[A clarification: We sometimes promote things to the front page on BMG that we don’t particularly agree with. This is one such post, most of which I disagree with, but which raises important concerns. I have corrected a contention that the MA Smart Growth Alliance is somehow connected with some larger developer-linked group; I can’t find evidence of that.]
Our Guv is again pushing the legislature to pass his so-called “Housing Choices” bill, in the barely-watched, lame-duck informal sessions. In January, 2018, Baker moaned that “for too many people housing in the Commonwealth is unaffordable.” Yet the bill he’s promoting has ZERO provision for affordability.
It’s a pure supply-side scam, designed to line the pockets of land speculators, property developers, and realtors, which will primarily result in more luxury condos for the super-rich to invest in. Its true nature can be seen by its biggest cheering section: the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts (HBRA), the Massachusetts Association of Realtors (MAR), the National Association of Industrial and Office Parks (NAIOP), and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board (GBREB.)
These civic-minded public benefactors are joined by the Mass Smart Growth Alliance, the local branch of a national outfit born out of the development community. [This is apparently not so — edited by Charley] Another seemingly odd bedfellow is the Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA). This organization lobbies Beacon Hill on behalf of the executive branch of local government – mayors, mainly.
Baker’s bill would be a huge gift to mayors, enabling an enormous executive power grab in the sleepy precincts of local government. Right now, it takes a two-thirds vote of a city council to change local zoning. Baker’s latest gift to mayors would change that requirement to a simple majority, allowing them to assure that anything they want built gets built, and damn the opposition.
This bill would reduce the role of democratically-elected local legislative bodies, eliminating much of the limited checks and balances they provide. Prop 2 and a half gives mayors a financial incentive to green light anything a developer wants to build. There is ample political cover for everyone if the magic words, “more housing,” are invoked.
Baker has cultivated mayors, handing out big discretionary grants for all sorts of local projects. That’s why Baker had 20 Democratic mayors endorse him – and plenty of others sit on their hands during the recent gubernatorial election. Plus, Baker has kept alive the promise of the “Housing Choices” goodie bag, designed to eviscerate the role of city councils in planning the shape of future development in their communities.
Granted, there are cities which should be stepping up to allow more residential development, especially that which is affordable to its residents. But, as Robbie Nelson recently wrote in Jacobin, “[W]e also need to steer clear of a noxious “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY)-ism which insists that capitalist developers would love to provide us with abundant, secure, and affordable housing if only we allowed them to build more. Many zoning regulations are stupid and not broadly conducive to healthy and sustainable urban space, but we shouldn’t buy the argument that places technical zoning legislation at the root of our housing crises.”
This is the just the argument that our ruling class has been repeating like a mantra. Since the very word “zoning” puts most people to sleep, many otherwise responsible citizens will just nod and say, “yes, yes, Governor Baker – a benign technocrat like you must know the solution to our housing crisis.” Is there any hope that people will wake up, and apply their critical thinking skills to this bill, before we’re subject to yet another corporate coup?
Our housing crisis is also fueled by low wages for the working class and a legislature that is a lap dog for the ownership class (AKA business owners/real estate owners) in all matters of economics.
Yes. But letting mayors control zoning decisions won’t help wages, and the lap dog legislature is wholly capable of giving Baker this bill on a cold December day, when the rest of the world is out shopping.
if you want to provide housing, provide it.
How about a law that taxes or seizes the vacant luxury condos in the cities?
This bill isn’t aimed at city councils. which generally are eager to please the developers and realtors. It is aimed at towns, where those pesky town meetings are proving far less biddable.
The link you’ve included is broken. You may have perhaps been intending to link to the September 2018 “Luxury Real Estate Project of the Institute for Policy Studies”.
I do have a question about this report, specifically about its use of the term “vacant”.
I chose a property cited in the report (“Echelon Properties”, in the Seaport district) and searched for rentals in that building. I found a great many listings — all described as “unavailable”. For example, Apartments.com describes the properties as follows:
In the text of the above PDF, it seems to use “vacant” as a synonym for “investor owned”.
Bearing in mind that my town (Somerville) has already implemented a real-estate transfer tax and a tenant right-of-first-refusal (both of which I enthusiastically support), I’m disturbed by what seems to me to be a misleading use of the word “vacant”.
Has yet another word in our language been redefined into nothingness?
Are you assuming that the “unavailable” listings are rented and occupied?
At least rented, yes, because that’s the normal practice and I didn’t take the time to dig deeper. Listings aren’t free on sites like apartments.com, and I think it’s more likely that those 285 units are rented than that the various rental sites in the Boston area are being gamed by the property owners in a clever ruse to give a false appearance of legitimate use.
I think the burden of proof is on whomever claims these properties are “vacant”.
Sorry about the link!
No links yet, but I did see pieces in both the Globe and WBUR describing the report I published (mid September).
If we’re talking about the same reporting, my question about your use of the term “vacant luxury condos” remains. Do you mean condos with nobody living in them, or do you mean condos bought and then rented to somebody other than the purchaser?
@Tom: The former.
And the links are there, just hidden by BMG’s ineffable formatting. (For instance, click the word “another.”)
Thanks, I found them It looks as though the WBUR link is to the pdf I first posted.
Who can say how the bill is “aimed, though given Baker’s relationship to mayors in general, he seems eager to help other governmental CEOs” The bill’s effect, regardless, is disproportionately to empower the executive branch of local government, whether mayors or selectmen, as it takes power away from city councils or town meeting.
Town meetings stacked with protectionist homeowners and city councils that primarily serve protectionist homeowners, which have done the most miserable job possible when it comes to providing a mix of housing suitable for our regional population.
The “seizing” of vacant condos would be eminent domain takings, for which the seizing unit of government would have to pay full market value. If local governments, housing authorities, etc. had that kind of dough, they might be building their own affordable housing. Efforts to impose vacancy taxes will likely be challenged in court. Plus, collecting the data about actual occupancy would be tricky.
I really must challenge your use of “vacant”. It took me me moments to find evidence that these properties are being actively rented. Actively rented is not “vacant”. “Vacant” means sitting empty.
If you have no occupancy data and no vacancy taxes collections are even being attempted, then I think it’s dishonest to talk about “vacant” properties.
Massachusetts is made up of cities and towns, so if you are criticizing mayors, your post is mostly about cities? The Department of Revenue identifies 295 towns and 56 cities according to this report., They also say that towns tend to become cities at a population tipping point of about 35,000.
So wouldn’t it make sense for places that already have high population density to add more housing? That would reduce sprawl and make it easier to plan for public transportation options.
