In the battle to build more housing, Massachusetts is making gains
There, was that really so hard? This year began with a lot of anxiety about housing — and, in particular, whether Boston’s suburbs would comply with a controversial new state law that requires them to allow more of the kind of apartment and condo buildings that many of them have a wellearned reputation for resisting.
The law was controversial because it diluted home rule, something legislators have treated as sacrosanct despite a century’s worth of evidence that towns have used that authority to limit growth, promote segregation, and harm the state’s overall economic well-being.
A few local politicians made noise about resisting the law. But so far, municipalities have largely complied, often with an enthusiasm that belies their histories as hotbeds of NIMBYism.
In one suburb after another, towns adopted new zoning that in some cases went even beyond the law’s requirements. In town meetings, the vote was often lopsided in favor of change: Lexington, 107 to 63; Arlington, 189 to 35; Brookline, 207 to 33. Those actions will make building new construction easier and more predictable, hopefully leading to more of it.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing: Newton’s City Council ended up doing just about the bare minimum to comply. Milton’s Town Meeting approved its plan, but citizens appear to have gathered enough signatures to force a referendum seeking to overturn the vote. But the bottom line is that, so far, each of the 12 communities with a deadline this year has at least tried to meet it.
To a certain extent, the local votes show just how bad the housing shortage and resulting price inflation in Massachusetts has become. When even voters in places like Lexington and Brookline are willing to allow the kind of multifamily housing that they and their ancestors fought so hard against, you know it’s gotten bad in the market. The price of housing rose more than 10 percent in Greater Boston in 2023, and the median single-family home went for $829,950, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors. Rents are similarly stratospheric. Suburban homeowners may like those rising property values, but they don’t like seeing their kids move far away because they can’t afford to live here. There is also far more public attention on the damaging environmental and social consequences of exclusionary zoning, which may be shifting public opinion in a more altruistic direction.
Still, there’s no reason to imagine so many large suburbs would have rezoned in a single year without prompting. Which is why legislators should view the law’s early success as vindication for state intervention — and proof that a stronger state hand in housing is not only the right thing to do but also might even be welcome.
Indeed, the strong margins in town meetings are enough to make you wonder if the hostility to housing in the suburbs was never more than just a bugaboo for the small minority that happened to show up at meetings.
Regardless, the next step should be for the state to build on this law and extend the state’s role. In her first year in office, Governor Maura Healey has taken several notable steps on housing, including appointing a housing czar and championing funds for market-rate housing. Her most important decision, though, may have been a provision in her proposed housing bond bill that requires communities to allow “in-law” apartments, which would build on the precedent of the MBTA law by again forcing communities’ hands. It is projected to add 8,000 new housing units statewide.
Defenders of home rule oppose that proposal. But the positive results of the MBTA law so far are a strong argument that the state can and should exert more power over housing — and not just over zoning but also over the whole gamut of financial, logistical, and environmental policies that determine how much is built, where, and for whom.
The Globe editorial page has made the case this year for some of the ways the state could step up. It could, for instance, put more teeth in the Community Preservation Act, to force towns that accept state funds for the program to spend more of it on housing. It could standardize applications for income-restricted housing. It could change the way it awards tax credits to pressure developers to build subsidized housing for families, not just senior citizens.
For the Healey administration, it should mean continuing to hold towns to account if they violate either the letter or the spirit of the law. In 2024, scores more municipalities will be required to zone areas for denser housing.
Healey’s housing czar, Edward Augustus, sent a good message when he implicitly threatened that the administration would yank funding for a commuter rail station in Newton if the city didn’t include its vicinity in the rezoning plan. The city ended up including it, and other communities hopefully got the message that the state really means business.
Sustained pressure and leadership from the state is essential, because the truth is that the state’s housing deficit will take years to overcome. Massachusetts needs up to 200,000 new housing units by 2030, which would require it to produce housing at a much faster rate. The state only approved 18,940 private housing units in 2022, according to the St. Louis Fed, and the numbers for 2023 are shaping up to be even worse. The zoning changes approved in towns this year are only a first step at fixing the imbalance; now developers have to actually take advantage of those loosened regulations.
Until those numbers rise, house hunters will continue to suffer from rising housing prices. Businesses will find it harder to attract employees. Renters will crowd into unsafe living conditions. Homelessness will linger.
For a place that proudly insists on calling itself a commonwealth instead of merely a state, Massachusetts has tiptoed around the sacred cow of local control for far too long. That is finally starting to change. If there’s one important takeaway from 2023, it’s that the state’s role in housing can’t be merely to ask politely for more. It’s time to use all the powers at the state’s disposal to insist on it.