Editorial: Will agreement on housing needs push production?

A University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB poll released Monday reinforced what just about everyone already knew – lack of affordable housing represents the most pressing issue facing the state.

It would appear that House leadership agrees with that assessment, to the point of significantly increasing Gov. Maura Healey’s far-reaching housing production proposal.

Given the chance to name one issue they would like the governor and the Legislature to tackle in the next year, 34% of those polled pointed to the state’s “housing shortage and affordability” crisis.

And residents seem open to a number of ways to address the problem; all six policy proposals polled won the support of a majority of respondents.

The five-year, $4.12 billion housing bond bill (H.4138) Healey filed in the fall to kick-start production of new housing units has been redrafted by the House Ways and Means Committee and scheduled for debate today.

The House bill, a substantial expansion of the governor’s proposal, combines $6.2 billion in borrowing and tax credits with policy reforms designed to spur much-needed production.

Out of the financial reach for many residents, home sales across Massachusetts sank to a 12-year low in 2023, due in part to a lack of inventory.

Surprisingly, those surveyed wouldn’t point fingers at public officials for the critical lack of housing production.

“Many would assume that the governor – who has been at the helm for the most recent acceleration in the state’s housing market – or her predecessor, who occupied the office for eight years and helped to usher in the resuscitation of the Massachusetts miracle, would be blamed for the housing crisis,” said poll director Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst. “Yet only 5% of the state’s residents hold Gov. Healey responsible for the housing and a paltry 1% lay the blame with former Gov. Charlie Baker.”

Instead, close to 3 in 10 (29%) of the UMass Amherst/WCVB Poll’s respondents pin the blame for the commonwealth’s high cost of housing on high interest rates.

The governor last year identified housing as “the number-one issue facing this state,” and said a shortage of 200,000 units across the commonwealth must be closed to keep up with population growth and stem the outflow of talented workers.

The housing policy idea that received the greatest poll support (73% strongly or somewhat strongly support) involved providing tax breaks for the conversion of empty office buildings into housing, something Healey included in her bill.

The second-most supported policy was one that Healey didn’t propose: allowing local governments to limit annual rent increases (72% strongly or somewhat).

Residents also support allowing accessory dwelling units by right in single-family zoned districts (66% strongly or somewhat), tax breaks for developers who build more low-income housing (66% strongly or somewhat), and allowing cities and towns to tax real estate transactions valued at more than $1 million to raise money for local affordable housing (62% strongly or somewhat).

The House’s redraft of Healey’s bill agrees with the governor and poll respondents in allowing accessory dwelling units by right, and helping cities and towns convert vacant commercial properties into multi-family residential or mixed-use units, but appears to part ways with Healey and those surveyed on efforts to create a local-option tax on high-price real estate transactions to fund affordable housing initiatives.

The governor’s own estimates suggested the transfer tax would create only 3,200 units over the next five years.

Beyond that, the bill the House Ways and Means Committee moved Monday also includes $1 billion for potentially expanding the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s system to the Ipswich River Basin and the South Shore.

Speaker Ron Mariano’s office said the water system expansion would “facilitate an increase in housing development outside the Greater Boston area.”

There had been studies to expand the MWRA system into Chelmsford, Acton and other northwest Boston suburbs to expand areas suitable for housing, but that’s apparently off the table in the House bill.

In a statement shared by Mariano’s office, Housing Committee Co-chair Jim Arciero, a Westford Democrat, described the borrowing bill’s bottom line as “the largest housing investment in state history.”

House Democrats want to steer $2 billion — $500 million more than Healey proposed — toward repair, rehabilitation and modernization of the state’s roughly 43,000-unit public housing stock, much of which lies in a state of disrepair.

Healey’s office estimated the combination of funding and reforms in her bill could generate more than 40,000 units of housing. It was not immediately clear Monday whether House Democrats have a similar projection for their own proposal.

The governor, one branch of the Legislature and a sampling of the people have spoken.

All want an ambitious, concerted push to make a significant dent in the lack of housing. Beacon Hill can’t do much on its own to alter the course of interest rates, but it can implement incentive policies to demonstrably ramp up housing production.

The only question remains: how soon and how much?