It’s all nice and fine the Eastern Box Turtle is guaranteed a home here in the Bay State. But it’s too bad the same can’t be said for middle-class families squeezed by some of the highest home prices in the country.

In a state starved for developable land, the humble box turtle may soon find itself king of the real estate heap, lording over a vast, 200,000-acre, specially protected domain. The lovable but rather common turtle would get free rein across what amounts to 4 percent of the entire land mass of Massachusetts.

Developers interested in putting up homes, stores or offices in that area would have to jump any number of additional hurdles put up under regulations being considered by the state Department of Fish and Game.

That’s a lot of buildable land to restrict, especially in a state with a median home price, at $250,000, almost $100,000 above the national median – and where new subdivisions are themselves becoming an endangered species.

Happy Turtles…

Not surprisingly, the proposed regulationss have raised the hackles of commercial developers and homebuilders alike.

Builders already face innumerable obstacles here in the Bay State, the NIMBY capital of the country – if not the world – with everyone from penny pinching town officials to environmental zealots out for blood.

The new protections, in turn, add a major new barrier to development, with tough and expensive new building restrictions on acreage where Eastern Box Turtles happened to have set up camp, or were just spotted passing through.

That’s right, the turtles don’t even have to be living on a particular tract for it to be given special protection under the new state rules – just a sighting of one of these slow but surprising mobile critters on a particular tract is enough to do it, noted David Begelfer, chief executive of NAIOP Massachusetts, the trade group leading the charge.

Once the land has been deemed part of the official turtle homeland – the so-called “conservation protection zone” – the real fun begins.

Developers looking to build in this land will have to make it through a heightened and much more intense review process. Then, if they manage to get that far, builders will have to carve out part of their site for the turtles. That means fewer homes as land is set aside for turtle mitigation, which could involve building special culverts and other expensive habitat enhancers.

To take the cake, the new rules are supposed to be an improvement over the current setup, which have less onerous restrictions spread over a broader area. But the area now under consideration for heightened protection is in and of itself simply immense. The 200,000 acres is equivalent to more than 312 square miles, much of it clustered in Southeastern and Western Massachusetts in areas that otherwise might be available for new home construction.

…Endangered Homebuilders

So why this big push to protect a species that is not endangered and for whom Massachusetts has never been a major residence, so to speak?

The Bay State is at the northernmost range of Eastern Box Turtle’s habitat, one that starts on the Florida border and covers most of the South and Mid-Atlantic before stopping midway in Massachusetts. So, we are far from box turtle central, here.

Maybe it’s just the PC thing to do.

But while the box turtle is not exactly in danger of dying off, the same can’t be said for new home construction. If there is an endangered species here in Massachusetts, it’s the homebuilder and the middle-class buyers they have long served, not the box turtle.

New homes were already getting scarce back in the boom years, faced with a gauntlet of restrictive local zoning rules and town officials wringing their hands over any possible uptick in school costs. God forbid.

Already anemic during the boom years, the development of new homes all but ceased in Massachusetts after the Great Recession hit. It’s that scarcity that helped prevent home prices from collapsing here and may very well contribute to a return to runaway price appreciation sooner rather than later.

Putting aside hundreds of thousands of acres in what amounts to a giant turtle preserve will only make a bad situation worse.

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.