Repetitive Community Housing on a Manicured Suburban Street
There’s only one way out of the housing crisis that is steadily driving prices to unsustainable levels in the Boston area and beyond, and that is to build our way out of it.
But as Beacon Hill finally begins to look at ways to rein in runaway housing prices, some lawmakers inexplicably appear intent on giving homebuilders the shaft.
Senate President Stanley Rosenberg’s left-leaning Senate recently passed a “zoning reform” bill that, while it would spur more apartment construction, would also effectively make it harder for builders to put up single-family homes.
Now some senators appear intent on gutting an innovative initiative that would provide incentives for cities, towns and suburbs to give a green light to starter homes, those moderately priced and moderately sized homes that become an endangered species in Massachusetts.
Championed by the Baker Administration, the starter-home program passed the House as a part of a wide-ranging economic development bill, only to get stripped out by a key Senate committee.
A last-minute scramble late last week by a pair of senators failed to get the starter-home proposal back into the economic development bill.
“We were both surprised and disappointed,” said Benjamin Fierro, a Boston attorney who has represented the local homebuilding industry for years, of the attempt in the Senate to gut the starter-home proposal.
It’s hard to see what anyone could object to in the governor’s proposal, other that the fact he is a Republican in a state where one party, the Dems, have controlled the Legislature for decades.
The governor’s program would use a $25 million “production bonus” pool to entice communities to set up “starter-home districts” where more modestly sized homes could be built.
We’re not talking about 4,000 and 5,000 square-foot McMansions here – the homes would be capped at 1,850 square feet. With lot sizes limited to 10,000 square feet, these would be similar in size to the modest capes and ranches that gave many families their first shot at homeownership back in the 1950s and ’60s.
The homes, in turn, would ideally be priced in the high $300,000s to low $400,000s, at a time when any new single-family construction in many Boston suburbs could put you out a million or more.
‘Poison Pills’
Exactly why the Senate’s bonding and capital assets committee decided to strip the starter home provision out of the chamber’s economic development bill remains unclear.
Certainly the reasoning behind it appears to be more than a little murky. The decision to jettison the starter-home program was based on the idea that the Senate’s so-called zoning reform bill already dealt with the single-family home issue, one committee staffer explained.
Well yes, it’s true that the Senate’s controversial zoning reform bill does deal with the issue of new single-family home construction, but hardly in an encouraging way.
In fact, the Senate’s zoning bill arguably would make it even harder for builders to put up new homes, requiring even the smallest of new projects involving just two or three homes to go through an extensive, site-plan review process at the local level.
In addition, the same proposal would also give local officials the power to level impact fees on new housing development and force developers to include subsidized, below-market units, in all their projects.
“Poison pills” is the term David Begelfer, chief executive of NAIOP Massachusetts, has used to describe these little nuggets.
Clearly something else is going on here. Frankly, there is an almost ideologically driven snobbery on part of some housing activists and planners on the left towards the humble, single-family home.
To the lefty, sprawl-busting planner types – who apparently have the Senate’s ear right now – all those subdivisions of humble, single-family homes built in the ’50s and ’60s are part of the problem, not the solution.
They are all for new housing, provided we are talking about rental projects near train stations and town centers, suitably dense, transit-oriented developments, acceptable as a lesser evil thanks to their lighter footprint on the environment.
We are also told, of course, that this is not just the right thing to do, but that it is also meeting market demand, with Millennials supposedly having ditched the traditional American dream in favor of become life-long renters.
This, of course, deliberately confusing desire with necessity, with young, middle-class buyers looking to start a family faced with few if any affordable options right now when it comes buying a home in the suburbs.
It’s not hard to see the fingerprints of the lefty, anti-sprawl activists on the attempt to kill the starter home program, given it is the same crowd that helped push the anti-builder, “zoning reform” bill through the Senate.
Hopefully the Senate will prove me wrong, not only by restoring the starter-home proposal to its rightful place in the economic development bill, but ensuring it winds up on the Guv’s desk for signing.
At this point, it’s the only housing related bill that stands a chance of passing this session – the Senate’s lefty zoning reform bill isn’t likely to pass muster in House Speaker Robert DeLeo’s more conservative chamber.
It’s up to you, Sen. President Stanley Rosenberg, you lion of liberal, right-thinking Amherst. Stop listening to the sprawl-busters for a minute and give starter homes a chance.
