With the Legislature’s annual session concluded, a bill dealing with expired affordable housing was left unsettled. But advocates are vowing to bring the bill back for a vote next year, even as developer groups continue to voice caution about the proposal.
Sen. Kevin Honan, a Brighton Democrat who targeted the bill as a top priority as chair of the Joint Committee on Housing, said 27,000 affordable units are at risk of expiring in the next two years, and legislators don’t want to start losing ground on the state’s already scant supply of below market homes.
Other bills, such as the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s financial bail out, took center stage at the last minute during legislative session’s conclusion Aug. 1, preventing the housing bill, which already passed the Senate, from coming up, said Honan.
“It was my hope that the bill would have received favorable action,” said Honan. “I guess we still have some work to do.”
Among other things, the bill would require owners of affordable units to give the state and tenants 24 months advance notice before a unit’s affordable status is set to expire. The bill also allows the Department of Housing and Community Development, the state’s housing and community economic development agency, the right-of-first-refusal to buy or negotiate the purchase of the units. The step would allow the state or a designee the option of intervening and reselling the property in order to preserve its affordable status.
Aaron Gornstein, executive director for the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, said the affordable housing bill has been through a number of iterations over the last 10 years. But he is hopeful the current version of the bill will finally pass sometime in the near future. Earlier versions of the bill imposed greater sale provisions on developers, he said.
“I think that it’s a reasonable piece of legislation that I am optimistic will pass,” said Gornstein.
But members of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board are expressing reluctance about the bill and would ideally like to see it fail, said Patricia Balmer, government affairs director for the association. The bill raises complex issues about the future of the state’s housing, many of which need to be weighed before the legislation gains passage, she said.
A majority of members in the association also believe there’s an “untold story” lingering about this issue – namely, that many affordable home owners are already being proactive about retaining the affordable status of their housing units when they are sold, added Balmer.
Our members “feel that a lot of owners have been doing the right thing for a number of years,” said Balmer. “They feel that owners have been responsible, and they don’t see the urgent need to do something.”
