Tom Lyons

Chapter 40B is Massachusetts’ regional planning law, but that is not how most folks know it.

Popularly, Chapter 40B is the anti-snob affordable housing law. It is a vehicle for granting streamlined approvals of new mixed-income housing, even when those housing proposals require waivers of local zoning. Frequently, Chapter 40B sets off local skirmishes over home rule principles in the face of a state law that pushes every city and town to devote at least 10 percent of its housing stock to affordable housing.

This dynamic speaks to bigger tensions around how Massachusetts grows housing outside the Boston core. Even though Chapter 40B has been successful in delivering new affordable housing, it has also helped drive a misconception that housing growth is something that happens to municipalities, and is not driven by local needs and priorities.

Massachusetts cannot meet its affordable housing needs if cities and towns are passive actors. That’s why MassHousing just launched a new $2 million program to help communities shape new housing growth.

Our new Planning for Housing Production Program seeks to make development less contentious and more collaborative, by helping establish more local control over growth under Chapter 40B. To get there, we want to help cities and towns deepen the link between local planning and local housing development.

MassHousing’s Planning for Housing Production Program is part of the Baker-Polito Administration’s new Housing Choice Initiative, which seeks to help municipalities across Massachusetts deliver 135,000 new housing units by 2025.

The governor’s Housing Choice Initiative creates a new system of rewards and incentives for municipalities that have embraced new housing growth. It sets up robust technical assistance supports for cities and towns that want to join the club of high producers, but need some help getting there. And it proposes new legislation that would make it easier for municipalities to rezone for housing growth.

Chapter 40B will be one key tool for achieving those 135,000 new homes. 40B has driven nearly all the affordable housing construction that has taken place outside Massachusetts’ largest cities since the late 1960s, creating 70,000 new homes, with over 35,000 affordable to working families and older adults.

As the state’s regional planning law, Chapter 40B rewards proactive planning. When municipalities plan for growth and deliver it, they have enormous leeway to shape 40B development. By saying yes to something, cities and towns get much greater freedom to reject 40B development that is inconsistent with local planning priorities.

This local control is achievable. In recent years, MassHousing denied 40B eligibility to projects in Easton and Reading, after those towns planned for housing growth and took steps to implement their plans. Still, there are not enough success stories like Easton’s and Reading’s to tell. Too many municipalities struggle to turn their local planning efforts into new housing units.

Our new Planning for Housing Production Program devotes $2 million to generating more successes like Easton’s and Reading’s. MassHousing will provide technical support to municipalities looking to implement local housing production goals, and deliver new mixed-income housing. The program will foster deep, sustained engagements between local stakeholders and technical support teams, build capacity at the local level, and empower cities and towns to control their own development destinies.

Local needs vary. In some cases, Planning for Housing Production grants will help a municipality craft new zoning to spur housing growth. In other cases, we will help plan public infrastructure improvements needed to support housing growth, deepen planning and community development capacity, or support public engagement and data transparency initiatives.

In whatever form it comes, we want to reset the way cities and towns interact with Chapter 40B, building new partnerships to plan and deliver new housing consistent with local priorities and needs, and deepening the link between planning and housing production under 40B.

Tom Lyons is the acting executive director of MassHousing. For more information, please visit MassHousing’s Planning and Programs Department at masshousing.com.