Wouldn’t Baker’s bill make it more difficult, at the same time, for new developments in towns? A 51% majority at town meeting could tighten up local zoning codes. So I don’t see how it’s unequivocally pro-developer. It would seem to depend upon location and type of housing.
Not so much criticizing mayors, but pointing to a significant transfer of power from the legislative branch of any local government to the executive branch. The bill would apply to towns and cities. The form of government adopted by a community is locally determined – and there are still some pretty populous places operating with a town form of government.
I’m not following why it would necessarily make sense for places which have high population density to add more housing. Chelsea, for instance, must be at or near the top for density, but has no subway or commuter rail service, only buses. Chelsea is congested with traffic, lacks a lot of basic infrastructure, is largely built out, and still struggles with its schools, but has probably added about a thousand or more additional housing units in the last 10 years, so, seriously, what’s the argument for more housing in Chelsea? Or Lynn, come to that – though it does have a commuter rail stop, I suppose,
I do agree that it makes sense to increase housing options near mass transit. There are plenty of places which already have MBTA service, whether commuter rail, trolley, or subway. They don’t necessarily have high population density now, but it’s the transportation availability that matters, not so much existing density.
Baker’s bill has the same effect in towns as in cities. It would not make it easier for towns to tighten zoning codes, only to increase density. Increasing density is not a bad thing per se, and a lot of towns have the space to do it; some even have existing transit. If they had the political will, they could increase their density under current laws, only they don’t.
The argument for more housing in Chelsea and Lynn is there’s a few hundred thousand housing insecure people in Greater Boston.
And your argument just ate itself. Yes, many tony burbs around Boston could zone for greater density, but they don’t because their protectionist legislative bodies have used the 2/3 rule to horrific effect.
Housing is an unusual issue because the people who control the supply (i.e. current homeowners, via their locally elected representatives) directly benefit from the lack of supply (created by zoning laws) in the form of higher asset prices and fewer headaches that come with “letting in the masses” (i.e. people at the lower end of the income scale).
“Density” is of little benefit to any community except Boston because dense properties have lower property taxes per unit. A two-family house is usually worth less than two single family houses.
While there are some density savings in a community via economies of scale (the marginal cost of a fire department covering more residents is lower than the fixed cost of having a department to begin with), there are also more expenses – as people live more densely, they tend to require more policing, there is more wear-and-tear on roads, etc.
Of course, the largest issue is with schools. Artificially restricting demand means that you wind up with the people who can afford to pay the most, i.e. the high earners. Statistically speaking, the children of high earners will do better in school, they will have more at-home resources, and their parents will be able to spend more time working with them on their education (like helping with homework).
What has happened in Massachusetts is that artificial restrictions on housing supply has made certain communities very desirable, and therefore very expensive. There is a zero-sum effect here – this comes at the direct expense of other communities who are less desirable in comparison.
Want to live cheaply within a 30-minute commute to Boston? Then buy a home in Brockton, right? You can get a house for around $200k. That’s pretty reasonable, isn’t it? Rentals are a little pricier, but you can still find one for under $1500/month.
Problem is, most people don’t want to live in Brockton. They want a $200k house in Dover, or Wellesley – because they don’t want to live near people who can only afford a $200k house.
Massachusetts real estate is built on exclusivity, and that’s the problem here. Wellesley has superb schools because they keep out the families more likely to have bad students. They have a better quality of life because they keep out the people who are more likely to park their cars on their front lawns and not cut their lawns. What happens is that the “better” people wind up in the “better” towns, making those towns “better”. Rinse and repeat.
No one is interested in upsetting that apple cart, because the people who hold the political power benefit from it the most.
We need to find a way to expand affordability while maintaining quality of life. I’ve never liked your attitude that suggests that people who want certain community standards are bad on that account or are somehow deliberately exclusionary.
I’m not trying to say that “people who want certain community standards are bad”, however, I hope you can recognize that this segregation has significant impacts which should be addressed and borne by everyone instead of being viewed as a free and superior lunch.
I think most people want such community standards, but the segregation makes achieving those standards far, far more costly in some communities versus others. If the result of zoning results in students who are 10x easier to educate than another community, then isn’t it a disparity when that other community has just 10% more educational resources? It should realistically have 10x the amount.
A good analogy would be someone who erects a fence on three sides of their property so that any leaves from their upwind neighbors do not blow onto their yard, but all the leaves on their own property blows into their downwind neighbor’s yards. Pointing out the impact of this fence isn’t a criticism of someone who wants to have a leaf-free yard, it is meant to point out that the person who does this has put additional burdens on his neighbors, and probably should assume some responsibility to aid them – or at the very least, should not be a critic when his neighbors don’t have as clean yards.
I’m all for making resources more equitable or even proportional to need, starting with dumping my absolute least favorite state law – Proposition 2 1/2.
It doesn’t matter whether the exclusion is deliberate or not. Whatever negative consequences accrue from such exclusion are completely independent of any intent or lack thereof.
The public schools of Billerica are worse than those of Carlisle and Concord (and, for that matter, all of the other nearby towns with the exception of Lowell). The result is a self-perpetuating spiral of Billerica residents who had horrible experiences with public schools and who therefore resent every nickle spent on those schools.
That’s a real problem, and it has nothing to do with intent.
I think that it isn’t precise to say “The public schools of Billerica are worse than those of Carlisle and Concord (and, for that matter, all of the other nearby towns with the exception of Lowell).”
It is more accurate to say “the students in the public schools of Billerica perform worse than the students in Carlisle and Concord…”.
Unfortunately the general public doesn’t understand the difference between a “poorly performing school” and a “school whose students perform poorly”.
Massachusetts education system is set up like a centrifuge to separate the “poorly performing students” from the “adequately/highly performing students”. Since the segregating tool is mostly income level, this makes it even worse, because people are quick to flip-flop correlation with causation, and they look at a wealthy district spending $15k on their students, a poor district spending $16k on their students, and they say the poor district is wasting money because the results are bad.
What they don’t realize is that each student likely has a dollar amount associated with them for “educational need”, probably ranging from $-5k to $-50k, and that the wealthy district has accumulated a lot of $-5k students by keeping out the $-50k students. So what happens is you have a district with primarily $-50k students who are receiving a $15k education, and another district with primarily $-5k students, receiving a $15k education.
This is the same thing that charter schools do, by the way.
I think you’re splitting hairs microscopically thin. Do you actually know anything about the schools in Billerica? Have you ever had a child in a Billerica public school? Have you known anybody with children in the Billerica public schools?
I’m well aware of the difference between correlation and causation. I’ve been doing failure analysis and similar statistical work for most of the past 40 years. I also lived in Billerica from 1979 to 1987, and I served on the town’s finance committee.
