At last year’s Rental Housing Association conference, Gov. Paul Cellucci took center stage, delighting property owners and angering affordable housing advocates when he uttered those infamous words about the state’s housing crisis: The free market got us into the situation, and it will be the free market that gets us out.

Although the second act of the play at this year’s conference was more subdued with Cellucci not attending the event, the message from the state’s executive branch was largely the same.

Instead of Cellucci, it was Lt. Gov. Jane M. Swift who addressed members of RHA at this year’s Vision 2001 conference, held last week at the Seaport Hotel in Boston.

“Addressing the housing issue is a top priority for this administration,” Swift told the crowd. “The easiest course of action for addressing this has been used in the past: building more public housing, providing more housing vouchers and instituting rent control.

“But these quick fixes have not been successful and do not provide a sensible approach to dealing with the issue at hand,” Swift said.

Swift said she and Cellucci are working on a host of initiatives that would help boost production of housing in the state while attempting to drive down the cost of that production, ultimately resulting in lower costs for consumers.

“Our plan is to tear down the barriers that stand in the way of more housing,” she said. “Our plan looks at the whole spectrum of housing, from homelessness to high-end luxury housing units.”

Swift cited low-income housing tax credits, investment tax credits, abandoned building tax credits and other incentives she said should encourage developers to add to the housing stock. Still, though, she said one of the larger obstacles to additional housing has been the reluctance of cities and towns to accept further development in their communities.

To that end, Swift said the administration would introduce a number of measures that provide incentives to those cities and towns that encourage housing construction. Already completed, she added, was an executive order for cities and towns to look at their master plans and make sure housing was an integral component of them, along with financial assistance for cities and towns that needed to make adjustment’s to their master plans.

“We will also be offering public works grants to those cities and towns to offset costs to the town that may come as a result of the increase in housing,” Swift said.

Chorus of Support
As has been cited by Cellucci in the past, Swift said the largest obstacle standing in the way of more housing is a lack of buildable land. She again pushed for the governor’s plan that would make it easier for the state to transfer more than 1,000 acres of surplus land to private developers. Some of that land included sites statewide that were home to many former state hospitals, in addition to other surplus parcels.

Cellucci filed the plan late in the last legislative session, but it died as legislators expressed several concerns about the proposal. Cellucci has said he will file similar legislation again in the next session, which begins in December.

“Those of you who have dealt with the special legislation needed to turn over the surplus land know that the process can take over a year,” Swift said. “I’m asking you to please be a chorus for supporting these initiatives.

Swift also said the administration has pledged to push for more uniform training for local officials such as building inspectors and fire inspectors.

“Anyone who has built in more than one community knows that often there is no consistency between what one inspector requires in one town and what one requires in another town. If there was, it would be a miracle,” she said.

But in addition to blaming local inspectors, and communities hesitant to accept new building, Swift continued her acts of contrition by accepting some of the blame for building impediments at the state level.

“We shouldn’t absolve ourselves at the state government level,” Swift said. “We’ve crafted some things that look good on paper but sometimes have bad unintended consequences.”

Chief among those programs, Swift said, is the state’s Title 5 regulations concerning septic systems.

“With local enforcement of Title 5, we know in many cases that Title 5 is used to restrict development,” she said. “One hundred twenty-five communities have adopted some form of restrictions that exceed the state’s requirements for Title 5. It may be necessary for environmental concerns in some of the cases, but certainly not all of them.”

Swift said the administration has not filed any legislation to revamp Title 5, but is in the process of forming a committee to look at the issue.

She added that when Title 5 was first proposed, the government said it would look into what alternative technologies were available for property owners to help them meet the new regulations without unreasonable expenses.

“We always had a promise for new technologies,” Swift said. “We need to look at whether we’ve met our responsibilities on that end, and whether these technologies have been accepted or promoted in the communities.

“We’re setting up the commission to see where our hopes have been met, and where we have strayed from an environmental program to making it a zoning program instead.” In cases where Title 5 has essentially become a restrictive zoning issue, Swift said legislative action might be taken to correct the situation.

Just as Cellucci had announced at a meeting of Small Property Owners Association several weeks ago, Swift reiterated the administration’s support for mandatory rent escrowing in cases where there is a dispute between a landlord and a tenant. Currently, tenants may withhold rent altogether until the dispute is settled, but often that back rent never gets paid, property owners say.

“Small property owners control about two-thirds of the rental units in this state,” Swift said. “We cannot afford to lose that housing just because those landlords fear setbacks caused by tenants who don’t pay their rent.”

Swift, the newly appointed state education czarina, also spoke about the state of the commonwealth’s school system, and pushed for support of the November ballot question that would set the state income tax at 5 percent.

“We wish there was a ballot question for addressing the high cost of housing as easily as the tax question,” she said. “We have one, now we’ll have to work on the other.”