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You have to hand it to them: Supporters of the “Great Neighborhoods” campaign on Beacon Hill certainly picked a snazzy name for their proposal to reform the messed-up Massachusetts housing market.
But the recipe for residential bliss by the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance was recently stripped of a key ingredient: rental housing.
The sprawl-busting group’s “Great Neighborhoods” housing bill recently cleared a key hurdle at the State House, but along the way it was stripped of a provision that would have made it easier for developers to build apartments in suburbs, cities and small towns across the state.
Still, the fact that the “Great Neighborhoods” bill is moving at all is a sign of progress. News of the housing crisis has finally landed on Beacon Hill, which, after decades of inaction, I guess is better late than ever.
There’s growing recognition in the State House that badly needed construction of new homes and apartments is being bottled up by onerous local building restrictions. However, now comes the hard part: Getting meaningful zoning reform by NIMBY suburban lawmakers with a fanatical definition of home rule, one that includes letting local officials effectively zone out new apartment construction.
The recent changes made to the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliances “Great Neighborhoods” bill are a prime example.
Scott Van Voorhis
Certainly the write-up for the proposal is stirring enough. There’s a lot of good talk about the need to reform an archaic zoning system that has spent decades now slowly strangling the Massachusetts housing market, as well as what makes for “great neighborhoods.”
“We need to reform our state’s planning, zoning and permitting laws to support communities that work for families and seniors,” according to the webpage for “Great Neighborhoods,” which describes itself not as a legislative proposal but as a “campaign.”
And in what seemed to be an encouraging sign, the House’s Municipalities Committee reporting out the sprawl busting group’s “Great Neighborhoods” in March.
But alas, that’s where the good news ends.
Nothing by Right
The bill the House’s Municipalities Committee reported out was missing what had been a key provision, one that would have required suburbs, towns and cities across the state to provide “reasonable and realistic opportunities” for multifamily housing.
Certainly seems reasonable. When hundreds of thousands of new homes, condominiums and apartments are needed across the Boston area over the next two decades, why should the suburbs be allowed to box out new apartment buildings, limiting new housing to teardowns of older, more modest homes to make way for boxy McMansions?
Even that provision was a watered-down version from what many housing advocates say is really needed: by-right zoning for multifamily construction in cities and towns across the state.
Before it was taken out, the provision stated clearly that it was not to be interpreted as “by-right zoning.”
What’s the big deal about by-right zoning? Without it, developers trying to build apartments in the suburbs face a years-long slog to make the zoning changes needed in order to build. If there’s opposition on part of suburban officials, who are often wary of any new rental proposal, it can be an almost impossible task.
But the requirement that communities open their doors to new apartment and condo construction wasn’t the only things that got clipped from the “Great Neighborhoods” bill.
The “edited” version, so to speak, dramatically narrows a proposal to allow for the construction of in-law apartments, another idea championed by housing advocates to help families cope with soaring rents and prices.
The original version calls for by-right zoning accessory apartments ranging up to 950 square feet of space.
But the version reported out of the Municipalities Committee puts the kibosh on the in-law apartment proposal, dramatically restricting who can build it to the elderly and/or the disabled. Also, the addition must be at least 450 square feet – there was no size limit earlier.
“It is just so limited, it misses a lot of the opportunity there,” said Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.
It’s really hard to see how the “Great Neighborhoods” vision expressed in the original proposal – “great neighborhoods offer housing choices” – with the tattered version that is now poised to move ahead in the House.
But there may still be a chance – Andre Leroux, executive director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, said he doesn’t know why the apartment zoning requirement was taken out of the Great Neighborhoods bill, but he believes the proposal will end up being combined with another bill that does have a multifamily zoning requirement.
“We are advocating strongly for including a multifamily requirement in the final bill,” he said. “We believe that the language that was in House 2420 was a solid compromise that most cities and towns could get behind, and we hope to bring that language back into the discussion.”
Here’s hoping that happens, because can a neighborhood truly be “great” if there are no apartments in it? Seems like a stretch to me.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