There are certainly issues with how we measure school or student performance. There are issues with pretty much ANY measure of ANY sort of performance. Nevertheless, when an ensemble of different measurements produces a large and consistent difference, then it is perfectly accurate to say that one is better or worse than another.
I invite you to offer measures that you agree allow two school systems to be compared. Then tell me how Billerica schools compare to Concord-Carlisle schools on those measures.
While I don’t know the specifics between Billerica and Carlisle, I think you are adopting the common belief that somehow, teachers/administration in poorly performing districts are simply worse than teachers/administration in strongly performing districts, so all we have to do is somehow fix that.
Beyond marginal improvement, I’d welcome a case study where changing all the teachers/leaders in a school or district (keeping the same students) turned that school or district high-performing. I’m not aware of this happening anywhere (beyond marginal improvement, that is).
I have relatives who teach in Springfield. The stories I hear about the students and parents are horrific. How many of your children’s classmates parents were murdered? Or thrown in prison? Or moved every few months? Or who just didn’t care? Or who assaulted the teachers? If those teachers “try a bit harder”, will that turn those students into scholars? No way.
Now maybe teachers in Billerica aren’t adept at preventing disruptive students from affecting the educational process, but the teachers in Carlile likely wouldn’t be able to handle them either – they just don’t have them at the same level. Does that mean that Billerica is failing because it can’t handle situations that other districts don’t have? If you want to look at it that way, sure, but it isn’t a reasonable comparison.
Teaching is a process. You can’t evaluate any process without evaluating its inputs, and very few processes are robust enough to handle a massive variability in inputs and produce the same output. Yet that is what we are asking our schools to do.
I would say that the best answer here is that the entire framework of teaching needy children needs to be reevaluated. Maybe this means that a classroom in a needy district is very different from a classroom in a non-needy district. Maybe it means that the idea of one teacher (with an aide) teaching 15-25 students needs to be thrown out in a needy district – maybe it means 3 teachers for every 5 students. Maybe it means delivering education in a radically different way that I can’t even fathom.
Instead, we have attempted to standardize education across communities. Everyone gets the same curriculum, everyone gets the same tests, everyone gets the same books, and we then rank the students against each other and collectively vilify those who “fail”.
I really don’t think Tom was suggesting that teachers in one community are inherently better or worse at their jobs than teachers in another community, though certainly circumstances they have to deal with vary from town to town.
Since you don’t know the specifics of the differences between Billerica and Carlisle, perhaps you might stop there. Billerica is certainly not Springfield, Billerica is not a “needy” town in the way you describe. I’m also not villifying anybody.
One church invests in its music program for generations, and another doesn’t. The music program in that church is objectively better than the other. You can hear the difference in the pew. The first has three full-time professional music directors (for example “adult”, “children” and “folk”), the other one part time organist. One has paid choir members, the other does not.
I’m not challenging any of the specifics you offer, I’m saying those simply aren’t relevant to Billerica and Carlisle (and to a great many other towns).
I’m just as happy to talk about police and fire. Or water and sewer departments. Or town government.
The point remains that in my opinion a balance must be struck between hyper-local needs and desires and the larger good. Chelmsford cited that UPS distribution facility literally on the town line with Billerica. Chelmsford got all the increased property tax revenue, Billerica got all the increased truck traffic.
Local control is not always better.
That’s my neck of the woods and Billerica never struck me as THAT poor; I would have said comparable to Dracut and Tewksbury but I admit that is a sense rather than looking up the data. Even so, my pushback wasn’t on what I know to be the reality of disparate public school systems, but rather the implication that people who want what’s best for their families are by definition snobs, and that this is a zero-sum game whereby others cannot also have what is best for their families.
Beware the false dilemma. You’re a professional educator and since that’s your neck of the woods, you must be aware of the differences between the Concord-Carlisle public schools and the Billerica public schools.
Of course I am, or at least I can assume based on what I know about those communities. We need to have policies, mostly appropriate funding I suspect, to minimize those differences as much as humanly possible though I hope that would mean lifting up Billerica rather than holding back Concord-Carlisle.
Christopher, this is actually worse than a zero-sum game.
If you have ten classrooms of 20 students each, and 2 in each of them are somewhat needy, those classrooms can very likely absorb the needs of those two students with little impact to the other students.
If you take the 20 needy students and put them into two classrooms, 10-needy, 10-not-needy, the other eight classrooms will likely see very little improvement, but those two classrooms (with 10 needy, 10 non-needy students) will become chaos. The 10 non-needy students will be completely neglected, and the 10 needy students will not get anywhere near the help they need.
So by dividing the students up differently, you get fewer students getting the education they need. That is by definition worse than zero-sum.
OK, I thought we were talking about funding rather than class composition. I actually believe in homogeneous grouping so that all students will have their needs served, but we’re straying pretty far from the original topic of this diary. I’ve been in classrooms like the half and half you describe and it’s not pretty. I would not want to be one of the non-needy class in one of those.
I agree with this analysis of the political dynamics. I think zoning is a symptom, not a cause, In examples of Brockon and Dover, I think the power differences drive the zoning decisions — along with a great many other decisions — that we’re talking about. Attempting to change this behavior by changing the zoning is like pouring water onto the tank of a stopped-up toilet in hopes of making it flush. You’ll end up with a stopped-up toilet in the middle of a flooded bathroom.
Billerica is a different town from its neighboring Carlisle. I bought my first house in Billerica because the Billerica property was more property for less money and I believed the hype at the time about Billerica’s “improving” school system.
What I learned, the hard way, was that people who wanted better schools chose Carlisle. People with good educations and good jobs wanted better police and fire departments, and they chose Carlisle. When the two towns began developing their farmland into housing after WWII, Carlisle chose 2 acre zoning. Billerica chose 1/4 acre zoning. When the real-estate boom of the eighties got under way, there was enormous pressure on the respective zoning boards of the two towns. The zoning board of Billerica was dominated by people who were dependent on the construction industry. Every Billerica zoning board decision benefited the developer. The zoning board of Carlisle was dominated by people who opposed commercial development of the town. Developers chose Billerica for their projects over Carlisle.
When the state mandated an earlier generation of affordable housing allowances, there was enough money and lawyers in Concord to turn back the attempt to override the local zoning. When similar moves were made in Billerica, the town government shrugged its shoulders, said “What can we do?” and the few zoning laws left that attempted to preserve what was left of the Concord river watershed in town were shredded.
