The all-too-familiar cycle of well-off suburbs shirking their duty to the rest of Massachusetts appears to be starting again as local leaders game out ways to avoid new transit-oriented zoning reforms.
As Scott Van Voorhis reports in his column this week, officials in Newton, Northborough and elsewhere have taken umbrage at the notion they should take their boots off the neck of our housing market by allowing a few new apartments and condominiums.
Instead of allowing the building of a few homes the hoi polloi can afford, nudged along by a new state law that cuts off access to a few infrastructure grant programs if they don’t, they would rather keep the gates of their towns effectively barred to all but the best sort of buyers who can afford the state’s sky-high single-family home prices.
A brief recap for anyone who has forgotten: the “MBTA Communities” law asks towns and cities that have previously been laggards to pull their weight in producing the hundreds of thousands of homes the state needs. The mechanism: zone small but not-insignificant areas near transit or in town centers for small multifamily buildings. The penalty: exclusion from the $68 million MassWorks grant program, plus a few others.
The hope is that if a builder can turn a single-family lot sold for $949,000 – the median single-family sale price in Arlington – into three condominiums, they can still sell those for a relatively pedestrian $500,000 and make a hefty profit. Not accessible to the poorest Bay Staters, true, but accessible to most and not needing any scarce government subsidies to make it so. And if implemented over a big enough slice of the Metro Boston, the reforms could make our state – with its fantastic restaurants and cultural offerings – much more competitive against Sun Belt state actively trying to lure our companies and workforce away.
Communities like Newton, with its three commuter rail and seven Green Line stations, have long barred the door to most new multifamily development. With a new chance to step away from that regionally damaging – and, let’s face it, racially tinged – legacy, some electeds are saying “no.”
This freeloading on expensive infrastructure and the investments other communities that actually chose to host more housing has to stop. And that’s where Banker & Tradesman readers can come in.
You can directly influence this pivotal time in your towns’ lives by privately lobbying your select board members, town councilors and planning board members or, if you’re able, testifying before those bodies to put the facts in the public record. Call on them to do the right thing, both for current residents – how many of your towns’ children could afford to buy there, now? – and for the greater commonwealth.
It’s clear the penalties won’t sway every town, but organized and informed citizens who want their leaders to welcome more neighbors can.
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