A pair of ballot questions very likely to go before voters next fall offer starkly different visions of how to fix the state’s housing problems. iStock illustration

As home prices and rents soar, the Bay State finds itself at a crossroads, with voters boiling over with frustration as costs escalate in almost every segment of their lives.

And housing tops the list, as the state’s top elected officials have recognized for years now.

Multiple governors have preached the gospel of housing production: If we boost the supply of new houses, apartments and condominiums to meet demand, costs will come down, the argument has been.

It’s certainly worked in other cities and states like Texas and South Carolina.

Yet rhetoric hasn’t been matched with the kind of bold – and politically risky – action on the scale needed to actually push the cost needle back down.

The biggest initiative passed to date – MBTA Communities – won’t come close to fixing the supply problem. At best, we’ll get maybe 40,000 new units out of the 2021 law, not the hundreds of thousands once predicted, Boston Indicators Executive Director Luc Schuster has been preaching for over a year, now.

It’s against this backdrop of rising frustration and mounting pocketbook pressures that Massachusetts voters next year could very likely face two radically different proposals for tackling the housing crisis.

Ballot Initiatives Hit Milestones

The two ballot initiatives are as different as can be in their approaches to rein in runaway housing costs.

One would slap a 5 percent cap on rent increases – likely less if inflation stays at its current level. The cap would not just apply in  Boston, Brookline and Cambridge, which once had rent control, but in every city and town across the state.

The other would lower housing costs by demolishing local zoning restrictions that stifle the construction of new, single-family “starter homes.”

Last week, advocates for these dueling plans both announced they had collected enough signatures to pass one of the biggest hurdles to getting on next fall’s ballot.

Backed by the state’s powerful teachers and service workers unions, rent control group Homes for All Massachusetts announced it had rounded up more than 124,000 signatures from voters for its sweeping statewide proposal, well more than the required 74,574.

For its part, the Legalize Starter Home campaign fired off a press release stating it had collected more than 100,000 signatures for its ballot question, which would bring down prices by boosting the supply of modestly-sized and priced homes.

For what it’s worth, state election officials still need to certify that all those signatures are valid and come from registered voters, but those sizable hauls make it fairly likely neither campaign will have a problem.

Rent Controllers Grab the Headlines

So far, it’s the rent control activists who are grabbing all the headlines in the local mainstream media, even as they push an idea that would make the housing crisis 10 times worse.

The announcement by Homes for All Massachusetts of their massive signature haul was duly reported by the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Worcester Telegram, CommonWealth Beacon, Banker & Tradesman – you name it.

When it comes to developing new rental housing, rent control laws are toxic. There is a long history, both in the Boston area, in California, in New York City and in other mostly blue cities and states, of rent control regs throttling plans for new apartment buildings and towers. Statewide trade group MassLandlords has assembled much of the sordid local story at RentcControlHistory.com.

One only has to look at Boston, where new market-rate apartment construction cratered after Boston Mayor Michelle Wu began pushing her own rent control plan amid soaring interest rates and construction costs, to see what a renewal of rent control could do.

“This policy has failed EVERYWHERE it has been implemented, decimating the economic backbone of those communities,” the Small Property Owners Association said in a statement.

Even Boston’s Mayor Concerned

And Wu’s plan was relatively flexible compared to the one being pushed by Homes for All, which Bloomberg News calls the “strictest” in the country.

The proposal would limit rent hikes to the Consumer Price Index, with a maximum increase of 5 percent.

In fact, even Wu herself has expressed concerns, saying during an appearance on GBH News’ “Boston Public Radio” show last week that she would have preferred the law be a local option, not a statewide mandate.

New apartment construction has lagged for decades in Massachusetts. And rental construction is already poised for a major drop-off over the next few years as developers face ongoing challenges with financing and costs.

Now just imagine what would happen if rent control were to be thrown into the mix.

“The risks of this ballot question for our economy cannot be overstated,” the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and NAIOP Massachusetts said in a joint statement last week.

Scott Van Voorhis

‘Starter Homes’ Campaign’s Positive Vision

By contrast, the Legalize Starter Homes, led by housing researcher Andrew Mikula, has been covered from the start by this newspaper, CommonWealth Beacon and by me in my Contrarian Boston Substack newsletter, but pretty much ignored by other mainstream media outlets.

That pattern continued, even as the group announced on Wednesday that it had collected more than enough signatures to get its pro-housing supply question on the 2026 ballot.

That news failed to spark much interest in the local media, despite the proposal’s potential to significantly boost the supply of lower-priced single-family homes in Massachusetts.

As it stands now, our insane housing costs are driving young professionals in their 20s and 30s to Florida, New Hampshire and other states where it is actually possible to buy a house in the suburbs without a six-figure salary.

Legalize Starter Homes wants to tear down NIMBY regs that have effectively made it impossible to build old-fashioned ranches and Capes on small lots, at a time when dozens of Boston-area suburbs have median prices of $1 million or higher.

Many local towns have minimum lot sizes of an acre – 43,560 square feet or more.

The proposal by Mikula and Legalize Starter Homes would bar local cities and towns from enforcing lot sizes larger than 5,000 square feet in residential districts with access to public sewer and water.

You could fit eight of those starter homes on 1-acre lot.

“In the midst of a generational housing crisis, this ballot question … will make it easier for first-time homebuyers, downsizing seniors, and working families to attain homeownership by updating outdated zoning rules that make modest homes nearly impossible to build,” Mikula said in a statement.

So will Massachusetts voters decide to raze the state’s future, or build it up? Stay tuned.

Email: Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.