My fight in Billerica of the 1980s was an attempt to preserve the tiny bit of open space left in the town. My colleagues and I were not trying to turn Billerica into a bastion of gated compounds of the wealthy, we were trying to keep the river clean and perhaps reduce the annual flooding of whole working-class neighborhoods of the town. We wanted our children to have a few places left in town where they could hear wind rustling leaves in trees rather than traffic.
One of my concerns about proposals like this is that — as night follows day — less desirable high-density housing will end up being forced on less affluent cities and towns, while the gated compounds of Concord and the multi-acre multi-million-dollar farmhouses of Carlisle will remain pristine. This is the way of political power. I think that zoning changes roll off the back of the politically powerful as water rolls off the back of a duck.
Wealth is power. The way to address the power disparity between Dover and Brockton is to address the wealth disparity between Dover and Brockton. Changing the zoning is just spitting in the wind.
But fixing this problem by addressing the wealth disparity between Dover and Brockton is a little like saying the best way to solve climate change is to invent cold fusion.
Thinking about this this morning, I think much of this stems from the use of local property taxes to fund everything, and especially schools. Getting away from local property taxes to state funding would benefit the common weal.
Then again, it might be easier to address wealth disparity between Dover and Brockton. 😛
Heh, agreed on both counts.
Moving from property taxes to state taxes has been needed for decades. That remains the best option for handling prop 2 1/2. Such a move would, in my opinion, require two related changes:
1. A mechanism for greatly increasing the effective tax rate on the wealthy. Deval Patrick’s proposal from 2013 remains an excellent starting point.
2. Allow cities, towns, or even — perish the thought — counties to impose a local surtax whatever state income tax is collected. Maryland has done this for decades, and it has worked very well.
One consequence of this that needs to be addressed is how such a change would affect the overall experience of living in the state. A negative consequence of the decisions made by MD in the 1950s is that individual cities and towns have essentially disappeared in more populated areas. Montgomery County MD, where I grew up, is now one big Framingham.
So this problem is unlikely to be solved easily. Maybe we should keep that cold fusion option open.
The dirty secret is that families cost towns money. Property taxes paid by families are less than expenses to a town.
That’s why local planning agencies are so hot for assisted living and hipster apartments that are too small for couples with kids.
It also explains a lot of local opposition to growth. Localities all want to growth business tax base, but not the residential population those businesses need to thrive.
That opposition is not limited to a rump caucus of NIMBYs gaming the 2/3 rule at Town Meeting, either. Contrary to the idea behind this legislation.
State funding of local government is not cold fusion. We do it inadequately today and did to properly a recently as the 1980s.
In the meantime, it’s not fair to say that towns are hostile to growth. The entire Commonwealth is, as expressed in its laws and budget.
To crack that nut, you will have to solve the problem of closely estimating how much each student “costs” to educate. Clearly you can’t just say “Dover has 1,000 students, Brockton has 10,000, so the state will give Dover $X and Brockton 10 x $X.
You would also have to say “and Dover, you are not allowed to kick in extra money to your school budget – you get what you get, and you don’t get upset”.
That will never fly, because people in Dover love the idea that they can spend their tax dollars on *their* students, and not on *those* students.
Chapter 70 attempted to fund to need, but in my opinion it grossly underestimated the needs. As I like to say, if you were a private contractor, would you choose a classroom of students from Dover for $Y, or a classroom of students from Lawrence for 1.5 x $Y, with the goal being that you each classroom must be educated to the same level of performance? You would clearly choose Dover.
I think the better way to solve this problem is 1) to chip away at the factors that promote inequality (i.e. zoning), and 2) spend state money in local communities with an eye towards equalizing demand (which will gradually normalize the prices).
We need to get to the point where the poorest town in the state has excellent schools, but I too would want the option of going above and beyond if we could afford it.
I don’t think that is a fair statement. I think it is more fair to say this:
What I learned, the hard way, was that people who can afford better schools chose Carlisle. People with good educations, good jobs, and therefore more income chose Carlisle because they could afford better police and fire departments (something that most people want, and something that all people should have).
Billerica was likely predominately built before zoning laws were even invented, and Carlisle likely only became a livable place due to the widespread adoption of the automobile in the 1950s. I don’t think it’s fair to assign blame for their divergent growth patterns to the towns themselves. Yes, there was a dynamic of power involved, but the choices each place made were not in identical circumstances.
Realistically, since Carlisle is so desirable, the “market” approach to housing would be that developers would build more housing there in a dense way. If there are 60 families looking to send their kids to the Carlisle schools, but there are just 20 lots left, then it makes market sense to a developer to put in 20 triple-deckers.
Will that make Carlisle marginally less desirable? Yes! But that is what should happen, because if you don’t allow that to happen, you wind up where we are, which is a state that is segregated by income, with sky-high housing prices.
If there were zero zoning laws, I do not think we would see a predominance of [empty] high-end condos – I think we would see communities being self-regulated by developers. I don’t think the idea of “exclusive” communities would exist, because the only player with the power to exclude is government itself.
It should be obvious that zoning laws amount to self-dealing by residents of a local community. They are laws intended to make scare a resource that all or most voters already possess – housing units.
This sounds to me like exactly how it should work. Each community deciding which battles to fight, what standards it wants to maintain, etc. Billerica wanting quarter-acre lots and Carlisle two-acre lots almost sounds like local decision making at its best, so long as it really is their choice and not forced upon them.
It might be local decision making at its best, so long as we’re all ok with the outcome — the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
It is a self-perpetuating spiral. Once a town like Billerica is less desirable than a neighboring town like Carlisle, it is VERY hard to break the resulting spiral that strengthens the barriers that separate them. It is the same reason why unregulated free markets produce the extreme wealth concentration we see all around us.
People who move into Billerica and who want good schools, responsive police and fire, honest government, and so on learn that there is no place for them in Billerica — and they move out. Money and wealth is part of the picture, but by no means all of it. Chelmsford is not that much more expensive than Billerica, yet has made dramatically different local choices.
It seems self-evident to me that relying on extreme local control will maximize the differences among cities and towns. If that maximum differentiation is what we want, then no changes are needed.
Well, to continue the market analogy towns making their own decisions are like the free market, but the state intervening to insure at least a baseline of equity is appropriate regulation of that market.
This is a fair description of the problem, I think. I don’t think that you’re making moral judgments so much as simply identifying the problem.
A lot of this stems from Massachusetts’ particular love affair with extremely local government, which is sort of ironic for a progressive-by-reputation state, given the perpetual ideological battle lines in national politics over “centralized government.”
We have to have everything on a town-by-town basis, including schools, emergency services, infrastructure, and parks and rec. That means that certain towns can pay teachers more and have more of them, and give them physical plant that is the envy of localities that don’t have those resources.
