February’s decline in single-family home sales and spiking prices should serve as a wakeup call to deregulate the state’s zoning laws, the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts said.
As reported by The Warren Group last month, February showed the first decline in monthly sales in almost two years, along with double digit price increases for single family homes.
HBAM President Mike McDowell blamed the state’s regulatory climate for contributing to the shortage of inventory. According to McDowell, communities abuse zoning regulations to block any new construction, through such practices as large lot zoning and adopting stringent septic systems and wetlands regulations that exceed state standards with no additional benefit to public health or the environment.
"These local barriers to home construction artificially limit supply and unnecessarily drive up the cost of a new home beyond the reach of the average family," McDowell said in a statement.
According to HBAM, single-family building permits have remained flat from 2008 through 2012, averaging just more than 5,300 per year, despite the economy’s improvement, with 2011 the worst year on record for new permits, with just 4,899 square feet of permits pulled.
Numbers like that have left Massachusetts lagging behind the other New England states when it comes to new construction. According to a statistical analysis prepared for HBAM by economist Elliot Eisenberg, from 2008 to 2012, on a per capita basis, Massachusetts ranked fourth or fifth compared to the other New England states in new construction.
"This shows that there are still significant challenges to providing the kind of housing that will retain and attract the families we need in Massachusetts if we are to take full advantage of the current trends toward economic recovery," McDowell said in the statement. "Even during the boom years, Massachusetts was still not creating enough new housing to satisfy demand, which kept prices artificially high."
McDowell hailed Gov. Deval Patrick’s housing plan, which calls for building 10,000 multi-family units per year through 2020 and the new Compact Neighborhoods Policy that could spur the construction of reasonably priced, reasonably dense single family homes.
"If you build it affordably, they will come," McDowell said in the statement. "We need a sustained, concentrated effort to make housing work for young families or our economy will continue to suffer as the rest of the country moves forward."
