Housing for all must include equity
On Jan. 18, legislators held an 11-hour-long hearing on the Affordable Homes Act, a $4.1 billion bond bill. The legislation seeks to address Massachusetts’ housing crisis by facilitating the construction of thousands of new housing units and rehabilitating deteriorating housing units, including hundreds of public housing units throughout the Commonwealth. This legislation includes a proposal for a statewide Office of Fair Housing, which can go a long way in addressing the need to incorporate fair housing in strategies for increasing the state’s housing supply.
Beginning in 2022, 177 MBTA communities were required to comply with a new zoning regulation in which “All communities served by the MBTA must zone to allow for multifamily housing as of right, with a greater obligation for communities with better access to transit stations.” It also stated that the housing “shall be without age restrictions and shall be suitable for families with children.” The MBTA Communities Act does not mention fair housing or affordable housing in its mandate for the construction of massive new housing.
These efforts to respond to the housing crisis in Massachusetts are especially important. But with these and other initiatives, there is a potential danger that the focus could remain solely on production and not equity. The call for production of more affordable housing must be conjoined with strategies to enhance the monitoring and enforcement of fair housing. The Affordable Homes Act addresses this missing critical piece. But fair housing goes beyond just housing discrimination; as federally mandated, this law covers any state or local government receiving federal funds with a charge to pursue the causes and effective actions to not only undo historical and contemporary segregation but also eliminate obstacles that have, and continue to, limited access to opportunity, intentionally or unintentionally.
Unless a commitment to a strong and enforceable fair housing lens is part of the policy context — as is required by law — increasing housing supply by itself does not guarantee the dismantling of institutional policies or private sector practices that have served to maintain racial divisions in local housing across Massachusetts.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 not only prohibits discrimination in housing but also requires that federal, state, and local governments “… administer the programs and activities relating to housing and urban development in a manner affirmatively to further the policies” of fair housing. That legal obligation is supported by numerous Supreme Court decisions to “affirmatively further fair housing.” This means that fighting intentional discrimination is but one facet of fair housing. As important is to review and respond to the social conditions, institutional practices and policies, and the behavior of private actors that maintain intentional or unintentional patterns of segregation.
A 2023 study tapped the insights of 36 community and civic leaders across
Massachusetts about what they saw as challenges to fair housing. Highlights included a limited public and community-based awareness about the scope of fair housing; lack of ample resources for implementing, monitoring, and enforcing fair housing; absence of attention or actions to address the impacts of historical racial discrimination or racial discrimination today in many cities and towns; lack of stronger emphasis on accessible, equitable, and efficient public transportation as critical for advancing fair housing in suburban communities; and, one that stood out, a disconnect between growing calls to increase Massachusetts’ housing supply and affordable housing, with a lens toward “affirmatively furthering fair housing.”
Responses to these challenges will require a review of local zoning regulations that, even inadvertently, result in spatial inequities where some groups are residentially concentrated in certain parts of a town or city; discrimination in the areas of appraisals and FHA loans; ensuring legal actions against Section 8 discrimination; close monitoring of speculative real estate activities; enhancing tenant protections; strengthening just-cause eviction requirements; enforcing source-of-income protections; ensuring public access to mitigation agreements agreed to by developers; and other tools that must accompany housing production strategies.
Calls for significantly more affordable housing — which isn’t addressed in either law — must include insistence on knowing, monitoring, and implementing policies and practices supportive of fair housing, lest it inadvertently serve to perpetuate segregation in some cities and towns. The call for increasing affordable housing must be contextualized with an understanding of the historical and contemporary practices that have contributed to and continue to sustain segregation, not only including zoning prohibitions against multifamily housing but also lack of access to reliable public transportation, racially based real estate steering practices, lack of investments in some neighborhoods, inaccessibility of services for people with physical challenges, site selection policies, discrimination and access to financial services like mortgages and equity loans, and private discrimination.
An important opportunity will be lost if fair housing isn’t included in strategies to increase the supply of housing in Massachusetts. Fair housing can move the state forward in reducing segregation and ensuring that housing inequities with social, economic, educational, and health implications are eliminated as the supply of housing is increased.
It is important to emphasize fair housing in any initiative to increase the supply of affordable housing, and especially when we hear calls to simply build more as the solution to the region’s housing crisis. This is because where we build, how we build, who we hire to build, what we build, and for whom we build does not happen in a vacuum. There are deliberate decisions made that prioritize who will have healthy lungs, or longer commutes to good jobs, or access to quality food. And whether these inequities occur based on intentional or unintentional motivations is irrelevant, they are all illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
By highlighting the importance and application of fair housing, the Affordable Homes Act will help to ensure that no group is left behind.
An important opportunity will be lost if fair housing isn’t included in strategies to increase the supply of housing in Massachusetts.