A lot of the things that exacerbate the sorting problem you identify could be mitigated by getting away from funding all of this stuff with local property and school taxes.
I have to differ with you here. It’s not a Bay State fetish.
Land-use regulation is a traditional function of local government in the U.S. and has been recognized as such by the U.S. Supreme Court.
By the way, if there is a local official whom you trust, tell him or her about your notion that local government has too much discretionary power in how it delivers services. You will definitely learn a thing or two.
I guess it all depends on what definition of “local government” we choose use.
To pick just one micro-example, the idea that there are hundreds of different building codes, plumbing codes, electrical codes, and so on is very much a Massachusetts phenomenon and very much a fetish.
Town-by-town zoning is similarly baroque.
Except there aren’t local codes for buildings, electrical work, or plumbing. These are state codes.
The closest you’d come to local is that some older codes sometimes remain in effect in some communities during a transition period (as was the case with the so-called “stretch” building code during the Patrick administration).
I encourage you to discuss these ideas with some local official whom you trust. They will set you straight.
I apparently stand corrected. The contractors who’ve done work on my property were apparently complaining about Somerville inspectors, and I thought they were referring to a town rather than state building and electrical code.
I can assure you that the inspectors in Dunstable MA apply very different standards than their counteparts here in Somerville.
My contractors tell me that the inspectors in neighboring Medford are very different.
Maybe it isn’t just Massachusetts, but it is a source of the problem,
I don’t know, it seems inefficient to me that every town has its own police, fire, and school system. I don’t think that most states do this–at least the 3 I have lived in do not, with the exceptions of larger cities. Emergency services usually are regional. Schools ought to be, though they are often not, specifically because people want to fund “their” school and not schools, generally.
Except every town does not have its own police, fire, and school systems. Many of the smaller communities have entered into regional agreements for these services for decades.
All but the largest communities usually have regional voc-tech schools. Counties are still a thing in the western part of the state, because it makes sense for them.
The level of regionalization that we have is a function of state law (which facilitates or not) and local judgment. There may be some cases where the judgment is wrong, but not often.
What do you believe is the most efficient way to provide these services? Do you think, for instance, that there should be just one fire department for the whole state?
How big is best? How do you know–what’s the basis for your opinion?
Can you imagine how some entirely local factors (geography, demographics) best understood by the locals could be decisive in answering that question?
It is certainly true that some smaller towns share police and fire coverage with their neighbors. Schools are similar. So while there not 351 separate police, fire and school departments, there are still MANY more than other states of similar populations and population densities.
For example, the 2018 population of Connecticut is 3.59M. Connecticut has 92 municipal police departments employing a total of 6,628 police officers.
The 2018 population of Massachusetts is 6.9M — about twice that of Connecticut. Massachusetts has 357 law enforcement agencies employing 18,342 police officers.
That’s nearly four times as many police departments and nearly three times as many police officers for only twice as many people. Similarly I grew up in MD (in a Washington DC suburb). MD has 6.08M people. MD has about half as many law enforcement agencies and 16,000 police officers.
I think that counties are better suited for these sorts of things than individual cities and towns. Counties are big enough to offer economies of scale, and small enough to allow local control. It is unfortunate that the Massachusetts political machine so thoroughly poisoned the well about counties in MA.
One serious issue I take with the framing of your last question is the inevitable tension between “best understood” for a single town and “best understood” for the region that includes that town.
In the late 1980s, the town of Chelmsford cited a huge UPS distribution literally on the town line with Billerica. Virtually all of the traffic impact fell on Billerica. The voters of Chelmsford certainly understood what was in the best interests of Chelmsford in approving that development.
One major contributor to our current disastrously bad transportation infrastructure is our steadfast refusal to do any effective regional transportation planning. It takes decades to properly plan and site major highways. Decisions made by Woburn and Stoneham regarding the intersection of 128 and I-93 have devastating impact on virtually every town between Lawrence and Boston. Our collective steadfast refusal to plan and build usable public commuter rail services translates to nightmarish impacts on working-class neighborhoods of Somerville — those neighborhoods were destroyed by the monstrously over-built elevated McGrath highway and I-93. Their children are endangered by hundreds or thousands of cars driven through their streets every day by suburban commuters.
As in so many things, balance is needed in such matters.
Huh?
Find a Massachusetts local official whom you trust and talk about these many ideas with him or her.
You are not necessarily wrong, but in any case you will learn a lot.
There weren’t that many ideas in my comment.
Do you dispute the data that shows that MD manages about the same number of police officers for about the same population with half as many police departments?
Do you think our regional transportation is working fine? Do you think it’s just fine that poor kids in dense Somerville neighborhoods have to dodge commuters from North Andover every day?
You asked some specific questions. It sounds like you weren’t actually interested in answers.
The customer is not always right and local understanding does not always lead to the best outcome.
There is plenty of room for informed criticism of state-local relations and the provision of local services in Massachusetts.
You generally have a good take on things but your comments would really benefit from being better informed by how things work.
You and I seem to agree that there is an optimal scale for these services.
You seem to believe that there is a single one-size answer to that question, and also that you know what that size is.
I disagree with the premise of that, but in any case your ideas would benefit were you to investigate the issues you wrote about. Otherwise you are just shooting from the hip.
I don’t think anything I’ve written suggests a “one-size answer” to any question.
I note that you haven’t responded to my request for clarification of what you think I need to investigate more deeply. Unless you share your so-far secret knowledge, then you’re not even shooting — your just complaining.
I welcome an opportunity to explore whatever you think I’ve got wrong.
This post smells funny.
It’s a little awkward to criticize a bill that changes the required vote from a super-majority to a majority as anti-democratic, no? And with the exception of that change, it’s not really clear what you think is wrong with the bill, except that it’s Gov. Baker who has proposed it and that it is supported by the builders, who of course would like to build more housing.
I’m not the maker of the post, obviously; but one reason we might consider that shift in the vote necessary to pass a zoning change as anti-democratic is that it does significantly alter the reasonable expectations of property owners regarding what safeguards they have, and gives the public materially less power to block development that an administration might favor, but that they might find undesirable.
If you think it’s a good thing for the public to have less control, and less of a chance to veto, whatever deals a municipal administration might want to enter into — as the developer industry clearly does, and as many frustrated mayors likely do — naturally you’ll see killing the supermajority requirement for a zone change as “more democratic.” But if you think it matters for the public to have a realistic chance of stopping what it considers harmful development, or that people who buy a house or a business property ought to be able to rely on the protections afforded by local zoning unless there’s some reason for overriding those protections significant enough to warrant a 2/3 (or 3/4, in some instances) vote of the city council, you’re going to be much less enthusiastic about this idea.
