As recreation for urban planners, land-use attorneys, policy analysts and newspaper columnists (from their special place in Heaven), the ballot initiative to repeal the state’s “affordable housing” law deserves top marks.
Chapter 40B has been long on theory and short on practice almost forever. Whether it gets voted down or not is of rather modest concern, except as a way to engage in the street theater of “concern” that the sort-of-poor will always be with us.
Those that champion 40B can stand tall, with rhetoric suggesting that social justice and real estate can join together in a big, group hug – while at the same time, winking to the developers and their accountants to tweak the numbers in such a way so that the 20 percent of the units in question that are supposed to go to low-income types might not actually add up to exactly 20 percent.
Those who oppose 40B can get all huffy and explain that local zoning and land-use rules are intended to be “local” – and that dreamy notions of socio-economic and racial integration sound a lot better in sociology class than they do in a snobby neighborhood that doesn’t even want pickup trucks in the driveways.
Of course, there is some (not much, but some) clarity at the heart of the 40B premise. Once one gets beyond murky notions of how “affordable” an affordable dwelling might be – and how far down the economic totem pole the target group must be to qualify – the reality is that on a range from homeless-in-the-park, to dreadful “public housing” complexes, everyone must live somewhere.
The affordable housing folks will be quick to explain that the beneficiaries aren’t necessarily drug addicts one step removed from rehab; that the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker often can’t find an “affordable” place to live a reasonable distance from where they work and play.
As the local zoning folks and assorted lawyers will tell you, when they think no one is listening, much of this good intention is lost in the real world, where developers sort-of embrace 40B as an excuse to trump local zoning laws – their reward for housing those with seemingly no “affordable” place to live.
Numbing Numbers
The end result, of course, is a bureaucratic nightmare in which 20 percent of the units in the development are matched up against 10 percent of the affordable units in the town, multiplied by the cost of Saudi crude oil on alternate Thursdays, divided by the cost of the affordable unit when some sneaky guy tries to flip it and it isn’t so affordable any more.
It is a situation that seems to cry out for the “invisible hand of the market” – an amoral, super-efficient hand, which, through a self-interested review of who needs what, can produce castles for newspaper publishers and one-room log cabins with no running water for columnists.
The obstacle to market solutions is primarily the very kinds of government apparatus that created “affordable housing.” A toxic mix of environmental regulation, “impact fees,” “smart growth” and traffic engineers conspires against the very notion of affordable housing, especially in the neurotic Northeast.
It was Tim Rowland, an amusing writer with a libertarian touch, who noted a few years ago that “public housing may be the only government construction project that draws greater cheers when it comes down than when it goes up.” That’s true, but the challenge comes when it is time to scatter the inhabitants hither and yon to other neighborhoods.
Whether the public perceives the beneficiaries of “affordable housing” to be the “poor,” or the public school teacher who helped little Johnny learn how to read, is the silent variable to the 40B debate.
In our hearts, we are just a little bit snobby and clannish. One of the charming, if somewhat dull, features of much residential housing in America is that clusters of similar folks live next door and down the street from each other, and – “diversity” be damned – we like that just fine.
I have to stop now. It’s time to mow the lawn at the publisher’s castle. It’s the only way I can afford my log cabin.
