How bad is the Massachusetts housing mess? So bad that Waltham is about to do what would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago: creating its own, Section 8-style housing voucher program similar to what the feds run.
A key City Council committee is slated to vote early this week on a proposal to spend $2 million over the next three years on rental vouchers for the Watch City’s working poor.
Affordable housing activists believe they have the votes to win a favorable vote by the committee and approval in early November by the full council.
Backers say the new program is necessary as rents skyrocket and the paychecks of the working poor stagnate, with the federal Section 8 housing program pretty much maxed out.
And if it passes, Waltham’s new rental voucher program may very well turn out to be a trend setter, with many communities facing the same challenges as the state’s affordable housing crisis goes from bad to worse.
Of course, how things have gotten this bad is another issue, with years of cutbacks in federal housing programs just part of the story in a state known for its inbred NIMBY attitudes towards just about all new housing.
But I digress.
To get a rundown on what’s happening in Waltham, I caught up Daria Gere, executive director of WATCH Community Development Corp., which is championing the proposal.
“I don’t know what happens if all the landscapers and kitchen workers, if they all left Waltham. Do they start commuting from an hour west of here?” Gere lamented.
“The prices are just going to keep going up,” she told me. “Workers have to live somewhere.”
Taking Over From Uncle Sam
So what’s new here? After all, communities across Massachusetts have a long tradition of building housing, mainly for their low-income seniors. There are also a myriad of local nonprofits and other groups trying to help provide housing or teaming up on small projects, renovating a single-family here, a multifamily there. Uber-expensive Nantucket has its own housing assistance program, though on a more limited scale.
But Waltham’s proposal takes things to the next level.
Waltham’s rental voucher initiative would work much like the federal Section 8 program, except the Waltham Housing Authority would run it and local taxpayer dollars would fund it. The money for the vouchers would come from tax money collected by Waltham under the Community Preservation Act.
The aim is to roll out 50 vouchers through a lottery to families who need a boost as they struggle to right their finances or climb to the next rung on the economic ladder, Gere explained.
The vouchers would provide a cushion, reducing the amount a family is shelling out in rent to a more manageable level, roughly 30 percent of income. The initiative is targeted at families and individuals making less than 50 percent of median income: $32,950 for one person; $37,650 for a couple; and $42,350 and $47,050, respectively, for a family of three or four.
Rents Rise, Incomes Don’t
The proposal is born of hard experience, with a growing mismatch between Waltham’s rising rents and the stagnant paychecks of many of the city’s working poor, Gere noted.
If you have few bucks in your pocket, there’s probably never been a better time to live in Waltham, with a burgeoning restaurant scene and hundreds of new luxury apartments taking shape downtown. But if you are waiter or cook in one of those new restaurant or in one of Waltham’s big hotels, the economic picture is not so rosy. Rents in Waltham, like many other communities, have gone through the roof, with a modest two-bedroom likely to put you out $1,800 a month now, compared to $1,500 a couple years ago, Gere said.
Many of the families that come to WATCH for assistance can’t come close to affording even that, toiling at minimum wage or low-wage jobs in Waltham’s restaurants, hotels and stores, she noted. They are often getting by doubling or tripling up with family and friends.
Beyond crazy rents, another reason Waltham is on the verge of getting into the housing voucher business is the increasingly creaky condition of state and especially federal social safety nets. Federal spending on public housing and rental assistance was carved up during the Reagan years, a blow from which it really never recovered. It can take years to land a coveted a federal Section-8 housing voucher and then years more to land a place to live, Gere pointed out.
But let’s be real here; it’s not all Washington’s fault.
One reason the voucher program is attractive right now is that it can provide help right away. While WATCH is still interested in building new housing, that can take a long time, Gere noted. We didn’t get into a discussion about why it takes such a long time, but that’s no big mystery.
Still, it just about goes without saying that one of the biggest reasons that both rents and home prices are soaring to ever more unsustainable levels in Massachusetts, but especially inside the 495 area, is the intense opposition to new housing of just about any stripe.
Every new apartment or condominium complex that doesn’t get built, or gets dragged out through years of appeals, simply adds to the upward pressure on pricing in communities across the region.
Some of our NIMBY local leaders might want to take a good look at Waltham’s new voucher program: If present trends continue, it’s likely to be the wave of the future.
