Scott Van Voorhis

Our trusty pals at the State House sure have taken some flak for ending this year’s legislative session with the equivalent of an all-night cram session.

After all, it was no mean feat to have jammed months worth of legislative slicing, dicing and haggling into one final frenzied weekend as the session wound to a close on July 31.

At least there weren’t allegations of drunken pols and late-night, Animal House-style debauchery as there was during a marathon budget session under the reign of former House strongman and convicted felon Thomas Finneran.

Still, you won’t find much griping about the Massachusetts Legislature’s work ethic this year among developers and real estate brokers.

The Bay State’s real estate and development communities dodged some nasty legislative bullets this year while also managing to score a few wins.

And while efforts to stop NIMBY suburbs and towns from barring new apartment and condominium development fell short, the proposal actually got serious attention for the first time in a long time, while also boosting awareness about the increasingly unaffordable state of the Massachusetts housing market.

“It absolutely felt like a turning point and it made it further along than anything else has made it in the last 30-plus years,” said Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.

Dodging Bullets

Just a few weeks ago, this year’s legislative session on Beacon Hill was shaping up to be a major disaster for both developers in general and for efforts to lower home prices by boosting new residential construction.

Stan Rosenberg’s left-leaning Senate stuck a poison pill for developers into a major energy/climate change bill. The controversial provision called upon state agencies, when examining any project, large or small, to consider its impact on climate change. Already fed up with the Bay State’s  notoriously difficult permitting process, developers faced the probability of endless delays at the hands climate change zealots.

Miraculously, common sense – and timely lobbying – won out and the irksome provision vanished into the Bermuda Triangle of the legislative session’s frantic final hours.

“It was poorly drafted and it wasn’t thought through,” noted Tamara Small, senior vice president of government affairs at NAIOP Massachusetts. “It would have had a dramatic impact.

Real estate brokers faced their own nightmare with the very same energy bill. The sprawling piece of legislation also included a provision that would have required homeowners to get an energy audit of their home before selling it.

Homes, in turn, would have been rated according to their levels of energy efficiency.

Supporters compare it to the mile-per-gallon ratings on cars, but the Massachusetts Association of Realtors came out swinging, blasting the proposal and warning it would deter owners from putting their homes on the market at a time when there is dire shortage of listings for sale.

“The Massachusetts housing market is starved for homes for sale and Realtors feel that this bill would put one more roadblock in the way of needed inventory reaching the market,” said 2016 MAR President Annie Blatz, branch executive at Kinlin Grover Real Estate on Cape Cod. That proposal also disappeared into the legislative void.

Maybe the biggest disaster averted though was the defeat of a Senate zoning reform bill that was really anything but that.

The bill was a favorite of planning types and town and suburban officials, with the Smart Growth Alliance leading the charge.

But critics – including those who actually do the building, like members of  NAIOP Massachusetts and the Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Massachusetts – pointed out that the bill included “poison pills” that would have actually made it even harder to build new homes and condos in our already housing-starved state.

Builders would have to undergo extensive site-plan reviews by local officials for even small, one- or two-home proposals under the bill. The proposal would have also let communities levy impact fees on top of all the already extensive haggling and mitigation money towns and cities typically squeeze out of developers in Massachusetts.

That bill, thankfully, also wound up in the circular file.

Small Victories

The last days of the legislative session also saw developers and home builders score some small but important victories on Beacon Hill.

Championed by the Baker Administration, an innovative starter-home program passed the House only to get cast aside by the Senate as the legislative session wound down.

But a big pushback by the builders’ association and other supporters convinced legislative leaders to put the proposal back on track. The starter-home initiative, aimed at spurring construction of more modestly sized suburban homes in the $300,000-$400,000 range, passed muster during that final weekend of the session.

The Legislature also passed an economic development bill that included hundreds of millions in funding for various initiatives aimed at boosting job-creating infrastructure and development projects.

And Bay State developers also got some additional breathing room when it comes to the amount of time they can hang onto key local permits before having to break ground.  Developers now have a year to start construction after being issued a building permit, up from six months, while the lifespan of special permits has been extended from two to three years.

These extensions could prove to be lifesaver for more than a few developers once the next downturn hits and lining up financing for a new project gets tricky again.

Hope For Housing

For the first time in decades, state lawmakers took a good, hard, serious look at the troubled Massachusetts housing market and the myriad roadblocks on the local level that are choking off badly needed new construction.

While the Senate “zoning reform” proposal was hardly the answer, a rival bill supported by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership also managed to catch the attention of some lawmakers.

That proposal goes to the heart of the housing challenge in Massachusetts, requiring all cities and towns to designate areas where multifamily housing – as in apartments and condos – can be built. No longer would it be acceptable for upscale suburbs and others not so upscale as well to structure their zoning rules in ways that effectively block out all new rental housing proposals. The bill would have also required communities to open their doors to cluster developments of single-family home.

The proposal was put into the legislative blender and wound up as part of that problematic Senate “zoning reform” bill.

Still, it was the first time in decades that a serious proposal aimed at reforming some of the rules blocking new housing construction at the local level actually made it to the final round of the legislative process.

Here’s to better luck next year.