Why housing is a state issue
The most important issue to voters in Massachusetts, according to a recent poll, is housing.1
If you’re a city councillor or select board member in Massachusetts, you probably know that. You’ve been asked by residents to deal with housing prices. You been lobbied on preventing big condos from coming into town. You’ve struggled with inclusionary zoning numbers, tax incentives, and the panoply of acronyms that are associated with housing programs.
It has probably been one of the toughest parts of your job.
But it also shouldn’t be your job.
Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely a place for local involvement in housing decisions. City councillors, select board members, and planning board members have a role to play in housing. For something so connected to place is essential that a municipality is involved in it.
But the reason that Massachusetts has a crisis of affordability and a housing shortage is because, for too long, the state has not been involved enough in an issue that by its very nature crosses town lines.
How bad is it
We all know that housing is getting more expensive, but some charts from the Federal Reserve show how bad it is. Explore the data yourself here.
Here we have the House Price Index for Massachusetts from the 1970s to today. The average home price in 1980 is 100, so that means that prices today are 13 times what they were when Jimmy Carter was President. And they’ve doubled since the lows hit after the financial crisis.
Here we zoom into 2008 to today. You’ll notice a long upwards trajectory and then a post-COVID jump. When you think that home prices are crazy now, it’s not your imagination. This is not the kind of chart you want to see for the biggest part of the average person’s budget.
And what is the reason for the increase in prices? There are a number of factors, but the biggest one is the lack of housing construction we’ve seen over past decades. The Governor’s office says that we need 222,000 units built by 2035 to get out of the current deficit.
Here is a chart of new housing units permitted for Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Raleigh, and Austin that illustrates just how stark the difference is between us and faster-growing and cheaper cities.
The expensive cities failed to build for years, while in Austin and Raleigh, supply grew to meet demand.
The result is clear. On Zillow, here are the homes near our district that are 3-bed, 2-bath, and under $700k.
And here is a section of Raleigh just outside the downtown with those same filters.
Why local control becomes a collective action problem
So if we need to build more to add the supply needed to bring down the prices, why isn’t this happening already?
A good part of this is that we’ve turned housing from a necessary place for people to live into a collective action problem.
Here is a map from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, that covers 101 towns and cities in Greater Boston. It shows where multifamily housing is permissible by-right (dark yellow), where it requires a special permit (light yellow), and where it’s not allowed (brown). You can explore the map and other data here.
As you can see, most of Greater Boston, even though we have a housing shortage, does not allow multifamily housing by-right. New development is seen as a burden on a community - and since no one town can solve the region’s problem by themselves - it’s often seen as not worthwhile.
What the state needs to do
Over the course of the campaign, I’ll go into greater depth about all of the different approaches the state can take to housing. That includes legalizing multifamily housing by right across the state, speeding up permitting, and transit-oriented development.
But what I want to stress in this newsletter is that this is a state issue. If you care about housing, you need to care about what Beacon Hill is doing. And those on Beacon Hill should be doing more.
Housing can be a win-win issue. It’s one of the rare problems where solving it can bring down prices for renters and buyers, can increase values for homeowners, and creates additional revenue for the state to spend on other services.
But we have to actually solve the problem, rather than delaying.
