Supporters of the comprehensive permitting law were relieved that an effort to repeal the law was unsuccessful. The Village at Wildflower Green in Raynham is one of hundreds of developments that have been built using a comprehensive permit.

An effort to repeal the state’s chief affordable housing law has failed.

Opponents did not collect enough signatures to put a question on next year’s ballot asking voters to strike four key sections of Chapter 40B.

At least 66,593 signatures had to be collected to place the question on the ballot. A spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said 33,849 signatures were submitted to the Elections Division but of those only 31,309 were verified as allowable.

“I think this strikes at the heart of the credibility of [supporters of the petition],” said Mark Leff, president of Home Builders Association of Massachusetts, a chief supporter of the law. “They claimed they had 72,000 and it turns out they didn’t have even half of that. This is consistent with the misrepresentation of Chapter 40B that they’ve been spewing for months now.

“If these people had been successful it would have jeopardized, frankly, the state’s economy,” Leff added. “This is a very serious matter. I think the state government has taken steps to eliminate the gray areas of the program. With that done, 40B remains a viable way of providing not only affordable housing but also reasonably priced new housing that’s so desperately needed in this state.”

John Belskis, an Arlington resident who filed the petition, told Banker & Tradesman last week that about 72,000 signatures were submitted earlier this month. “We would’ve liked to go in with a lot more, but we had a short time [to collect signatures],” he said.

In a press release issued by the Coalition to Repeal 40B, Belskis said, “We continue to build support from the ground up because it’s clear that control over this issue on Beacon Hill is held by developers and special interest groups.”

Chapter 40B is a law that has been used by developers to build mixed-income housing in communities where less than 10 percent of the housing is affordable to lower-income households. Proponents of the repeal initiative have claimed the law is broken and more oversight is needed because developers have abused the law. They say the law strips away local control over growth and development.

But the law’s supporters say it has helped create thousands of units for low- and moderate-income families throughout the state that otherwise wouldn’t have been built.

“This is a very challenging issue facing the state: how to build more low- and moderate-cost housing. It’s a top priority, in my view, when it comes to what we’re doing with regard to the future health of our commonwealth,” said Tripp Jones, chairman of the Committee Against Repealing the Housing Law. “Frankly, my hope at this point is that we can now have a more rational process to go about making a good law better.”

The committee headed by Jones, formed earlier this month, includes influential business and civic leaders like Paul Guzzi, chief executive officer of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce; Gloria Larson, president of Bentley College; and former gubernatorial candidate Chris Gabrieli.

“That they were willing to recruit some of the state’s biggest insiders and power brokers to fight this effort shows the lengths to which they will go to preserve the status quo,” Belskis said in a prepared statement.

‘No Law Is Perfect’

Chapter 40B, passed in 1969, has generated plenty of controversy. Lawmakers have considered dozens of bills over the years to alter the law, and the state has approved various regulatory changes to address communities’ concerns.

“No law is perfect. There are certainly going to be issues with any law that’s trying to address the challenges that we’re talking about, and 40B is no exception,” said Jones, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassInc. “I’ve said this before: I think the ballot initiative is a very radical extreme overreaction that would have threatened in a very serious way our ability to address one of the most significant challenges facing the state.”

Ted Regnante, a Wakefield attorney who represents developers, said the initiative had a “very strong chilling effect” on Chapter 40B proposals.

“Since this has all happened, there have been very few new comprehensive permit applications that have been filed,” said Regnante, a senior partner at Regnante, Sterio & Osborne. “I, personally, in the last five months only saw one. I was getting maybe 12 to 15 a year.”

Regnante predicted that more Chapter 40B proposals will emerge now that the question won’t appear on next year’s ballot and because the state has proposed regulatory changes to the law, some of which are developer-friendly.

“Because of the combination of the failure to get on the ballot and these new regulations, I think you’re going to see a rebirth of 40b applications,” he said.

Regnante said he was very surprised that the petitioners didn’t collect enough signatures, noting he saw people gathering signatures at two 40B hearings he recently attended.

“The folks who were gathering signatures were there, so evidently they were watching the newspapers to find out where the hearings were,” he said.