Committee members conferencing the 2024 housing bond bill – from left, Rep. David DeCoste, Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, Sen. Lydia Edwards, Rep. James Arciero, Sen. Peter Durant, and Sen. Will Brownsberger – gather for their first meeting Thursday, July 11, 2024 in Room 348 off the House Lobby. Photo by Sam Doran | State House News Service
House and Senate negotiators sent an agreement on a policy-filled $5.16 billion housing bond bill to Gov. Maura Healey Thursday morning around 9:30 a.m., potentially salvaging a priority for the House, Senate and governor.
“Lots of minor stuff is not in there,” Sen. William Brownsberger, one of the lead negotiators, told reporters when he filed the compromise at 6:30 a.m. after 19 hours of open sessions in both branches as lawmakers tried to find compromises on a swath of major bills.
Most of those pieces of legislation appeared stalled amid worsening tensions between House and Senate leadership.
Another major bill closely watched by the real estate industry, the economic development bonding bill and its provision clearing the way for a New England Revolution soccer stadium in Everett, was one of the high-profile casualties. It also remains unclear whether the Senate will take up a controversial bill passed by the House Tuesday that authorizes Boston to increase the tax rate on commercial properties to make up for revenue lost to collapsing office property values and a separate one rechartering the Boston Planning & Development Agency board to focus on climate change and affordability, and away from its mid-century, Urban Renewal-era mission of combating “blight” and “decadence” – an old code word for the sex industry and drug use.
What’s Not In the Bill
The conference committee’s compromise housing bill left out a billion-dollar allocation to expand infrastructure for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority – the sewer and water system for much of metro Boston – to parts of the South Shore. House Speaker Ron Mariano had proposed the idea as a way to unlock development at the huge but benighted Southfield development site in Weymouth, where new housing construction has been hobbled by a lack utility capacity.
Other notable pots of money that didn’t make it: Senate-backed grant programs worth $50 million each that would have pumped money into rural housing, housing in small suburbs and in “seasonal communities” like Cape Cod, and a House proposal for a $150 million fund for turning vacant offices and other commercial properties into homes.
Developers and city officials wanting help for office-to-residential conversions weren’t left high and dry, however. Developer trade group NAIOP claimed a win with the inclusion of language it wrote authorizing what it said was a “first-in-the-nation” tax credit to support the development of market-rate office-to-residential conversions. The high cost of renovating older office properties has been widely cited as a barrier to their conversion to housing, even in troubled markets like downtown Boston’s.
On the policy front, legislators opted to dodge a range of hot-button policy items: tenant opportunity to purchase – also known as TOPA – that had been included in the House’s bill; a “crumbling concrete assistance fund” from the Senate’s bill to fix homes built with pyrrhotite-contaminated concrete; barring contractors who don’t have apprenticeship programs from working on certain public housing renovations; and letting any town or city vote by a simple majority, instead of the current two-thirds majority, to require housing developments make up to 13 percent of their units affordable housing.
Both the House and Senate had earlier declined to include Healey’s proposal to allow towns and cities to charge a sales tax on high-dollar real estate sales to fund affordable housing, amid opposition from the real estate industry.
The real estate industry appeared to lose one policy fight, however: Eviction sealing, a key tenants’ rights priority, was included in the compromise bill. The measure would let renters who were the subject of a no-fault eviction petition a judge to have that court record sealed. Tenants evicted for failure to pay rent more than four years before can also apply, provided they can prove that non-payment of rent “was due to an economic hardship,” as can tenants with a fault eviction on their record older than seven years and no subsequent evictions on their record.
“Not just because landlords will have much higher risk, passing increased rents through to renters, but also 96 percent of renters who benefit by showing a clean eviction record will be harmed by tougher eviction standards, as well,” MassLandlords Executive Director Doug Quattrochi said in a video message to supporters Thursday urging them to call Healey’s office and ask her to veto the section.
‘We Did a Smaller Bill’
House and Senate negotiators ultimately chose to compromise on less spending.
“It didn’t include the MWRA expansion, it also does not include a lot of Senate initiatives as well. So, we put, from a financial standpoint, we did a smaller bill,” Brownsberger said.
The House wanted a $6.5 billion bill, which included the $1 billion water resource expansion, while the Senate’s bottom line was about $1 billion lower at $5.4 billion. Both were larger than the $4.1 billion base bill Healey filed.
The final bill features a high bottom line, but not all of that borrowing capacity will actually get used. The state’s plan for actual capital spending released last month dedicates $2 billion for housing over the next five years, and $400 million in fiscal 2025, a 30 percent increase over fiscal 2024.
“At the end of the day, we took an approach that was focused on the financial elements that were in common between the two bills,” Brownsberger said.
ADUs, Lawsuit Deterrents Included
In addition to the billions of dollars allocated to fund affordable housing development, housing advocates’ other massive win was the inclusion of language legalizing accessory dwelling units on all single-family-zoned lots statewide. Towns and cities will still be allowed to enact dimensional regulations and force ADU projects to undergo site plan review, but administration officials have said they believe the change could create as many as 10,000 new homes statewide in the next five years.
Also included: judicial reforms sought by the real estate industry to deter “frivolous” abutter lawsuits related to zoning board decisions.
The compromise report secured its final passage in the House on a 128-24 vote. It wasn’t split exactly on party lines. Republican Reps. Marcus Vaughn, David Vieira, and Steven Xiarhos joined the Democrats in supporting the bill. All other Republicans voted “no.” Democrat Reps. Colleen Garry and David Allen Robertson voted with Republicans to oppose the bill. Independent Rep. Susanna Whipps voted in favor.
In the Senate, the roll call was 37-2, with Republican Sens. Peter Durant and Ryan Fattman in opposition to the bill.
State House News Service staff writer Sam Drysdale contributed to this report.
