Two recent reports brought the need for more housing production in Massachusetts into sharp focus as the state legislature sits on an important reform that could begin to address the problem.
First, the Case-Shiller home price index released last week shows the total value of Greater Boston’s homes rose 9.4 percent between October 2020 and the same month in 2019, much faster than the historical average.
Second, First American reported that the metro area saw the third-biggest drop in housing affordability nationwide that same month, again on a year-over-year basis, beaten only by the famously housing-starved San Francisco Bay area. The state suffered little better for the second-worst year-over-year drop among states, again only beaten by California. It’s telling that the Bay State’s peers in that ignominious award were New Hampshire – whose southern third is closely tied to the Boston economy – and Hawaii, whose mountainous terrain and surrounding ocean make it physically impossible to build new neighborhoods.
As this paper has reported several times over the course of 2020, the pandemic and the record-low interest rates that accompanied it have encouraged many Millennials to surge into the purchase market for the first time, stressing the market like few times in history and bidding up prices to record levels.
But policymakers should not interpret the pandemic’s concentrating effect as a sign that the problem of supply in our housing market will pass with the virus. Instead, it has revealed the depth of demand for new homes across the state caused by a much-larger-than-normal number of people entering their prime household-formation and homebuying years.
But instead of being able to address this demand with new construction, the legislature continues to hobble the for- and nonprofit development sectors by delaying the passage of even the barely-enough, incremental zoning reforms known as “Housing Choice,” which would make it easier for pro-growth majorities in towns and cities to exercise their democratic rights and rezone parcels for more density.
Such delays aren’t just hurting middle-class Massachusetts residents, as many of the state’s working-class communities have shown. Barriers to housing construction have helped cause severe crowding in cities like Chelsea and Lawrence, causing much higher rates of COVID-19 infection among people forced to sleep seven or eight people to a three-bedroom apartment.
As of this writing, the Housing Choice legislation has sat in a conference committee on Beacon Hill, as part of an important COVID-19-relief-cum-economic-development bill, for 153 long days. While wise to attach it to such a must-pass legislation, it is decidedly unwise for legislative leaders to – seemingly inexplicably – allow the conference committee to sit on its hands, particularly when the Senate version of the bill includes a valuable provision to require increased density around MBTA stations.
In this new legislative session, under new leadership, Beacon Hill’s leaders must do a better job of expediting important bills that will be able to make differences in everyday people’s lives as soon as they are passed.
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