Gov. Charlie Baker, Senate President Karen Spilka, left, and House Speaker Robert DeLeo, right, applaud during Baker’s second inaugural speech Jan. 3, 2019. State House News Service Photo | Sam Doran

To anyone outside the Greater Boston bubble, the fact that Arlington County in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. recently green-lighted Amazon’s H2Q plans in only nine months would probably seem rather unremarkable.

But for anyone who has either followed the local development scene like I have or has tried to build something here, the Arlington County Board’s approval of a pair of 22-story towers in less than a year seems like nothing short of light speed.

In the strange world of Boston development, the most promising projects are also the ones that are most likely to get caught up in literally years of municipal red tape, endless appeals and a never-ending permitting process.

Just think of Fan Pier, which took a couple decades and chewed through a number of different developers before it finally got rolling.

Sometimes, by the time the project gets approval, the market has shifted, investors have fled, the “ground breaking” is nothing more than a photo-op for the local pols.

Which brings me to my point: It just takes too long to get anything done in Massachusetts as a whole, especially in the Boston area.

Home Prices a Problem Since ’90s

The same sluggish, no-need-to-rush and time-is-no-object atmosphere is not unique to the local permitting process, but pretty much pervades the response to all major challenges facing both the Boston area and the state as a whole.

Just take the housing crisis, which has unfolded like a slow-motion train wreck over two decades.

Home prices and rents started to go crazy in the late 1990s and, with a brief pause or two, haven’t stopped.

There’s no mystery as to what’s driving up real estate values, with single-family and multifamily construction dropping sharply in the 1990s and not fully recovering since then.

And everyone knows the solution: build more housing and, just as crucially, reform local zoning and permitting rules that bottle up so many badly needed proposals and projects.

In fact, everyone knew the solution way back in the early 2000s, when groups like the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization began raising the alarm about soaring prices and rents and the dearth of affordable housing.

MBTA workers surveyed the scene of a Red Line derailment on June 11, 2019 at the JFK/UMass station. Repairing damage from the incident snarled subway service for months afterwards and led to a scathing independent audit of the T’s safety practices. State House News Service Photo | Chris Lisinski

And what does the Massachusetts legislature do? Well, to date, nothing.

Now that might change, with signs that lawmakers may finally take up Gov. Charlie Baker’s modest proposal to eliminate the rule that requires a supermajority of local voters or electeds to change zoning rules, an almost impossible standard for most housing proposals to meet.

Still, it’s a far cry from a full-scale housing reform bill, with no signs of anything like that winning approval on Beacon Hill in the near future.

We Saw Traffic Crisis Coming

The same pattern can be seen in the state’s response to the growing transportation gridlock that has made the daily commute pure hell for hundreds of thousands of people across Eastern Massachusetts.

Again, everyone saw this coming – I remember writing a story back in 1998 looking at how Boston-area companies were increasingly weighing traffic when deciding where to lease office space.

And the MBTA’s reliability – or lack thereof – has been slow and steadily building crisis for years now.

Why is there no fire in the bellies of our elected leaders? My suspicion: There is no better place to live in the world than Greater Boston, provided you have money.

Back in the 1980s, both the commuter rail and the subway system offered a fairly reliable and reasonably priced alternative to getting around the Boston area.

But after decades of disinvestment, mainly by Republican governors and a legislature long-controlled by tight-fisted, fiscally conservative and terribly short-sighted Democrats, the only time people use words like “on-time,” “on-schedule” or “reliable” are used in connection with the name of our largest transit agency is in the punchlines of jokes.

Baker has slowly risen the challenge posed by our traffic-clogged highways and byways and our reliably unreliable public transportation system, but we are now a year into his second term.

Like the legislature and its inaction on the housing crisis, it’s fair to ask what took Baker so long to get with the program.

What’s Going On?

What’s with the lack of urgency? Why is there no fire in the bellies of our elected leaders?

I wish I had an answer, but I don’t.

My suspicion: There is no better place to live in the world than Greater Boston, provided you have money.

With enough money, you don’t have to worry about contending with 10 other bidders for the right to spend $800,000 on a modest split-level in some town like Natick or Medford that was once a middle-class haven.

And if you have the kind of money needed to spend a cool million or two on a house, you are also not likely depending on the commuter rail or subway to get to work every day.

Baker, who famously declines to take the T, lives in a picturesque, 19th-century Victorian in Swampscott now worth $1.2 million, having bought it for $750,000 in 1999.

Scott Van Voorhis

If the governor had to take the commuter rail to work, or was hoping to buy a new home but unable to afford something bigger, he might just have a little more motivation when it comes to these bread-and-butter issues.

And while no one is getting rich off their salary as a state representative or state senator, more than a few have lucrative law practices on the side.

Many incumbents have served for years, if not decades, and, having bought their homes years ago, are not likely all that connected with the struggles of their constituents in the housing market.

Crazy home prices and broken trains are middle-class problems that may not seem so pressing if you can coast along above the struggles that face us ordinary folk.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.