At a workforce housing forum sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, State Rep. Kevin Honan, D-Allston said he was currently working on a plan to encourage local corporations to take a more active role in creating workforce housing.

Honan cited not only a bill he sponsored to create matching grants for corporations employees housing assistance, but also efforts to encourage corporations in the Route 128 and Interstate-495 technology belts with large land grants to consider developing housing on their parcels, since infrastructure is already in place.

"We need to do more on that front," he said.

Ron Phipps, president of the National Association of Realtors, cited his best friend, a police officer in Rhode Island, as the inspiration for his own interest in the topic of workforce housing. He warned that housing affordability was under threat in Washington and said that housing advocates needed to do more to make their voices heard on the issue. 

"Right now there’s a re-writing of history," with regard to the importance of housing, he said. Most people are currently focused only on the lessons of the housing bust, and not the value it provides to all classes of society "from the founding of the republic."

Honan spoke on his work on workforce and affordable housing issues as chair of the state legislature’s joint committee on housing.

Honan joked that his work on the issue has warped him to the point where he can’t look at Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of a man speaking at a New England town meeting without thinking he might be protesting a housing development plan. Honan said that in his travels around the state "there is opposition to change and to dense development almost everywhere." While many cities have been active in developing affordable housing, the state’s suburbs need to do more to encourage the development of workforce housing., he said.

"We want to do smaller houses on smaller lots," Honan said. "If you have those you can reduce sprawl, and the housing itself will be more affordable. [But] there’s so much anxiety around new development, new construction, that you have to overcome."