Gov. Deval Patrick has been basking in lapdog media coverage as he enjoys a victory lap before jumping off for destinations unknown.
But with crazy home prices and rents, trains that don’t run on time, traffic-jammed highways, and a chronically corrupt state government, is it really a victory?
Patrick may be one of the most charismatic politicians since Bill Clinton. And his big, $1 billion bet on the life sciences industry proved to be a shrewd one, spurring a development boom in Cambridge and along Route 128. Yet too often our soon-to-be ex-governor chose to push trendy environmental causes beloved by his uber-liberal base rather than facing up to the broader challenges that are crushing the state’s middle class and which have made the old-fashioned starter home an endangered species.
Ironically, Patrick could have achieved far more substantial environmental gains by tackling the state’s broken housing market and ailing public transportation system. Instead, he opted to pursue trendy environmental causes that look great to the green heads, but jack up the cost of living and doing business for everyone else.
Skewed Priorities
Who knows what the future may hold for Patrick, a charismatic speaker and personality who has toyed with the idea of running for president. Some of his environmental accomplishments may look great for wooing future Democratic primary voters, but not so hot when measured against the unique challenges Massachusetts faces as a state with one of the highest costs of living in the nation.
Just take the tough new energy efficiency regulations rolled out under Patrick for the construction of new homes. Already some of the most stringent in the country, the Patrick Administration upped the ante, giving a green light to towns and cities to unleash even more stringent standards, an opportunity many have taken up with relish.
Under this short-sighted view, developers pick up the extra costs – typically thousands of dollars for each home – for promoting more environmentally friendly homes. Yet the real losers are homebuyers, who will wind up having to pay more for new construction in a state where the average listing price for a four-bedroom, two-bath home tops any other state, including ultra-expensive Hawaii.
Sure, you may earn that money back over the years on your heating bill, but first you have to pay for the house, and that’s an increasingly difficult proposition here in Massachusetts, especially for middle-income buyers.
Market Solutions, Not Mandates
When it comes to the Bay State’s long-running housing crisis, Patrick has essentially passed the mess to his successor, Charlie Baker.
Patrick has talked a good talk about spurring more housing construction. Yet he has followed the incremental approach, established under former Gov. Mitt Romney, of essentially bribing suburbs wary of apartments and condos to accept new housing next to “transportation nodes” – read railroad tracks. Sadly, this is a classic, Clintonian pop-gun approach, when a howitzer is needed instead.
Patrick never seriously grappled with the myriad selfish restrictions thrown up by towns and suburbs across the state that make it a hard – and often impossible – place to build anything but McMansions on one- or two-acre lots. Developers interested in building starter housing, affordable apartments, or anything within reach of a family with school children, simply need not apply in the vast majority of affluent – and even not so affluent – Eastern Massachusetts communities.
Only at the very end of its lifespan did the Patrick Administration even attempt to tackle the highly questionable practice of local officials effectively barring developers from building new homes and condos with more than two bedrooms in the hopes of keeping families with children out of town. As a result, far too few new homes and condos have been built in Massachusetts over the past two decades, ensuring that prices rise, year in, year out, to ever more unaffordable levels for middle-class families.
Forcing developers to build a dwindling number of ever more expensive green homes is not the solution.
Opportunities Lost
It didn’t have to be this way. By taking a bolder approach that would have boosted the construction of a range of new housing across the state, not just next to train stations, Patrick could been able to have had his cake and eat it as well, restoring the fortunes of our state’s chronically ill housing market while boosting the environment along with it.
Instead, we’ve wound up with the worst of both worlds: Ridiculously high housing prices and an environment under siege from the fumes of all those commuters forced to drive in from ever more distant locales.
Unable to afford anything within 128, or increasingly within 495 as well, homebuyers are settling for ever longer commutes, driving into Boston from Worcester County, Southern New Hampshire and Rhode Island, where home prices are still relatively affordable for the middle class.
A case in point are the pricey MetroWest towns along 495, where there are now 26,000 more jobs at various businesses and companies than residents of working age in those towns, according to a recent study out of Framingham State University.
That means tens of thousands of commuters from all points of southern New England jamming 495 local roadways to get to work each day. It’s a safe bet that more than a few of these commuters with exhausting daily drives wouldn’t mind settling down in one of the western suburbs closer their work, but for the area’s crazy home prices.
We are already reaping the rewards of this failure, with 128 well over capacity and 495 nearly to maxing out on the key stretch between the Turnpike and 1-290.
To all this, add Patrick’s commuter and subway line strategy, which has opted to gamble the state transportation system’s scarce resources on adding new lines, rather than tackling long-standing service issues.
Sure, the the Green Line extension will be great someday for Somerville and Medford, but commuters across the MBTA system are now paying more to ride the train or subway while suffering from the same old litany of trains that are predictably late, or worse, all but nonexistent when something shocking like a snowstorm in New England happens.
With gas prices headed lower for what could be a long-term shift, taking the T can now cost more than driving to work, making it an increasingly unattractive option.
So Patrick can take all the victory laps he likes.
But when it comes to chronic problems like our increasingly unaffordable housing market and traffic-clogged highways, it’s hard to argue Massachusetts is somehow better off today than it was eight years ago.
