Dismantling CPA won’t solve housing deficit
The inability of many prospective homeowners to find a property they can afford has forced them to remain renters, which predictably has jacked up the price of those leases, especially in the Greater Boston area.
Just as frustrated homebuyers have found, offering to pay just the list price on that average apartment will leave you out in the cold. Now it’s customary in several communities to pay over the asking rental price, and hope you don’t lose out to a higher bid.
In the midst of this state’s housing affordability crisis, one major real estate industry organization wants to see the Community Preservation Act program reworked to put a greater emphasis on housing.
A new report by the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, in conjunction with the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, found that more than a third of CPA communities haven’t met an existing housingspending requirement, and suggested ways the CPA program could be refocused to help spur housing production.
State law requires each CPA community to “spend, or set aside for later spending,” at least 10% of the annual CPA revenues for community housing purposes each fiscal year. But the GBREB/ CSPA report said that 70 CPA communities — about 36% of the total — have spent or set aside less than that percentage on housing projects.
The report’s findings can be found on the mahousingsolutions.com website.
“Are we missing an opportunity here with the CPA? It was created in a time and place 20 years ago where things were much, much different. The focus was urban sprawl. Now we’re really looking at housing and that should be our focus. Are we missing something here by not being able to have it create more for us?” asked Greg Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board.
Since the program became law in 2000, voters in 195 of Massachusetts’ 351 municipalities — 55% — have approved an increase in their local property taxes with the promise of state matching funds to pay for open space investments, historic preservation, and affordable housing — in that order.
In most CPA communities, the first $100,000 in property value remains exempt from surcharge calculations.
Property owners incur an initial 1% surcharge on their tax bill, which by law comes with a 3% cap.
The state’s Community Preservation Trust Fund would match those local funds with reimbursements that vary, based on state revenues and each community’s surcharge percentage. While starting out as dollar-for- dollar paybacks, the state contribution now averages about 20%.
And of that 195 CPA member total, only around 30 of those communities are incorporated cities; that’s less than 20% of the number.
That low buy-in rate by urban communities makes sense on two levels.
One centers around the lack of open space, which means cities can’t preserve what they don’t have. The other reflects the soaring price of housing — both new construction or rehab projects — that CPA funds can only address at the margins.
Lowell, for example, has expended CPA money on several housing-related projects, including $220,000 for housing with supportive services for those suffering from substance-use disorder at 555 Merrimack St. by the Coalition for a Better Acre; $763,200 for an affordable housing development known as Acre Crossing; and $500,000 for Merrimack Valley Housing Partnership’s One+ Lowell Down Payment Assistance program.
While admirable, these contributions represent seed money, which hopefully can attract private investment and other partnerships.
The report said that housing projects have regularly been overshadowed in the CPA program due in part to “a clear and longstanding tension between this commitment to housing and the other facets of the program, like historic preservation and the protection of open space.”
These efforts to amend a law that never prioritized housing production won’t make a dent in boosting housing stock, and undermines the reasons why most communities joined the CPA in the first place.
As the name of the law clearly states, it seeks to preserve the character of its member communities, which by the act of purchasing open space that could otherwise land in developers’ hands, accomplishes that purpose by also restricting that community’s buildable land.
That’s why, for every Boston, Cambridge, Lowell, Malden, Springfield and Worcester on that CPA list, there are countless more Cohassets, Concords, Duxburys, Grotons, Harvards and Hinghams that wish to maintain the status quo.
We’d urge the Greater Boston Real Estate Board to drop its effort to retool a law ill- suited for its purpose and focus on other housing production efforts, including the efforts to expand affordable housing zones in communities served by the MBTA.
These efforts to amend a law that never prioritized housing production won’t make a dent in boosting housing stock, and undermines the reasons why most communities joined the CPA in the first place.