I know affordable housing sounds great. But you know what this is going to be used for? Strip malls and drive-throughs in places where the neighbors would welcome affordable housing, but don’t want to risk the failed retail developments or noise and light pollution, that’s what. It’s not going to bring my city more (or renovated) affordable housing where neighbors are being all NIMBY about it. That supermajority is the only effective tool we have to even slow down this sort of negotiated-behind-closed-doors project out here, and yes, it’s more democratic to keep it — or at least, it is if your aim is promoting democratic self-government as a matter of function, and not merely of form.
Well, does “the public” in your comment mean a motivated and interested minority? And what does a property owner’s reasonable expectations have to do with democracy?
Look, I’m not taking a view on whether zoning law changes should be made easier. But I think it’s silly to frame this in the way that the author has done.
The narrative that Baker is pushing is that the state’s housing crisis is caused by a handful of snobs in the suburbs who are blocking development though old zoning codes that cannot be “fixed” because of the 2/3 rule.
There may be some examples of this, but I think it is largely a fantasy and that furthermore urbanizing the ‘burbs would not make a big enough dent in the problem to matter.
Meanwhile, what the market causes to get built is vacant luxury condos.
That is exactly the Baker narrative. Yet his bill applies to all cities and towns, not just that ones which act like “snobs” and say no to housing.
This bill (its number now is evidently H. 4290) restricts what cities and towns can do via zoning, but places no requirements on developers or on what they build. Local zoning decisions get moved from a broad base to a narrow one, and developers get an easier go-ahead, without having to address affordability at all. Score one for free-market real estate development.
“Meanwhile, what the market causes to get built is vacant luxury condos.”
I think you’re grossly distorting reality by calling these “vacant”.
I invite you to provide data that these properties are actually unoccupied, because it appears to me that many are being actively rented.
If we must use deceit and dishonesty to advance our agenda, then I suggest it’s time to revisit our agenda.
“handful of snobs in the suburbs”, etc. Well, Ed Glaeser has been studying this for a long time and that’s pretty much what he’s come up with. The Cambridges and Somervilles are mostly doing their job in building.
I might agree that more supply, unleashing development, is not sufficient; we likely need occupancy taxes and affordability mandates as well.
As far as it goes, there’s not a lot I disagree with in Baker’s proposal:
Statements like this make my skull hurt. Yes, the current market generates inordinate amounts of luxury condos. So why are we fighting to preserve the legislative underpinnings of the current market? If you don’t like what we’re getting, stop doing the same stuff.
One important feature of any democracy is constraints on executive power.
Except the power dynamic here is the legislative bodies suck really bad and they’ve given us a housing market targeted at the upper tier.
If so, make all zoning by simple majority.
Perhaps the point got lost in the discussion thread, but this bill has no provision for the production of affordable units, or even what they call workforce housing – none. It rewrites the zoning code for every city and town in MA, but without saying, for instance, one unit out of every ten, has to be affordable for people of a certain income level. It makes permitting easier for developments that in the short term have a fairly high affordability threshold (80% are wide median income) but even leaves the impetus even to build that kind of mildly affordable housing up to the desires of developers and the political will of towns and cities.
Also, while requiring a super majority in an election for public office might be anti-democratic, I think a different analysis applies to certain other kinds of decisions which require a super-majority vote of elected officials. Issuing bonded debt is another vote of a local legislative body which requires a two thirds vote, like a zoning change; in both cases, the idea is that the municipality will have to live with the outcome for a long time, not just a local election cycle.
Why does something like zoning require 2/3? Seems to me it should in fact be a majority. Mayors are elected by the people too so I’m not sure why you seem to be making them out as unaccountable tyrants.
I’m confused. The Boston City Council has 13 members. 2/3rds of 13 is 8.6.. but let’s call it 9. A ‘simple majority’ would be half of 13 plus 1, which is 13/2 = 6.5 (let’s call it 7) + 1 making a ‘simple majority’ of 8. So it looks like we’re talking about changing, actually, very little when it comes to City Councils…. I think (but don’t really know) that Boston, being the most populous, has the largest city council and so the margin of change this would affect for, say, Worcester, which has, IIRC, 11 City Councilors, is even smaller.
Where the margins are much larger, like in a town meeting, it seems to me, is where the most mischief can be affected. But your beef against ‘luxury apartments’ it seems to me, only applies to place like Boston… I don’t think they’re going to be putting up luxury apartments in Fitchburg or Lowell, so it’s a bit confusing… and places like Lexington already have luxury homes…
In fact, the voting change does not cover blanket zoning changes. It only allows a simple majority to change zoning for a subset of zones for promoting things like mixed-use, multi-family, ‘in-law’ apartments and a few others. It is not the case that, should this law pass, local mayors will be able to make wholesale zoning changes without let or hindrance, which is sorta what your piece suggests will happen.
I think in cities with mayors this bill, should it be enacted, will have no impact whatsoever. I think it is intended to impact those cities and/or towns that have town meetings and is an effort to shift the focus (and the cost) of affordable housing to those towns and away from places like Boston.
For bodies with an odd number you don’t need an extra vote to make a majority. Seven votes out of thirteen is sufficient.
Irrelevant. The point is the very small numerical difference between ‘simple majority’ and ‘supermajority’ and, therefore, the negligible effect this legislation will have upon mayors and city councils… . when, in fact, the diarist is contending, for mayoralities with city councils, this change will mean the difference between righteous democracy and complete mayoral autocracy.
Hi editors, this is a really bad post from top to bottom that should not be on the front page.
Any interest in rebutting the arguments?
Nope. Don’t post garbage on the front page & ask people to come up with the progressive reply.
Ok. Just to be clear, not asking you to do anything. A suggestion that a post does not belong on the front page usually comes with an argument why not.
Thegreenmiles clearly laid out his argument: the post is bad, as in low in quality and therefore without much in the way of merit. That’s an entirely sufficient argument and I don’t think you should insinuate it is not.. I agree with thegreenmiles.. I don’t think it necessary to itemize the badness but if you insist, here it is: It is a mix of hyperbole and calumny that mis-characterizes the legislation under question and expects that a general dislike of either Charlie Baker or the legislature, often found here at BMG, will translate to condemnation of anything and everything they do…
I think there is may be much to dislike in this legislation, none of which is accurately portrayed in this post.
(Although, I will add that thegreenmiles should have at least taken the time to first downrate the post before commenting that it should be removed peremptorily… It would lend his argument greater creedence. )
Done!
