Why is the state still letting places like Braintree kill the housing we desperately need?
The cancellation this summer of a large housing development in Braintree, which would have added about 500 units of desperately needed apartments near South Shore Plaza, was a setback for the state’s ambitious efforts to solve the regional housing crisis. It’s a familiar story: With a few exceptions, towns and cities across Massachusetts are simply not allowing enough housing growth to meet demand — much less to put downward pressure on prices. The Braintree saga, recounted by the Globe’s Andrew Brinker last week, was a reminder — if any more are needed — that the state simply can’t count on communities doing the right thing of their own volition and must weaken the ability of municipalities to thwart development.
As proposed by developer ZOM Living, the two five-story buildings would have generated $800,000 in yearly tax revenue for Braintree. They also would have included 180 senior housing units. The buildings would have been built on what are now parking lots, and the plaza’s owner supported the plan as a way of revitalizing the mall. Most importantly, the development would have provided a chunk of the tens of thousands of housing units that the South Shore needs to keep up with demand. Failing to build those units doesn’t make demand go away; it just means people who need housing are chasing fewer opportunities, resulting in bidding wars and higher prices.
Opponents cited the usual parade of horribles — traffic, impact on schools, sewers — and a few novel ones, including the suggestion that the proposed development’s proximity to an elementary school would attract pedophiles. There are good answers to such criticisms, which state officials, housing advocates, and developers have spent decades dutifully reciting to skeptics. But zoom out for a moment, and ask — even if a development does put more kids in local schools, what gives anyone the right to sink a project for that reason? The ability of neighbors to hold up housing isn’t some ancient tradition brought over on the Mayflower: It’s the result of zoning rules and practices, relatively recent in historical terms, that have the effect of giving residents inordinate and inappropriate power over where other people can or can’t live.
There’s a line of argument that NIMBYism — and that’s what happened in Braintree, as much as its practioners may hate the term — is a perfectly rational, self-interested tendency. Just because it’s in the state’s and society’s overwhelming interests for developers to build more housing doesn’t mean it’s in any individual neighborhood’s to allow a new development. To the extent that selfish logic is true, it just reinforces what decades of housing battles in Massachusetts demonstrate: No amount of gentle persuasion, no number of incentives, are going to make people accept what they don’t believe is in their personal interest to accept.
Maybe residents can be talked out of such beliefs. State officials talk about the need to bust housing myths to break down suburban opposition, and we wish them the best of luck at that. But with every voted-down apartment building, every badfaith campaign against a new housing development, it becomes clearer that the housing shortage is intrinsic to our system of local control. The Legislature took an important step when it recently passed the MBTA Communities law, which does not ask but requires certain communities in Greater Boston to ease their zoning. That law should be seen as just a start, though. In the long term, taking progressively more power out of the hands of municipalities is the most durable solution for getting more housing built in Massachusetts.