Senate President Karen Spilka speaks to reporters at the start of a fiscal 2025 budget briefing by Ways and Means Chairman Michael Rodrigues (left) on Tuesday, May 7, 2024. Photo by Sam Doran | State House News Service
State senators Thursday night unanimously passed their version of Gov. Maura Healey’s landmark housing bond bill, which would authorize $5.4 billion in borrowing to spur housing production, without including a controversial measure to tax high-end real estate sales to fund affordable housing.
The legislation (S.2834) is also loaded down with policy ideas, like allowing accessory dwelling units by right in single-family zoning across the state, allowing tenants to seal previous eviction records in certain cases, expanding the designation to address housing availability in “seasonal communities,” and allowing a simple majority voting threshold for inclusionary zoning ordinances and bylaws at the local level.
“We know that we cannot solve the housing crisis with one bill, with one lump sum of money … but we can course correct. And I would argue that this bill is the most comprehensive course correction in Massachusetts history when it comes to housing policy,” Sen. Lydia Edwards, Senate chair of the Housing Committee, said as she introduced the bill Thursday morning.
Edwards projected the bill would prompt the creation of 40,000 housing units, a bite out of the 200,000-unit shortage Massachusetts faces. And while some senators touted the housing bill as historic in the scope of its bond authorization, the state is currently limited to about $400 million a year in capital spending on housing under its latest five-year capital budget.
‘Pivot From the Status Quo’
Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr echoed some of Edwards’ language in his opening remarks, saying the issue of housing policy is one with lots of bipartisan agreement because “we know that there has to be a paradigm shift in how we approach this.”
“This bill represents a pivot: a pivot from the status quo of passing bond bills, and bonding money, and producing housing. This is a pivot toward trying to address some of the fundamental issues that we must face; and those issues are many, and they’re complicated, and they’re intense. They involve ensuring that we have land use policy that allows the production of affordable units, they involved in ensuring that we have the infrastructure, whether it be in drinking water, or wastewater treatment, or transportation, to be able to support those units,” the Gloucester Republican said. “Because if we do one without the other, we will have failed to set the stage for the kind of production that we need.”
Housing in Massachusetts is inaccessible or unaffordable for many residents and Gov. Maura Healey last year identified housing as “the number-one issue facing this state.” Home sales across Massachusetts fell to a 12-year low in 2023. And while single-family home sales have been up each of the last two months, the increase in sales has not taken any pressure off the pricing side of the equation as a backlog of demand among house hunters keeps prices hovering at or near all-time highs.
Through May, there have been 14,005 single-family homes sold across all of Massachusetts in 2024, a 2.1 percent increase over the sales volume of the same five months of 2023, The Warren Group reported this month. Meanwhile though, the year-to-date median single-family home price has increased 9.3 percent to $590,000.
The next step for the governor’s top priority bill is very likely a six-person conference committee that could be tasked as soon as Monday with reconciling the House and Senate approaches into a compromise bill that would still need additional votes to get to Healey’s desk.
Closely-Watched Amendments Fizzled
The Senate bill does not include language to authorize local-option real estate transfer taxes, which more than a dozen communities are seeking to tax high-dollar property sales within their borders and generate money for affordable housing. The House also did not adopt the policy amid an intense lobbying campaign by real estate trade groups, meaning it is likely dead for this session.
Four senators filed nine different proposals to revive the measure Thursday, but all were either withdrawn or rejected. The idea of local option transfer taxes seemed to have legs this session, especially after the governor included the proposal in her initial housing bill.
Tenant advocates were critical of the bill Thursday, saying both the House and Senate housing bills would take meaningful steps towards expanding affordable housing options but do nothing for people who are currently struggling to stay in their Massachusetts homes.
“But even if all the housing envisioned in the bond bill is ultimately built, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the housing crisis that is forcing working people out on the street today,” Carolyn Chou, executive director of Homes for All Mass and a Dorchester renter, said. “Without immediate relief, tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents will be forced out of their homes by rising rents in the coming years, and we’ll continue to lose the working people who power our economy as they fall victim to predatory real estate speculators.”
Not included in the Senate bill is the $1 billion bond authorization to expand the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority’s service area including to the suburbs south of Boston, a priority for House Speaker Ronald Mariano. Sen. Jo Comerford, whose district includes some of the towns surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir which provides the water flowing east to the greater Boston area, said the Senate believed that there hadn’t been enough conversation about the potential for MWRA expansion.
Sen. Patrick O’Connor of Weymouth — the city where Mariano says the developer of the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station could build 6,000 homes if he just had access to MWRA water — offered but then withdrew an amendment that would have added the MWRA expansion bond authorization to the Senate bill.
Amendments are commonly withdrawn when their sponsors lack the votes to push them through.
In addition to the big jump in funding for housing projects that formed the bill’s core, Senators also voted to allow accessory dwelling units on most single-family lots by right across the state, adopting language earlier passed in the House that creates barriers advocates say will keep municipalities from creating de facto bans on ADUs.
“I am proud that Massachusetts will now have the strongest ADU law in New England. This meaningful piece of legislation allows homeowners to generate additional income or house loved ones with disabilities, aging family members, or young adults who might not otherwise be able to afford to live in the community where they were raised. This is the first of many wins for the pro-housing movement in Massachusetts,” Abundant Housing MA Executive Director Jesse Kanson-Benanav said in a statement.
