Earlier this year, Newton Congressman Jake Auchincloss floated an idea for the state to establish brand-new satellite cities outside Boston that could take a big bite out of the state’s housing deficits. iStock illustration

Move over, Boston, Worcester and Springfield.

You may be the Bay State’s three largest cities, but if Congressman Jake Auchincloss has his way, you may soon have some competition.

Forget about zoning reform, which, while helpful at the margins, isn’t going to yield the hundreds of thousands of new homes, apartments and condos that we need.

Rather, the Newton Democrat contends the solution to the housing crisis involves building new cities from the ground up, both here in Massachusetts and across the country.

And now that he’s decided against a run to unseat Sen. Ed Markey, Auchincloss will have more time to flesh out his rather unique and definitely outside-the-box approach to tackling the housing crisis, which includes potentially building a pair of new cities in Massachusetts.

Devens, South Weymouth Ideal Locations

In our shrunken local news world, speculation about Auchincloss’ political ambitions generated abundant headlines, even as his bold, if somewhat utopian, proposal to build entire new cities got little to no coverage in the local mainstream media.

Undaunted, the 37-year-old congressman and Marine Corps veteran has pushed his ambitious, city-building plan during an appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast and in a piece for The States Forum with MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

At a time when efforts to boost housing production in blue states like Massachusetts are sputtering, Auchincloss is promoting the idea of building new urban centers – with hundreds of thousands of people on sites like Devens and the old South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts – and across the country as well.

“Why don’t we have the big idea of the governor in the statehouse, either in Massachusetts or in California or another blue state, starting a new city and saying: We’re actually going to build 200,000 units of housing here,” Auchincloss noted on Klein’s podcast in February.

Bold ideas are needed, he suggests, because the current efforts at zoning reform in both Massachusetts and California aren’t actually yielding all that much new housing.

“That solution isn’t working fast or fully enough,” Auchincloss said, noting that “even the most optimistic projections” see the Bay State’s MBTA Communities rezoning mandate “delivering no more than 40,000 units over the next decade for a state that needs a quarter million.”

The Healey administration estimates Massachusetts will need 220,000 homes by 2035 just to keep up with demand.

Auchincloss says it’s not just Massachusetts that would do this, but states across the country, which would form independent “new city” commissions to look at potential sites.

There are 1,300 acres of federally-owned land in the Pittsburgh area alone, with tens of millions more acres owned by Washington across the country, the congressman noted in his piece for The States Forum.

Scott Van Voorhis

State Could Provide Low-Cost Financing

Under his plan, newly created and existing public authorities would dole out low-cost financing to developers and builders, who would be pushed to use more cost-efficient methods, like modular housing.

At times, Auchincloss’s vision for new cities ventures into the unproductive realm of utopian thinking, such as his suggestion that cars be banned in these new cities.

You can quickly sense how plans for a new city, liberated from all sorts of counterproductive zoning and other regulations, could potentially then be bogged down with a new set of mandates, environmental and otherwise, that would quickly make new housing and other projects too expensive to build.

And there are immediate practical barriers that would have to be overcome, not the least of which is the fact that the towns around Devens have an effective veto over plans for new housing at the old base.

Only the state Legislature can do that, and the governor would definitely have to be on board as well.

But the housing crisis is a huge problem, both locally and nationally.

Maybe it’s time – like Auchincloss – to start swinging for the fences.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.