Jonathan Berk

Massachusetts is failing to provide the housing it needs to support a growing, evolving economy. This fact is not up for debate and, consistently when polled, Massachusetts voters rate housing availability and affordability as the largest issue negatively impacting their lives today. The solution is to rethink our processes, modernize our building codes and embrace a small, local development workforce to build the housing of the future our communities need.

We’re between 100,000 and 200,000 units shy of today’s housing demands to provide a stable, accessible, housing market and that number may approach 400,000 units in the next two decades. Not adequately addressed today, this will stunt businesses’ ability to grow in the region, eventually leading to a contracting economy. In a perfect world, the landmark MBTA Communities law would still leave us shy of even our current housing demands.

We also know that every unit “allowed” by MBTA Communities won’t be built and, in fact, the vast majority of units allowed “by-right” by the law will never be built as existing situations on the land like topography, existing long-term tenancies, high costs of capital and increasing costs of construction will all serve as barriers.

Even towns complying with the letter of the law are missing compliance with its spirit: “If the state is telling me to do something, I’m going to comply, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to make it easy to develop. It’s making as many barriers to entry as possible,” said Chelmsford Planning Board member Annita Tanini at a Feb. 28 public hearing.

While the MBTA Communities law is an important piece of a needed, broader housing policy rethink. We cannot view it as the sole solution. Today’s crisis is the product of decades of failed, overly restrictive housing policies. Our systems are not set up to produce the housing we need to support a growing region. To position Massachusetts for a stable housing future, we have to be willing to think bigger and be bolder in our policies.

 A Complete Rethink Of Land Use Patterns

A major cause of the housing shortage in Massachusetts is just how much land is devoted to unsustainable suburban sprawl and how close that ring of large-lot, single-family-only zoning exists in proximity is to Boston.

Boston is hemmed in by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and to the west by suburbs that experienced a wave of downzoning in the ʼ70s and ʼ80s, making it so burdensome to build that any new home would need to go through a costly, unpredictable review process. As many communities have found out, even the existing neighborhoods that some fight so hard to protect could not be built under today’s overly restrictive zoning.

We have to embrace efforts to rezone our main streets and downtowns where walkable, infill development can be located, incentivizing more dense infill development in these locations in order to provide the housing we need today while avoiding the mistakes of the past 60 years of economically, socially, and environmentally damaging and inequitable sprawl.

But this kind of “missing middle” infill development won’t become widespread without important changes to an archaic entitlements process.

Make It Easier to Build

Permitting costs can be up to 20 percent of the total budget and much of that is put on the line in consultant fees, at risk if a project does not get approval. Many small local developers are unable to put that sort of capital on the line, precluding a wave of needed missing middle housing developments in Massachusetts that can offer reasonably priced new homes.

Faced with a rapidly growing housing crisis and a need to protect their vast wilderness, Montana’s conservative leadership moved quickly to adopt statewide zoning and permitting reform last year aimed at streamlining the review process, allowing more by-right missing middle housing and cutting out some of the more arbitrary, lengthy, and often subjective reviews a project must go through.

In Vermont, a 2023 bipartisan bill allowed duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes by-right on any lot statewide served by existing utilities like water and sewer. A Republican member of the Kentucky Legislature has proposed a new bill to not only allow four-units by right statewide but employ a 60-day “shot clock” to require local officials to move on permit requests quickly.

Unforeseen fees and hidden delays in the approval process can quickly send a small development project south and a “shot clock” would help not only speed projects along but ensure that more certainty can be built into the costs of development, particularly meaningful to smaller projects with razor-thin margins.

The extent, breadth and severity of a problem decades in the making demands a level of unmatched response, innovative approaches, cross-sector collaboration and outside-the-box thinking that we have not seen to date in Massachusetts. It’s time for all of us to work together, collectively to meet this moment head-on, embracing new ideas and most importantly change to set us on a course for a better future commonwealth.

Jonathan Berk is the founder of re:Main, a new organization working with public and private sector partners to enhance our walkable neighborhoods, and a board member of Abundant Housing Massachusetts.