I’ve been reading and re-reading the thread-starter and commentary for a few days now, and I must confess that I just don’t get the issue. I still don’t know whether I support or oppose the proposed legislation.
I don’t find the thread-starter as bad as some — I think “garbage” is too strong, especially since I’ve seen far worse diaries on the front page (at least we finally seem to have lost EB3). I would really welcome some sort of clarification of what the bill actually proposes, what the proponents claim will result (what problems are they claiming to solve, etc) and what the opponents argue will happen instead.
I realize that the “vacant properties” discussion is not part of the thread-starter, and that’s the only exchange that I really struggle with.
So — I for one will welcome some clarification from those who understand these issues.
The issue is a facile understanding of local government power dynamics and the mechanics of how large housing projects get approved. It’s hard to make sense of it because it’s arguing to empower the defenders of the status quo while bemoaning the status quo.
I support the legislation and the associated Great Neighborhoods bill from MA Smart Growth. Municipal zoning is where the biggest gains can be made on what gets built (mainly by making mid- and lower-income housing more of a by-right endeavor).
As for the state mandating inclusionary housing percentages, I’m all for it. Yet it’s not happening any time soon. Cities and towns do that through their own zoning. I think Somerville and Cambridge have the highest percentages in the state (20%). Others are way of it because if the number is too high it could drop production to nil.
I may be wrong, but I believe the poster posted under another name in the last few months. Perhaps, Uncaffeine? Used to have a blog, now deleted. It might be me, but I couldn’t find any of her previous BMG posts. Again, I may be wrong, but there’s something funny about this post.
Baker has a bill, but so does the House, though I can’t find it.
The issue has something to do with the Jacobin quote on neo-liberalism.
I had no trouble finding comments from the OP going back to June of 2018.
I missed those. I was talking being unable to find Uncaffeine’s stuff.
I don’t know enough about this issue to say it’s objectively a bad diary, but one feature of previous iterations of BMG that I miss is the ability of the editors to explain why they promoted a diary and which one did the promoting.
Oh, we could add a quote at the top any time. Perhaps we should get in the habit again.
Well, I don’t only front-page stuff that I agree with. I look for a minimum of substantive claims that can be discussed. No front page post that’s not by one of the editors should be necessarily taken as an endorsement.
I don’t agree with much of this either. But I think there are at least a couple of things to kick around: Should it take a 2/3 vote to change local zoning? I’d say no, that sounds like a bad idea! Disagree with OP. Do I agree with the characterization of “Mass Smart Growth Alliance, the local branch of a national outfit born out of the development community.” Nah, doesn’t sound right. And quoting Jacobin, well, heh.
But it’s grist for the mill, and that’s kind of always how we’ve run things here.
The quote I would have put at the top of this post:
“Formal legislative sessions are over until January. But bills can still be made into laws. One bill that might get to the finish line is “An Act to Promote Housing Choices,” a bill the Governor filed to facilitate the construction of (in his words) “more housing of different kinds.” Why, this post asks, does the bill simply pave the way for developers to build whatever kind of housing they wish to build — in other words, housing choices for whom?”
The current version of the bill is here. Lest an impression be created that the author of the post is the sole opponent of the bill, one member of the Joint Committee on Housing dissented from that committee’s decision to advance it.
Also this:
I note another reference to “vacant luxury units” in Mr. Connolly’s letter.
I searched again for any evidence to support the implication that this is an issue. ALL of the hits I found are sourced back to the single report already discussed above. That report’s use of “vacant” is grossly deceptive. This “vacant luxury unit” canard appears to be just as dishonest as the right wing’s “voter fraud” deception.
I don’t think we should compound an already complex issue with outright disinformation.
This strikes me as making a profound change to the ability of our cities and towns to manage their local property use. Such a profound change should require debate and consideration, and should therefore NOT be done during “informal” session.
Gosh Tom, that’s been the case all over the world, not just Boston. It’s long been a preferred money-laundering, or money-solidifying method. I could link widely, but start here: https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-sit-vacant/
Drill down.
The article Charley cites about NYC explains that of the empty units, once you account for those being renovated, those in lawsuits, those empty because the owners are in the hospital, the pied-à-terres, those rented/sold but not yet moved into… you get 27,000 units. NYC has nearly 3.5 million housing units.
Twenty-seven thousand is a lot, but in the context of 3.5 million — we’re talking three quarters of a percent. And, that includes both vacant-park-money-international-superrich and full-time Air BnB use.
Tom’s got me intrigued — just how many vacancies are there really, once we account for the more typical and perfectly normal reasons for a unit to be vacant for a moment in time? It might be a convenient bogeyman rather than good analysis.
And, stay with me here — given that selling high end real estate can’t be assumed to be done quickly, why wouldn’t someone who drops $Millions into an apartment hire a full-service rental agency to rent it out? Surely it’s extra money in the bank, after fees, renovations, taxes, whatevs. And if you’re coming to the city for the weekend, just rent a massive hotel suite or a high end apartment for short-term, and come out way ahead on the dough. What’s the argument for foregoing the rental income?
A ‘pied-a-terre’ is defined as a small space for occasional use. It may be a small apartment kept by a lawyer for afternoon trysts with a mistress.. Or maybe a small studio owned by a writer who goes there to write away from his/her family when a novel or a biography is in the last month of writing….
The rich, it is said, are not like you and I. Something that you and I might consider a large and substantial investment, the rich might consider little more than their kind of a ‘pied-a-terre.’ I suggest it’s a question of both scale and perception. A billionaire who knows he’s going to visit Boston for a week once every four months, can buy an apartment for millions and use it every four months much like the lawyer or the writer makes occasional use of the more traditional ‘pied-a-terre’
To whom are you going to rent it? Somebody who can afford to rent at that price? That same somebody can, if they can afford to rent at that price, can also just buy something similar and save themselves the entanglements of a rental contract… so why wouldn’t they?
It’s a bank with an amazing interest rate. If you bought it for all cash, then you’re not paying any extra interest and, if the market is hot, you can make up for any taxes/fees you paid when you make a killing on the sale.
I’d like to see the state pass some legislation to ban shell corp ownership of individual units and allow vacant units to be taxed at a higher (with all caveats about defining “vacant”). There’s a lot of things we could be doing, and the proposed elimination of the 2/3 rule is one of them.
and from the same site: https://www.6sqft.com/follow-up-report-says-next-years-11-percent-vacancy-rate-is-bogus/
That … sounds like a reasonable request.
I guess I am missing something, even after poring through the thread.
