Obviously, I am fond of data.  My go-to sources range from the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing (research), MAPC (policy) and their DataCommon, the UMass Donahue Institute (town data) and the American Community Survey (demographics).  There are also some great annual reports like the Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card.  A new addition this year is MassInc’s Inaugural Gateway Cities Housing Monitor.

Both the Report Card and the Housing Monitor provide data on how things are changing for better or worse.  This year they are, not surprisingly, reporting a drop-off in housing production, putting us even further behind demand, and continuing impediments to new housing production.  Both provide direct and easy-to-understand descriptions of why workforce housing in the Commonwealth isn’t viable without subsidy and how the high cost of property, permitting and labor places rent and home prices far beyond what most working people can afford.

What is not made clear by either of them is why there is a housing crisis.   People like me, public officials, and the media keep saying there isn’t enough housing.  But for people who are not land use professionals, it can seem like there is an awful lot of new construction. I suspect that it is confusing to many folks.

Indeed, the relationship between supply, demand, demographics, and what it takes to build is opaque at best.  Most people only get to see what’s happening in their immediate surroundings and certainly don’t consider how their own decisions about who they live with (or don’t) impacts the housing markets.  Seen that way, NIMBYism is almost understandable.

Maybe we aren’t putting information out in a way that people understand.  The data is reliable, but it lacks the context necessary to make our case.  Here is an example of this from each report.

In the Housing Report Card, there is an extensive, data-rich discussion about public housing.  In bold, at the top of page 55, it states that “Nearly half of all subsidized rentals in Greater Boston are one-bedrooms or smaller.” That is factually correct and without context it might seem like a problem.

Any discussion of current demographics would make it clear why public housing is the way it is.  The number of people living in each household has dropped in every census since WWII, both across the country and in Massachusetts.  The 2020 census tells us that almost 60% of Massachusetts’s population lives in one and two person households and 51% of the population is 55+.  In that context, having half of the state’s subsidized housing be for one- and two-person households makes perfect sense.

Further down that page, the report says “Subsidized rentals in Greater Boston are heavily skewed toward smaller units…. In contrast, less than 20 percent of the overall housing stock in the Boston MSA falls into this category.”  While interesting, I’m not sure this comparison is meaningful in a state with some of the oldest housing stock in the country.  Single family houses and apartments with 3+ bedrooms were built for the much bigger families that are less numerous than in 1950.  Indeed, MAPC reported years ago that we likely have enough homes for families across the state.  Unfortunately people without children at home, like me, are living in them.

MassInc’s report reaches beyond Boston to the Commonwealth’s 26 Gateway cities that provide nearly two-thirds of the state’s naturally occurring affordable housing.  It draws attention to many positive developments including ten years of housing growth in 23 of them. It provides interesting statistics, such as even that increasing supply hasn’t kept up with demand.  It provides insights I’ve never thought about before, like how more than 60% of this new supply was created in single homes, rather than in more commonly discussed multi-family buildings.

The Gateway cities turn out to have an interesting problem.  MassInc reports there are around 23,000 long-term vacant units in these 26 cities.  While demographers and the Census Bureau expect about 3% of existing housing stock to fall out of use every 10 years, 23,000 is well outside that range.  Adding these units back into the housing supply would meet almost 60% of the Gateway City housing shortage without the feared, negative community character impacts of new construction.  Funding renovation instead of new construction might be less glamourous or headline making, but it would seem like a great tool for those communities.

This is the kind of information that explains the why of the housing crisis.  That population growth is only one of many demand drivers would, I suspect, be a surprise for many with NIMBY tendencies.  They also might be surprised to learn that many new housing units are taken by empty nesters previously living in houses that are larger than they need and who want smaller, affordable homes in the communities they love.  And very few people have heard that a lot of our current housing demand is driven by less people living in each household, since folks in their late 20’s and early 30’s don’t want roommates while they wait to get married and build a family later in life.

The Boston Foundation’s Report Card concludes with a plea to free up land for housing by making government property available.  Local, state, and federal governments all have major land holdings that are not needed for any current public purpose, so why not use it for new housing? This makes a lot of sense in state where most of communities have been “built-out” for decades and land cost is a major cost burden for both rental housing and home ownership.

But it’s complicated.  The Boston Foundation goes into great detail about 30B, the state law governing how excess property is divested.  Without repeating their careful analysis, 30B first requires offering underutilized land to other government agencies or local communities, making the process expensive, cumbersome, and time consuming.  In the past, it has also been effectively used as a convenient, legal pathway to prevent new housing.

As the Report Card points out, there is a lot of underutilized public land which could be made available to deal with this crisis.  Indeed, both the State and City of Boston are actively identifying property appropriate for housing.  Unfortunately, it turns out that much it is not where the housing demand is or is made up of distributed parcels that are just too small for 30B to make sense. Or it they are encumbered by environmental and historical restrictions.  Or just plain lack the infrastructure like water and sewer needed to make housing economically viable.

Even if, as the Report Card hopes, 5% of this land is appropriate for housing, the existing 30B process is so cumbersome and time-consuming as to make it economically infeasible for all but the largest developments.  It is not designed for the small, in-fill development that many communities might be more welcoming of, and it certainly is not friendly to the small, community-based builders who created all those triple-deckers the working class has lived in for the last 100 years.

If this is a housing crisis, then 30B should be reformed by making housing the top priority for excess land.  There are a number of relatively simple changes that would help, including:

• Giving housing the highest priority for the disposition of excess land;
• Offer smaller, scattered parcels to housing authorities, community development corporations and local developers to build workforce housing, prior to those sites being made available to agencies or local governments;
• Offer excess land appropriate for workforce housing to both public and private developers at no cost so long as they guarantee a higher percentage of subsidized units. Too many agencies use 30B as a way to raise funds, the purchase price often indirectly being paid through other project-based housing subsidies.  It’s like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another.
• Authorize agencies who have land without currently identified needs to create Public Private Partnerships (PPP) whereby they lease, rather than sell, land for housing development. This would retain the land for future government use while creating more housing in the short term, which some state organizations like colleges and universities may need for their current staff and students.

This last option has other advantages.  Even with the historic opportunities created by the Affordable Homes Act, much of the state’s bonding cap is spoken for, paying for other critical public services.  As both reports make clear, no workforce housing anywhere in Massachusetts is economically viable without subsidy and most of those subsidies come from bonds.  Using land value as a source of subsidy that doesn’t impact the bond cap might be a way to do more with less.

Housing report cards are important and we are lucky to have so many great organizations willing to spend their time and resources to create them.  Now it’s up to us to use them wisely.

Author’s note:  I want to thank Carol Gladstone, former commissioner of the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAM), Susan Connelly, COO of Housing Opportunities Limited, and Jennifer Gilbert of Housing Navigator for their thoughts and input on this subject.

Please send any reactions, comments, or ideas to Scott at [email protected].