Incredibly, you can add the humble three-bedroom apartment to the list of undesirable development towns and suburbs across Massachusetts want to ban.
Just 6 percent of all apartments built in the last decade under the Bay State’s affordable housing law were three bedrooms. By contrast, roughly a quarter of the rental market across the Northeast is made up of rentals that are at least three-bedrooms or larger.
It’s hardly due to lack of demand. A shortage of apartments of all sizes has made Massachusetts one of the most expensive places on the planet to rent in.
Rather, small town and suburban politicians are pressuring developers to ditch plans for three-bedroom units and instead stick with smaller, one- and two-bedroom units.
After all, they just might be appealing to families with children, which, based on the actions of local officials, appear to be just as unwelcome in many Bay State communities as toxic waste and methadone clinics.
“The bias against multifamily housing and school children from rental properties is enormously strong,” said John Connery, a longtime Melrose-based housing consultant who works with communities and developers.
The pushback against three-bedrooms can be seen in communities across the state.
In fact, it has gotten so bad that the state is preparing to mandate that three-bedrooms make up at least 10 percent of all new apartments built under Chapter 40B, the state’s long-standing affordable housing.
The most recent battles have taken place in the suburbs of Boston.
In Walpole, Bayberry Homes dropped plans to include three-bedroom apartments in its proposed, 174-unit housing complex after getting some very strong hints from town officials.
By contrast, in Norton, the chairman of the local board of selectmen backed off on a push to ban three-bedrooms from a proposed new apartment complex after hearing about the pending move by the state.
Local officials talk a good talk about trying to protect constituents from rising school costs.
One local nabob was incredulous after it became clear I wasn’t ready to jump on the anti-rental housing bandwagon with him.
“Of course,” he replied, as if to a slow learner, when asked if his opposition to three-bedrooms was related to concerns that families with children might be moving in.
“It just makes commonsense if you have more bedrooms, you are going to have more children,” he said.
Hot Air
But that argument is getting weaker by the year, with studies by UMass-Boston and Tufts having exposed these arguments as so much hot air.
UMass-Boston’s Donahue report found that school costs in communities across the state rose and fell independent of enrollment trends, going up at times even in cases where student enrollment dropped.
What’s really happening is just small-town politics and demagoguery at its worst, driven by fear of change and outright ugly attitudes about renters and, worse still, their children.
Clearly, in the minds of some small-town pols, every new apartment complex is a potential urban-style housing project filled with Section 8 tenants, even if families are having to fork over $1,500 or more a month in rent.
But laughable or not, such attitudes are helping distort our state’s already highly distorted housing market, helping drive up rents for everyone, including families with children.
There is already a dire shortage of apartments across the state, let alone without town and local officials trying to top anything larger than two-bedroom from getting built.
New apartment and condo construction is struggling to emerge out of a decades-long slump. While 5,191 units were given approval by towns and cities across the state in 2012, it was just half of the 10,000 multi-family units Gov. Deval Patrick has declared are needed to keep up with current and future demand.
Not surprisingly, Massachusetts is the seventh most expensive state in the country for renters, with the average two-bedroom costing $1,271 a month, the National Low Income Housing Coalition finds.
Once you strip away the BS and get to what’s really going on here, there’s lots of room for outrage here.
In fact, this is an issue that should unite both liberal affordable housing activists and conservatives who put their faith in the free market, a category developers are more likely to fall into.
First, there is a moral issue, with local officials effectively discriminating against families with children. No, it’s not exactly like a landlord who says, “Thanks, but no thanks, but I just don’t want kids in my building” – and there are still plenty of those jerks out there.
But it’s damn close. You have local officials basically stopping construction of apartments for the sole reason that families with children would be more likely to rent them out. If the units aren’t there because of boneheaded local housing policies, it’s all not that much different than some mother and her young children being turned away by some bigoted landlord.
However, free market advocates should also be lobbying hard to open up our state’s incredibly overregulated housing market as well.
A good part of our state’s chronic woes could be solved not by creating some new government initiative or program, but by simply demolishing the irrational maze of local zoning rules and regulations and letting the market do its thing.
There’s a huge market demand for housing of all types here in the Bay State, including three bedrooms.
But developers are effectively being prevented from serving this market and rightly profiting from the honorable work of building places for people to live,
Any way you look at it, trying to stop apartments from being built to keep children out is about is as low as you can go. And that we tolerate this nonsense, especially in this age of supposed hypersensitivity to discrimination of any kind, is just flat out amazing.
Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
