p>Leo Sarkissian, Arc of Massachusetts

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    p>Peter Shelley, Conservation Law Foundation

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    p>Robert Sheridan, SBLI

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    p>Jonathan Sherwood, Amesbury Municipal Council

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    p>Mark Thompson, Boston Private Bank & Trust Company

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    p>David Turcotte, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Family, Work, and Community

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    p>Robert Turner, Commonwealth Compact

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    p>Greg Vasil, Greater Boston Real Estate Board

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    p>Chris Widelo, AARP

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    p>Michael Weekes, Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers

  2. Tripp, while it looks like your concern is really affordable housing (which is more than I can say for many 40B supporters), your statements are simply untrue.  TO say “the fact is 40B is the single-most effective tool in creating affordable housing in the state” is simply and unequivically false.  

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    p>Nearly every other affordable housing program in the state, including those run by DHCD, creates more affordable units than Chapter 40B does.  In fact, the 10 communities that produce the most affordable housing in the state DO NOT USE Chapter 40B.  They use many other systems, including inclusionary zoning.  

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    p>Also, you say that 40B has created 56,000 homes for working families.  Again, FALSE.  The vast, vast majority of those units are NOT affordable, they are market rate.  Massachusetts has had the benefit of a stable population for the better of 5 years, we do not need 56,000 UNaffordable homes FORCED on communities that cannot afford them.  

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    p>Your group is drinking the CHAPA kool-aid my friend.  You cannot argue the facts, we are ranked 47th in the nation, this means that 46 other states have affordable housing programs that work better than Chapter 40B.  

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    p>We agree that there is a STRONG need in this state for REAL affordable housing.  But reasonable people, thinking logically, cannot believe that Chapter 40B is effectively producing that housing.

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    p>I cannot even list all of your “supporters” who directly benefit of profit from development.  If you look to those who make money by screwing people on 40B, you will find no lack of it.

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    p>Sorry for any spelling mistakes here đŸ™‚

  4. Before I allowed the Slow Growth Initiative to join the movement to repeal Chapter 40B, I did two weeks of nothing but 40B research.  Several things about the law seemed perfectly reasonable to me.  Here are a couple of the things that sounded reasonable to me at first, and how they are, in reality, not reasonable.

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    p>1) Communities only need to reach 10% affordable housing to ward off future 40Bs.- This sounds VERY reasonable at first.  Ten percent is not a large number and it seems like a good idea for all communitites to have 10% affordable housing.

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    p>Reality: Chapter 40B builds, on average, 3 non-affordable units for every 1 “affordable” unit.  This means that to reach 10% affordability using 40B, the average town would have to grow its total size by over 60%.  Not so reasonable anymore, is it?  

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    p>Also, new regulations allow for what is called a “regional need” standard.  So even if your town is at 10%, if other towns in the region are not at 10%, your community is still open for 40B development.  

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    p>Also, the supreme court has ruled that the regulations actually allow 40B projects to be built and approved by the zoning board at ANYTIME, as long as the law stays in place.  

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    p>The bottom line is that 40B creates a way that developers can continue to build large, high-density projects in the suburbs, while the crumbing infrestructure of affordable housing in the urban communities gets completely ignored. This law is not about affordable housing, its about forcing new construction and developer profits, which leads me to my next point.

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    p>2) Developers can only make 15% profit on 40B projects.- Again, this seems reasonable.  However, the law allows the developers to do their own accounting, resulting in the costs of nearly all projects being OVERstated.  In fact, even with this giant loophole, the Inspector General found many developers were STILL exceeding this profit cap on paper.  The state’s response to this?  In a public hearing the comment was “We have taken care of that in the new regulations and developers will no longer be exceeding the cap”  In reality, they simply raised the profit cap from 15% to 20%.  And developers regularly make FAR more than 20%.  If they say a bag of cement costs $7 and it really costs $5, how is that ever going to be discovered?  It isnt.

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    p>Over the course of the next year, as we approch voting time, you will hear many things from the pro-40B lobby that sound reasonable.  But when you really understand them, they are as unreasonable as the 40B law itself.  Let’s vote together, repeal this environmentally harmful law that does little to create affordable housing, and spend those MILLIONS of dollars on creating REAL affordable housing.  

    • Complete with the same broken attempts to post HTML — broken the same way — by each sock-puppet.

      I invite the editors to remove this clearly fraudulent diary and “comment”.

      • A quick review of the Slow Growth Initiative led me to a Facebook page that hasn’t put up a new post since 2010. It reads pretty archaic given the housing crunch we’ve suffered through this decade.

    • I counted a dozen people on the list of “endorsers” who are no longer at the positions claimed, e.g. Allan Rodgers retired from MLRI in 2010 and Alan Macdonald left the Business Roundtable in 2011. The credibility of the person who posted the long list of “endorsers” stands at zero with me.

      • The diary itself is from December 2009 so I’m still trying to figure out how it popped up again.

      • There does seem to be some chance that this post was made on 16-Dec-2009 (nine years ago). The list of endorsers might date from then.

    • I made the perhaps rash assumption that the dates shown are incorrect., The first two comments, for example, are described as being from “2019 years ago”. One explanation is that they’ve been there since the time of Christ. Another is that the timestamp associated with the comment has a value of “-1” instead of “2018”.

      I therefore assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the “2009” on the thread-starter is similarly broken in some way.

      • I hadn’t noticed the 2019 years ago part before, but the diary and first comments have the telltale formatting marks of being from the Soapblox era. This diary also doesn’t appear on the front page or recent list so I’m not sure how people found it.

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