1. Like others, I don’t quite understand the “vacant properties” thing. It doesn’t make financial sense, and I therefore am skeptical that it is a real issue. I get that there is/was a tendency to use high-end real estate for money-laundering purposes (by concealing ownership interests in opaque entities, but that seems to be less a zoning issue than it is a financing issue– and has already been the subject of federal regulation (or at least it was, before our federal government became a lackey of foreign gangsters).
2. I have always thought that the primary problem with affordable housing IS too-strict zoning, and that all of the “affordable housing” paperwork-multiplication-regulation in the world just isn’t going to fix a zoning problem. That problem is, specifically, the lot-size, building height, and density zoning that makes certain communities exclusive and expensive. A lot of towns are going to have to be a whole lot more dense.
I’m not sure that this proposal would fix that, but anything that cracks the concrete in the zoning system is a step forward, in my book.
I’m intrigued by what people would consider a definition of vacant is. I can’t really confirm the amount of vacant condos in Boston but I can assure you they are all over Fla. except for the months of Jan – Apr. If you walk on the beach in Naples, West Palm, Marco Island, the oceanfront condos have their hurricane shutters down most of the year. No one is renting them, the shutters would be up, and I have talked to maintenance people confirming their occupancy. Not just the luxury areas though, as snowbirds come down the seasonal population can double the number of people in an area. Their places are empty till they come down, their homes up north stay empty while they are down south.
The government should not be able to tax a property more if it is “vacant” 8 months a year. An absent owner already pays their fair share of taxes, and actually puts less strain on local infrastructure by not being there most of the year.
I agree with you. Not just snowbirds in Florida, either. There are vacation homes, cottages, and camps in Western MA, on the Cape, and on both the North and South shore. Some folks keep an in-town pied-à-terre, especially families who live in the ex-urbs and work in Boston.
Property ownership is one of the few avenues left for middle-class families — especially teachers, firefighters and police — to build a modestly secure retirement. A vacation condo or camp is not a mark of uber wealth, at least not yet.
I think there’s a very real issue with investor-owned housing, especially with overseas investors. I think airbnb and its competitors are similarly driving prices up. Real estate speculators have always been an issue, and that gets worse in a hot market.
The “vacant housing” approach strikes me as misleading, at least until somebody offers more evidence that these properties are truly vacant. When cities and towns tax “vacant” properties, they are generally talking about slums and slumlords. There are also issues with properties that remain vacant (and often unmaintained) after the death of the owners.
I join CMD in thinking those are financial rather than zoning issues.
This is not true.
Somebody who lives in Massachusetts only 4 months of the year is not considered a resident and, therefore may dodge resident income tax.
Absent owners may not pay their fair share of taxes especially if they ‘own’ through a Limited Liability Company expressly created for the purpose of sheltering from taxation.
Being absent might not “put less strain” on local infrastructure as neglect and/or lack of oversight has a cost: either you pay someone to come in regularly and see that the heat works and the pipes don’t freeze or you risk — especially in density — just such an occurrence affecting everybody else, who does live in that building all year round.
Remote control internet security cameras and leave a key with a neighbor.
You’re going to leave the keys to an apartment that costs several million dollars with ‘a neighbor’??
Cameron’s dad: “Hey, Cameron, I’m going out of town. I’ll leave the keys to the Porsche with your friend Ferris. Tell him to not drive it and that he should rub it with a diaper every few days…’
Cameron “Sure, Dad. Whatever you say.”
There is no semantic relationship between “vacant” and “value”. A vacant property is vacant whether it cost $100 or $100,000,000.
I invite you to offer a definition of “vacant” that isn’t going to apply to the vacation cottages, camps, and summer homes of a great many Massachusetts residents who are not multi-billionaires.
I think we’re barking up the wrong tree here. I enthusiastically agree that we should find ways to limit and tax speculators, flippers, money-launderers, slumlords, and so on. None of that has anything to do with the occupancy of a given property.
Let me offer a more concrete example.
In the winter of 1995, my family and I lived in a corporate rental in Hyannisport. This was a nice neighborhood within an easy walk of the Kennedy compound. Most of my neighbors were not wealthy. Comfortable? Yes, very much so. These were people who drove Buicks, not Porsches. Many of them inherited their houses and struggled to keep up with maintenance and property taxes even though they had no mortgages.
I just checked the Barnstable assessors map. The house we lived in was purchased in 1982 by the present owners for $50,000. It is now valued at a bit over $1 M. The owners are decidedly NOT wealthy. Very comfortable, yes — more so than me. But they do not play in the multi-million-dollar-condo league.
A typical pattern for my neighbors was to own a small (2-3 br) summer home in western MA (Tanglewood was a popular area). They lived in their summer home from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and rented out their Hyannisport home during that time. They were able to make enough money from their summer rent in Hyannisport to cover the annual housing expenses for both properties.
I fear we’re attacking stereotypes and scapegoats here. I am again reminded of the right-wing obsession with the non-existent issue of voter fraud.
Here in the West, a lot of suburbs and small towns have zoning that discourages, if not prohibits, affordable housing. Members of my local planning board opposed allowing in-law apartments because they thought they would bring in low-income people. Ludlow has been vigorously opposing a low-income housing project. Granby’s development is hindered by a lack of infrastructure. It seems like Baker’s bill might allow a private developer to pay for it. Correct me, if I’m wrong. This bill may be bad, but something along these lines might start to correct the imbalance between our racially and economically segregated towns and our overburdened cities.
An excellent argument in favor of deferring action on this bill now, so that it can be debated and discussed during the regular legislative session.
I don’t feel like being polite on this. The argument for preserving the 2/3 rule on the notion that it somehow protects lower income residents and neighborhoods is the most moronic thing currently making the rounds in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is sheer idiocy.
Anyone with a working brain can spot how the current system, which has been built around this rule, allows higher income residents and neighborhoods to resist affordable and multi-family housing while big ticket developers consistent find their way over the 2/3 threshold. The argument being put forward in the initial post here is at best a case of Stockholm Syndrome, where the writer has become so inured to a terrible system as to believe it’s somehow a benefit as it delivers an increasingly top-heavy housing market.
And the lack of production is killing us. The scam here is pretending basic economics don’t apply. They do, in perhaps the most obvious fashion we could ever ask to be given. Greater Boston needs a housing surge, one where there’s so many projects we can barely keep track of it. To pretend all, or even most, of that is going to be in the luxury market is blockheaded. Constrained supply is how you fuel the luxury market, otherwise the prices of existing units starts to drop.
I’m all for putting constraints around the housing market and vacuuming money out of it to increase affordable housing production. Yet technical zoning legislation is how we created this funhouse mirror of a housing market. Rip down this system.