Interesting Subject in a Regulatory Review

Massachusetts has a state law that requires each town to strive for 10% affordable housing. Affordable housing is defined by rent or mortgage payments that is based on a percentage of the mean income of that particular town. If that is not met, there is a program called 40B where any developer can get zoning relief if he makes 25% of the development affordable (must stay that way for an eternity), they must be equal to the other houses, and they have to sell one affordable before they can sell the corresponding three market rate units. I don’t know any community that has reached the 10%. Most people get upset when a “40B” is proposed near them simply because it does not fit the zoning of the area and seems a lot more to do with letting a developer build more rather than achieving the 10%.

All of the local, regional, and state government agencies are very much motivated to provide (or have someone else provide) affordable housing. There are many non-profits and busy activists as well in this area. You don’t hear too much “not in my community” , but plenty of “not in my back yard”. Everyone is all for it in concept, but when reality gets too close, look out.

Housing was a big problem here a few years ago as vacation homes were selling like hot cakes and being flipped left and right. Few people rented out homes to year ’round workers because they could rent out by the week in the summer and save a couple of weeks for their own use and get the same money. There was a big shortage of labor, so many businesses brought in J1 visa students from eastern Europe and Ireland or H2B (?) temporary work visa laborers from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

Now we have lots of empty houses from foreclosures, a drop in weekly rentals, and many empty apartments and houses. We also have many empty business space due to business failure. We have also had a drop off in the immigrant population – many went back to Brazil according to newspaper articles. There are shortages of jobs instead of workers.

I should re-iterate that they did wave this affordable housing impact review and will not discuss mitigation (by a 4-3 vote).

It was not the town. It is “a regional land use planning and regulatory agency that eas created in 1990 to serve the citizens of the 15 towns of Barnstable County”. This town has come close to getting out of it’s jurisdiction on at least one occaision. Elsewhere is not an option unless they move it more than 30 miles and four towns away because it would otherwise still fall in their jurisdiction.

Again, clearer heads did prevail and they will not seek mitigation and the $20k number was given to me from a second hand source so that I can not verify the validity of that amount.

40B is more beneficial to builders than anyone else, in my opinion, because they can cram a lot more houses into a development and land is scarcer here than many other places (my town was established in 1663 and is 17 square miles – pretty well built out). I would suggest that those who do math and support it are builders (and those involved in the administration or “non-prophit” groups with paychecks involved) and those who support it because they think it will get to a 10% affordable housing rate are emotional and not doing the math. When I do the math using an assumption of 10,000 housing units with 9% currently affordable (900 units), it would take the construction of 648 40B units with no other building going on in order to make 10%. That is a 6.5% growth in housing units to close a 1% deficit of affordardable units. That does not sound like a solution to me.

On the other hand, other big winners with all this regulation are those of us in land planning offices who have to produce the plans, reports, advocacy, and revisions due to the hoops these developers have to go through. I’m stating a fact rather than saying that it is good. There is a lot more work out there dealing with this type of stuff on a day to day basis than there is designing roof gardens or pocket parks if anyone is having trouble finding a niche.