Scott Van Voorhis

Who says bipartisanship is dead? Just take a look at the opposition to badly needed new housing here in the Bay State, where steaming heaps of hypocrisy can be found fouling both sides of the political aisle.

Sen. Robert Hedlund highlights the rather odd trend of avowedly free market conservatives yearning to heap red tape on local builders, who are a key part of the private sector.

The Weymouth Republican is pushing legislation that would have government dictate the rate of return for developers who build affordable apartments and condominiums and make them jump through all sorts of unnecessary local environmental reviews.

And on the left? Well, we have the pathetic example of some of the most liberal communities in the state – Newton and Arlington – trying to wriggle out of state affordable housing requirements while soaring prices threaten to remake their communities into enclaves for the rich.

Here we are at a time when every housing expert and economist in Massachusetts and beyond is warning we’ll need hundreds of thousands of new homes, condos and apartments over the next few decades – and that’s just to keep up with current demand. Yet too many people, liberals and conservatives alike, just don’t get it. Or maybe they don’t really want to get it, out of willful ignorance, cynicism, or some combination thereof.

Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, said he finds the support for ever more onerous local housing regulations odd for those who, like Hedlund, the assistant Republican minority leader in the Senate, “advocate private market solutions in general.”

“The private market is prevented from addressing the housing crisis in Massachusetts through a convoluted system of regulation,” Ziegler contends.

Regulation Republicans

In the old days, Republicans seemed to have a stronger grasp on basic economics than the Dems. And you always count on the GOP to argue for freeing up the private sector to tackle challenges liberals would rather have government grapple with.

But strangely, our local Republicans have done quite a flip. When it comes to the housing market, they’ve decided the private sectors – as in developers and homebuilders – are the big problem. And what’s needed, amazingly, are more rules and regulations that will let local cities and towns show all these builders with plans for big new apartment buildings or townhome developments who is really boss – the government!

Hedlund has proposed several changes to the state’s more than four-decade old 40B housing law, which gives developers who pledge to include some affordable units in their new condo or apartment projects the needed leverage to get their projects through the local approval process.

In fact, towns and cities across the state have made it so difficult and time-consuming for developers to build new housing that most are simply going the 40B route in order to have some assurance they will actually be able to build someday.

The law gives developers a reliable road map for winning approval to build their projects on what is, after all, their property, and prevents towns from using local zoning rules and bylaws to endlessly delay or kill a project.

But under the guise of reform, Hedlund’s proposed changes would instead help neuter 40B.

For starters, the good senator wants to give local conservation and environment boards to have final say over all new 40B housing developments when it comes to wetland related issues, which, I may point out, are rather broadly defined in his proposal.

A little environmental do-goodism, maybe?

Not quite. Rather, local conservation and environmental boards have become a graveyard for all sorts of development projects, with local communities free to adopt far more stringent regulations than even those required by state government, whether or not they make any logical sense.

Another one of Hedlund’s innocuous-sounding proposals that would be a poison pill for the state’s affordable housing law would cap how many apartments or condos a developer could put on a single acre.

The problem is that eight units per acre, or four times the local zoning limited, isn’t much, especially given many local zoning rules allow for just a single home on a single acre. We are talking about four or maybe eight units on a 40,000-square-foot site – not much given Boston towers have taken shape on less land.

Of course, if a builder were to agree to cap profits for his project at 10 percent – and plough whatever earnings beyond that into building additional affordable housing – the cap on the number of units would be magically lifted, according to Hedlund’s proposal.

Let’s get real here – only someone with no sense of business, especially the real estate business, would think that sounds reasonable. There’s no developer out there who will take on the risk of a major project for such a modest return. And frankly, no investor would be daft enough put money down on such a half-baked plan.

The icing on the cake, though, is Hedlund’s proposal to mandate the exact size of the subsidized apartments or condos that developers who build under 40B are required to mix into their otherwise market-rate developments.

According to the Weymouth Republican, the affordable units should be not more than 1,000 square feet for a two-bedroom, or 1,200 for a three-bedroom.

Not sure what Hedlund is getting at here, but this sounds like the antithesis of true conservatism, this micromanaging of private business venture down to the rate of return and the size of the units.

For his part, Hedlund says I have him all wrong. He’s not trying to scuttle 40B, but rather return more control to the local communities, which he portrays as “suffocating” from big new apartment projects being driven through with what he calls a “sledgehammer” of a law.

And he notes he has been on the other side of the table as a businessman, battling for months to get a local permit for a small restaurant and having lost money on a real estate venture back in the 1980s.

Still, while a bit more is being built now, I don’t see the Biblical flood of new apartments and condos Hedlund believes are “overwhelming” cities and towns.

The level of new home and apartment construction is not yet back to the relatively unimpressive levels of the last boom in the mid-2000s, let alone the 1980s, when three to four times the amount of new housing was being built each year.

And needless to say, Hedlund’s obstructionist proposals also fly in the face of what every housing expert in the state is saying right now. The problem is we have built far too few new homes and apartments for far too many years, and now we need to play catch up or see our already high housing costs go through the roof.

Greater Boston alone will need another 435,000 new homes, condos, apartments and townhouses by 2040, according the respected Massachusetts Area Planning Council, and that’s just to keep pace with current demand and prevent things from getting even worse.

We don’t need more government regulation – we need to set the private sector free.

Limousine Liberals

To be fair, it’s not just conservatives who are playing the cheap seats by targeting supposedly greedy developers – some liberals are being completely pigheaded as well.

Progressives are much more likely to support 40B, at least in concept. But it’s a different story when it’s their posh suburb where a developer wants to build apartments that might actually be affordable for middle- and working-class families.

Then things get nasty, as recent battles over 40B projects in Newton and Arlington show.

The Garden City probably has more housing activists and other do-gooders per square mile than any other city or town in the state, if not country. But Newton’s efforts to push back against proposals to build new rental housing have been nothing short of shameful.

After an uproar by some snooty neighbors, Newton Mayor Setti Warren eventually withdrew support for a plan to convert an old firehouse into seven affordable units for formerly homeless people.

Now Warren and the city aldermen are trying to block a creative plan to transform part of an office park along Route 128 into a mostly market-rate rental development aimed at young professionals, with some affordable units mixed in.

Newton is relying on an until-now little-used loophole in the 40B law that gives communities a pass on meeting the requirement that at least 10 percent of their housing stock be subsidized units affordable to low- and moderate-income renters and buyers.

In Newton, where the median price is closing in $1 million and just 7.5 percent of all housing counts as affordable, the city is hoping to prove that 1.5 percent of its developable land is dedicated to affordable housing. If so, that would get the city off the hook of meeting the 10 percent requirement.

Taking a cue from Newton, Arlington officials are exploring a similar maneuver.

For otherwise classy communities, it’s shabby stuff.

“It’s redefining the problem away,” Ziegler said. “If every city and town tries to pass the buck, we are going to be left in a situation with declining revenue and a declining workforce. It just doesn’t add up.”