Susan Gittelman
For as long as Greater Boston has faced a housing shortage, we’ve heard that our challenge was exacerbated by the fact that, unlike many sprawling Sun Belt metropolitan areas, there is little land left to be developed here. But a special section of the Boston Foundation’s annual Greater Boston Housing Report Card authored by Boston University’s Initiative on Cities identifies a surprisingly plentiful resource: wide swaths of vacant, publicly owned land.
It’s an opportunity hiding in plain sight; we just have to figure out how to turn the land into housing. Doing that will require streamlining land disposition rules and enacting zoning reforms. The commonwealth can and should help with both.
Seventeen percent of all Greater Boston land is owned by municipalities and another 7 percent owned by the commonwealth. The authors of the report card’s special section estimate that, excluding conservation land, more than 40 percent of the municipally owned land is vacant. Vacant municipally owned land in the region accounts for an area three times the size of Boston and state-owned vacant land is about equal to the size of Framingham.
If just 5 percent of that publicly owned vacant land were developed into housing at the minimum density of 15 units per acre included in the MBTA Communities law, it would produce about 85,000 housing units. That would put a significant dent in the estimated 200,000 new units Greater Boston needs to build by 2030 to catch up with demand.
“Vacant publicly owned land represents an incredible opportunity,” said Boston University Associate Professor of Political Science Katie Einstein, who co-authored the Initiative on Cities section. “But unlocking its potential will require streamlining local processes.”
High Hurdles for Housing
Even before a developer seeks permitting approvals, the land disposition process requires a municipality to declare the land surplus. Then the local town meeting or city council must approve the declaration by a two-thirds majority. After that, the community solicits bids through a request for proposals (RFP).
The report card wisely urges the commonwealth to consider exempting these reclassifications from town meeting votes or, in the alternative, only require approval by a simple majority.
The report card highlights a Weston development to illustrate burdensome local processes. In 2018, that town bought a small parcel to build affordable housing. The developer, Habitat for Humanity, proposed to build six affordable units, and town officials and the community have been supportive.
To be selected as the developer, Habitat had to go through a design review process. Since then, a stormwater report, grade plane and allowable building height calculation, a traffic study and a grading utility plan are among the studies they have had to undertake as part of the permitting process.
The report card recommends a better approach: the commonwealth should require municipalities to exempt affordable housing developments on public land from this second round of discretionary review if they have already been approved as part of an extensive RFP process.
Six years after Weston acquired the land for affordable housing, construction still hasn’t begun. And this is for a Chapter 40B project – a state law that allows certain affordable housing projects to bypass some zoning and land use regulations – that has no opposition.
Other Cities Offer Good Ideas
Greater Boston is ranked among the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the strictest zoning laws. But zoning is a state power and there are steps the commonwealth can take to ease the burden, such as introducing state mandated by-right zoning opportunities that, unlike the MBTA Communities law, do not rely on municipalities rezoning themselves.
The Affordable Homes Act housing bond bill passed earlier this year offers an example. It creates by-right approval statewide for accessory dwelling units – dwellings that are either attached to or on the same lot as single-family homes, have their own entrance, include a bathroom and kitchen and meet all local safety standards.
Mandating reforms like reducing minimum lot sizes would also be impactful. In 1998, Houston reduced some minimum lot sizes from 5,000 square feet (currently a typical minimum lot size in Boston) to 1,400 square feet. In 2013 it extended the reform citywide. Between 2007 and 2020, more than 34,000 townhomes were built on lot sizes allowed by the reforms. The new homes cost 38 percent less than other new single-family homes built in Houston.
More recently, Austin – which has experienced 40 percent housing price increases in just two years – passed a similar provision that reduces minimum lot sizes to 1800 square feet and allows three units on the lots by right.
Back at home, many believe that solving our own housing crisis is out of our control because we have no land to build on, but that is not so. What is lacking is the broad political will to streamline processes that stand in the way of meeting our housing needs.
Others have done it, and we can too.
Susan Gittelman is executive director of B’nai B’rith Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing developer currently working in Boston, MetroWest and the North Shore.
