The Bay State’s housing market is in deep trouble. But the seemingly unlikely combination of basic capitalism, housing activists and zoning reform just might save it – if we’ll give it a chance, that is.

For decades now, Massachusetts has been a housing market laggard. Year-in, year-out, we simply build far too few homes, condos and apartments to meet demand in a university- and research-rich state that has become a magnet for a bevy of cutting-edge industries.

Then we act all puzzled as to why real estate prices just keep going up, year-in and year-out, pushing up towards ever more unsustainable heights and slowly putting the squeeze on everyone, from the poor and middle class right up to even the moderately well off.

Sure, we are seeing a luxury condo tower boom in downtown Boston, but nowhere close to the tens of thousands of new homes of all types needed to satiate decades of pent-up demand.

Beyond the gilded towers, middle-class buyers have been all but priced out of half of Boston’s neighborhoods, a recent report by Boston Mayor Martin Walsh found. In the suburbs, the outlook isn’t much better, with modest homes in a growing number of communities being torn down and replaced by much larger and more expensive abodes.

By contrast, more modestly priced homes face a gauntlet of local opposition and red tape, noted Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, who is gearing up for another push at the State House to reform of local zoning rules.

“Literally, we are right back to where we were before the recession, with single-family homes being bid up,” he said. “We are back to the same problems we last saw in 2004 and 2005.”

It’s really no mystery why this is the case. Far too many cities and towns see new housing beyond the scattered McMansion or two as the advance guard of an unwelcome invasion of tax-dollar-gobbling school kids. Worse yet, not all of these newcomers are likely to be white and wealthy, either.

So towns have made it all but impossible to build new housing, with a crazy quilt of rules and reviews that profess lofty motives, but whose real intent is to stop housing development in its tracks and keep everything just as it is now, and has been for years.

There are few towns and cities in Eastern Massachusetts – or for that matter, the state – that allow developers to build new condos or apartments by right.

That means filing your proposal with the planning board, getting the once over, and then pulling the building permit.

Regulatory Fiefdoms

In many parts of the country, if you want to build a new apartment or condo building, you file your proposal with the local planning board, get the once-over, and pull a building permit.

That is how a free market is supposed to work, with developers, like other business people, able to scout out opportunities and capitalize on them, earning a profit and filling a larger community need in the process.

But that’s a rarity here. Roughly 10 percent of towns in Eastern Massachusetts actually prohibit multifamily housing altogether, according to the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. The majority of cities and towns, while not actually banning new apartments and condos, require developers to go through torturous special permitting reviews that can take years, if the developer doesn’t bail first.

In some cases, developers have to win a two-thirds vote in Town Meeting, an almost impossible bar to clear if there is any opposition, and, in NIMBY Massachusetts, that’s almost always the case. It’s a system that is easily and often hijacked by a few determined cranks, with everyone else paying the price in ever-higher home and condo prices and soaring rents.

“You cannot not have young people; you cannot freeze your community in time,” MHP’s Ziegler said. “We have a big, big problem.”

Fact is, when it comes to housing, or at least the construction and development of it, what we have now in Massachusetts is far from a free market – and it’s hard to spot the capitalism in it amid the dense forest of regulations.

Instead, we have dozens, if not hundreds, of little regulatory fiefdoms, dedicated to micro-reviewing proposals for new apartments or condos with the kind of scrutiny reserved at the federal or state level for hazardous waste dumps, prisons or casinos.

During the decade ending in 2013, more than 200 towns across the state never permitted a single apartment or condo project of five units or more, according to MHP.

Yet much of our housing woes could be substantially solved if we simply let the forces of supply and demand work by letting builders do their job and put up new housing – capitalism 101. Certainly, the demand is there. The bidding wars over relatively modest homes that we have been seeing across Greater Boston attests to that. Despite a recent bump in listings, the amount of homes and condos on the market remains at historic lows.

But all those artificial barriers in towns and communities across the state will have to go before builders can truly do their job.

“I think in general if the zoning were simply allowed to be more responsive to market demand, the impact would be extraordinary,” Ziegler said.

Discriminatory Practices

While there are a few individual success stories out there as some communities embrace state incentives and open up their doors to a project or two, this isn’t really a battle that can be won town by town.

The good news is that the Legislature, working with a like-minded governor, has the power to tear down these artificial barriers. And, after years of legislative setbacks, Ziegler and other housing activists are gearing up to launch yet another push on Beacon Hill for zoning reform to start bringing down the myriad of local barriers to new housing.

However, the bad news is that zoning reform has had a rough ride in the Legislature, with lawmakers leery of angering local officials upon whose support they rely on.

The last proposal didn’t even require communities to change their zoning – it instead would have allowed towns and cities to opt into a more flexible zoning system and designate sites that could be used for apartment and condo construction.

Change needs to come from the top down, with sweeping zoning reform that will prevent cities and towns from effectively walling themselves off from all new housing. The short-term prospects for effective change aren’t good, with nary a word about housing from the two leading candidates for governor and with the scandal-plagued Legislature hardly a profile in political courage.

But the long-term prospects are better.

The current system now is terribly unjust, with zoning barriers being used in what are effectively discriminatory ways, to keep out a broad segment of society – families with children – in ways that also have at times distinct racial undertones.

 It is also a threat to the viability of the Bay State economy, as the state’s workforce gets slowly forced out.

And as the affordability crisis deepens, true zoning reform will become impossible to ignore, if not this year, then the next.

Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com