Category Archives: Boston

New life for old idea?

affordable housing, Boston, Burlington, California, home ownership, housing, Massachusetts, New York, public opinion, rent control, renters, Vermont, , , ,

When the housing-unaffordability problem comes up at a public meeting in Burlington, chances are someone will stand up and call for rent control.  rental1Never mind that the city rejected the idea three decades ago and no one has made a serious effort to revive it locally. It’s an idea that never goes away, though, and is getting some fresh currency these days — where else, in California, the housing-unaffordability epicenter.

Rent control’s heyday was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, apparently. Massachusetts did away with it in 1994 via a statewide vote, but it can still be found in many municipalities in New York, New Jersey and Maryland, as well as California, where tenants’ advocates are pushing to get more communities to sign on and have come up with an organizing toolkit. “Rent control moment gains momentum as housing prices soar,” read a recent news headline, but a closer look suggests that much of the impetus is in California. Most states, after all, have laws that prohibit rent control, although in Washington, there’s an effort to lift the ban for Seattle.

Any groundswell in favor of rent control would have to grow out of large numbers of renters, and renters are certainly on the increase nationally. A new Harvard report announces that “that 43 million families and individuals live in rental housing, an increase of nearly 9 million households since 2005 — the largest gain in any 10-year period on record.”

Renters are a distinct minority in Vermont, where the home-ownership rate is above average. In fact, renters outnumber homeowners in just two cities — Burlington and Winooski — so if rent control were plausible anywhere in Vermont, those would be the likely places. City voters would have to approve a charter change, which would require legislative approval. How unlikely is that?

Burlington voters overwhelmingly rejected rent control in a special election in 1981, during Bernie Sanders’ first mayoral term. (Actually, they rejected the creation of a “fair housing commission,” which everyone agreed was a proxy for rent control.) They were influenced by a publicity campaign against the measure mounted by commercial interests.  burlingtonhouseSanders’ critics on the left complained he didn’t try very hard to see the idea through, and in fact he went on to promote affordable housing via a range of other policies.

Barring a major ground shift, rent control will remain one of those recurrent policy ideas with no traction in these parts. Like single-payer health care.

Learning from Massachusetts

affordable housing, Boston, density, housing crisis, housing subsidies, Massachusetts, middle class, Vermont, workforce housing, , , , , , ,

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2015 is out, and it’s an eye-opener. Prepared for the Boston Foundation  by the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, it’s a detailed analysis of Massachusetts’ housing-unaffordability crisis –a crisis that results, in part, from not enough housing being produced. What accounts for the insufficiency?Mass2

“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.”

That’s from the executive summary, which goes on to make the same point in another way:

“(T)he cost of developing new housing for working and middle-income households has become prohibitive in Massachusetts. Radical remedies will be needed to overcome the barriers to housing production …”

And what are the barriers? High development costs, of course ($274 per square foot for urban projects, of which $159 is construction and $41 is land acquisition). And zoning regulations that limit density and where multi-family projects can be built.

Now, you might be thinking, what does any of this have to do with us, up here in our little, rural, unprepossessing state? Metro Boston is another world — far pricier and denser than any place around here.

Well, we’d argue that the problems that Massachusetts is facing are problems we share — albeit on a smaller scale. And remember, Massachusetts has an affordable housing zoning law (Chapter 40B) that’s arguably stronger than what’s on Vermont’s books.

Yes, it would be nice if we could get a comparable report card for housing in Vermont, but failing that, perhaps we can learn something from what the one for Massachusetts.

The report notes that “Although there is a lot of vacant land, most vacant sites are not zoned for multi-family residential development.”

As for zoning:

“Highly restrictive zoning, present in virtually every one of the state’s 351 municipalities, creates an artificially high barrier to development. It pushes developers to propose smaller projects (i.e., fewer units) and smaller units (i.e., fewer bedrooms per unit) in order to reduce the perceived impact on the neighborhoods and — in the case of larger units attractive to families with school-age children — the perceived impact on the town or city’s education budget. The complexity of getting zoning changes approved dramatically extends the development period and increases carrying and soft costs. The cumulative effect drives up both the cost of development (seen in the high level of site costs, financing, and soft costs) and rents.Mass1

“Thus, significant resistance to any change in the local community ambience has also meant that local support has heavily favored low-density, smaller projects, both of which are far more expensive to produce. Higher density housing maximizes the efficiency of land use, and larger projects create economies of scale in development and construction. Massachusetts residents opposed to zoning for multi-family housing at 20 units per acre are astounded to learn that the city of Paris — a pretty nice place to live with undeniable “character” — has a density of approximately 120 units per acre!

“When developers are given permission only to build projects of very low density, they will do so. As a result, the housing that is built will be expensive and affordable only for the very well-to-do or, if public subsidies are involved, to people with very low incomes. Working and moderate-income families will not be able to afford these units. This state of affairs, of course, causes the average cost of producing multifamily housing in the Commonwealth to increase.”

Here we note that merely increasing the housing supply (as some are advocating) isn’t going to solve the affordability problem if the added supply happens to be … luxury-scale and thus … unaffordable to all but the wealthy.