Tag Archives: Boston

Learning from Massachusetts

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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.

New push for integration

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When the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its AFFH rule yesterday, it was the second cause for celebration among fair housing advocates in the last two weeks.

The first was the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the disparate impact doctrine — a key civil rights enforcement mechanism, under which housing policies can be found discriminatory on the basis of their effects, not merely their intent.

The second was the long-awaited AFFH rule. AFFH stands for “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” language contained in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 but not fully elucidated until yesterday.

Essentially, as HUD summarizes it, the rule is a means of overcoming segregation and fostering inclusive communities. This is entirely in keeping with the intent of the Fair Housing Act’s original sponsors – chief among them Sens. Walter Mondale and Ed Brook, who can be seen flanking LBJ as the president signs the legislation into law on April 11, 1968.

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The main point of the Act according to Mondale, “was to replace the segregated living patterns with ‘truly integrated and balanced living patterns.’” To Brooke, the act was meant to break the “dreary cycle of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs and the rapid deterioration of the central city.” (They said as much in their amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the disparate impact case.)

Their vision hasn’t exactly played out over the last half-century, as most major metropolitan areas remain highly segregated. Consider Boston, for example, which has a white/black dissimilarity index of 68. On a scale of 0 to 100, 0 represents total integration and 100, total segregation. Any place that registers over 60 is considered highly segregated. (The State of Vermont, by contrast, came in at 38.8, according to a 2012 report.)

In this map of the Boston area, based on 2010 Census data by Eric Fischer, red dots represent white people; blue dots, black people; orange, Hispanics; and green, Asians.

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Similar maps, some even starker in the depiction of racial separation, can be seen for most major U.S. cities. The AFFH rule, which makes operational the Fair Housing Act’s intent, is seen as a tool that will help overcome these longstanding segregated patterns.

Even though Vermont is 95 percent white, AFFH will have broad application here. After all, a major thrust is to break up pockets of poverty and promote inclusive settlement patterns that give people in protected classes – among them, racial minorities and disabled people – the choice to live in low-poverty areas with access to transit and good services. Vermont has plenty of room for more housing development in keeping with AFFH standards.