It’s well more than four decades since the Bay State passed a sweeping law meant to bust up snob zoning, but the snobs and their warped zoning are still with us.

In fact, if anything, the housing snobs have gotten even snobbier, bent on zoning out not just subsidized apartments, but even more modestly priced homes attractive to middle class families with children.

The price for this insanely restrictive zoning is plain to see, with Massachusetts home prices gone wild again, spawning legions of frustrated buyers and revived concerns about a brain drain.

Now hopefully two new reports, one an exposé of New England’s dirty little zoning secret, the other an analysis of the pitiful state of housing construction in our state, will put our local housing snobs on the hot seat once again.

“These local barriers to home construction artificially limit supply and unnecessarily drive up the cost of a new home beyond the reach of the average family,” said Mike McDowell, president of the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts lawmakers first tried to put an end to snob zoning in the late 1960s, back when revelations were just starting to surface about redlining and attempts by white suburbs to keep minority homeowners and renters out of town.

40B A-OK

The Legislature put its foot down in 1969, passing Chapter 40B. The act gives builders with plans to include subsidized homes or apartments in their projects the power to make an end run around local zoning rules.

The only way a town or city can avoid triggering this penalty is to reach a point where 10 percent of all the homes and apartments in town are deemed “affordable.”

But the quotas, as farseeing as they were at the time, apparently have done little to expunge the fear, hate and paranoia that lurk in the hearts of too many suburban homeowners and local town board potentates.

In “Snob Zones,” New York Times real estate reporter Lisa Prevost takes an unflinching look at some of the ugly fears that all too often drive opposition to new housing across New England.

In Massachusetts, Prevost focuses on Easton. The upscale town next to Brockton rejected cottage-style homes, with neighborhood opponents arguing the 1,000-square-foot homes would create a “mini ghetto” and a “glorified trailer park.”

No matter that the developer had hoped to sell the market-rate units for $250,000 to $340,000.

“Even though the workforce housing of today bears no resemblance to the public housing high-rises of the past – the poster child being Chicago’s notoriously crime-ridden Cabrini-Green – local opposition is still one of the greatest impediments to its construction,” Prevost writes.

Having covered real estate locally for many years myself, I can recall more than a few scenes like that over the years.

I still can’t get out of my head the soccer mom at a town meeting in the western suburbs who said she was “terrified” by the prospect of rental housing being built in her comfortable suburb.

Renters and their broods would come and go in revolving door fashion, creating chaos and confusion in the classroom, she pleaded.

Nor has the old 40B law been enough to dismantle all those devilishly ingenuous barriers to housing construction that towns across Massachusetts just keep throwing up.

The fact is, even with 40B, the housing shortage – and the pressure that it is putting on home prices and rents – is only growing worse.

Just check out of some of these numbers the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts recently put out.

While the economy has been on the mend in Massachusetts for the past four years, new home construction has remained flat, skidding along at anemic levels.

The low point came in 2011, when builders pulled just 4,899 single-family permits, the lowest amount ever recorded for the state. The average has been just 5,300 new homes per year, HBAM reports.

That’s a far cry from the 1980s, when builders were regularly pulling permits for 24,000 new homes each year. And guess what? We were hardly a hotspot for housing construction even then, with the number of homes built across Massachusetts in the 1980s about average nationally, according to the builders group.

Enough is enough. It’s time to ditch snob zoning once and for all or face a future in which homeownership in Massachusetts becomes a millionaires’ club. 

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com