Piggy-backing on a late-night deal to inject hundreds of millions of dollars into a state economy struggling through the COVID-19 pandemic, the state legislature passed two long-discussed zoning reforms aimed at easing housing development in the state’s suburbs.
Gov. Charlie Baker’s long-stalled “Housing Choice” proposal will lower the threshold for local boards to approve zoning bylaw changes to a simple majority from the current two-thirds. Baker has pushed for years for the change as one that is essential to meet his goal of creating 135,000 new units of housing by 2025 to ease the housing crunch, especially around Greater Boston.
The bill (H.5250) also includes a requirement for communities that host MBTA stops to rezone “at least 1 district of reasonable size” within a half-mile of at least one stop within their borders to allow multifamily construction as of right, with a minimum density of 15 units per acre, approximately equivalent to the density of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.
Communities that fail to do so will not be eligible for a clutch of state grant programs, including MassWorks infrastructure funding. The legislation leaves key details like the minimum size of rezoned districts up to state officials to determine at a later date.
The legislature notably also included $400 million in a separate, $17 billion transportation bonding bill that also passed Tuesday to pay for electrification and new trains for the MBTA’s Providence, Stoughton and Fairmount lines and for the Boston to Beverly portion of the Newburyport-Rockport line. Transportation advocates and the MBTA’s Fiscal and Management Control Board have pushed for the idea as the beginning of a systemic transformation of the agency’s suburban network into more subway-like service.
The three measures could open the door to significant transit-oriented development in the Greater Boston area. Researchers at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership estimated in a 2019 study that if areas within a half-mile of MBTA stations were rezoned to a minimum average density of 10 units per acre, it would be possible to create 253,000 new housing units. More recently, Brookings Institution scholar Jenny Schuetz and Boston Indicators researcher Luc Schuster calculated that a 15 units-per-acre mandate would make it possible to build units affordable to middle- and many working-class Bay Staters even in wealthy communities like Wellesley while keeping buildings relatively modest in scale. And some developers have begun regarding even Greater Boston’s existing, limited commuter rail infrastructure as an important amenity that can attract apartment tenants and office or lab development, alike.
Advocates and developers alike have argued that many Massachusetts suburbs spent recent years building “paper walls” of legal requirements that make it effectively impossible to build multifamily projects without uncertain, time-consuming and controversial rezoning processes that put individual projects to a vote by local officials or town meetings. In the wake of last summer’s protests against racial inequality and police violence, advocates also began linking greater housing production in the suburbs with the racial wealth gap.
The economic development bill to which the Housing Choice and rezoning measures were attached had been stalled for months on Beacon Hill for unclear reasons, but legislative leaders noted the absence of a deal legalizing sports betting as the bill inched closer to passage.
New House Speaker Ron Mariano called it “a shame” late Tuesday afternoon that the two branches couldn’t reach a deal to legalize betting on sports.
Baker filed a proposal to legalize betting on professional sports back in January 2019, and had hoped to sign a law before the start of the NFL season late that summer. Mariano pointed the finger at the Senate for not wanting to negotiate the issue, but said he hopes to return to the topic early in the new session to make sure a home-grown company like DraftKings doesn’t uproot and take jobs somewhere else, like New Hampshire, where sports betting is legal.
The House had proposed to use nearly a third of the $50 million in revenue it projected from legalized sport betting to create a new fund for distressed restaurants, with qualifying restaurants eligible to receive up to $15,000 in relief.
The bill also seals no-fault eviction records, said state Sen. Eric Lesser, who was a Senate representative on the conference committee.
Staff writer James Sanna contributed to this story.
