A slate of new housing reforms in California are trying to open the floodgates to more multifamily development.
Yes, the Massachusetts housing market is a hot mess. But, no joke, California might just have the solution.
Unfortunately, the Baker administration has all but scoffed at California’s increasingly hard-headed measures to boost construction of new homes of all types.
After all, what could there be to possibly learn from such a basket case of a blue state, whose stratospheric home prices make even Massachusetts look like a bargain?
In case you were wondering, California’s median home price hit $839,460 in August, according to the California Association of Realtors. The median price in Massachusetts hit $565,000 in August, a 17 percent increase over last August, The Warren Group – publisher of Banker & Tradesman – reports.
“We have such a long tradition of local control here in Massachusetts. The beauty of Housing Choice – it totally respects that,” Mike Kenneally, the state’s housing and economic development chief, told me last year in a piece I wrote for CommonWealth Magazine.
That settles that, right? No need here for aggressive mandates that tony suburbs get with the program and zone for growth? When you see what California’s accomplished recently, you’ll reconsider.
From Win to Win in CA
The Golden State saw a more than 15 percent jump during the first six months of 2022 in permits issued for new homes, condominiums and apartments compared to the same period in 2021, coming in at over 71,000. And those numbers are up roughly 40 percent compared to 2019 as well, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.
Massachusetts saw roughly 10,000 new residential units take shape during the same period, federal Census Bureau stats show.
Crunching the latest numbers from August, California now has a slight edge when it comes to housing production, on track to roll out one new unit per every 314 residents in 2022, compared to one per every 364 in Massachusetts.
Reforms enacted since 2019 have boosted housing production in California by 40 percent, and two news laws could push that even further.
The progress comes as Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers steadily demolish long-standing obstacles to new housing thrown up by cities, towns and suburbs statewide. Legislation passed in 2020 and 2021 now allows as many as four homes to be built on a lot that previously just held one.
California has also started taking a tough line in thwarting NIMBY subversion of the new pro-building laws by local officials.
Formidable West Coast NIMBYs
If you thought our NIMBYs are bad, well then you haven’t met their West Coast cousins and their mastery of bad-faith environmentalism.
In one case, Woodside, a posh Silicon Valley town, declared the entire community a mountain lion sanctuary, all aimed at short-circuiting the new rules allow two or more homes to be built on existing, single-family lots, according to the New York Times.
A warning shot by the state’s attorney general quickly put an end to that zoological charade.
Another California town required all new housing come with a covered porch, the “highest level of energy efficiency and an automatic garage door,” the Times reports.
Oh yeah, and – no kidding – the signature of an archeologist.
A new law, just inked in the last few weeks, lets developers convert commercial buildings, parking lots and the like into multifamily housing by right and without the state’s notorious CEQA environmental review process if 20 percent of the units are affordable and if a community hasn’t zoned for growth. As an alternative, developers can build all-market-rate projects on a similar selection of commercial properties by right, but they will need to use labor trained in apprenticeship programs paid the prevailing wage and go through environmental review.
Scott Van Voorhis
More Mollycoddling in MA
Considerably more modest reforms by Gov. Charlie Baker are also starting to have an impact, with overall residential construction up 10 percent in Massachusetts so far in 2022 compared to last year.
However, that’s after years of stagnation that saw little or no new significant growth in the number of new homes and apartments built.
Another bad sign are the suburban officials who have suggested simply ignoring the Baker administration’s new MBTA Communities law, which requires towns zone for multifamily housing around T stations, citing the relatively weak penalties for non-compliance.
Attorney General Maura Healey, the Democratic candidate for governor, apparently wants to continue the tradition of mollycoddling NIMBY suburbs, with lots of carrots to encourage communities to open their doors to new apartment construction.
Are we going to wait until our backs are against the wall – as they frankly did in California – before cracking down on the abuse of local control?
The Massachusetts housing market may not be in as bad a shape as the Golden State’s. But barring an effective effort to demolish local roadblocks to new housing, we are heading there fast.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
