The Continuing Conversation on Housing in Massachusetts

Today's episode is a second conversation on housing in Massachusetts. In this episode, we talk about recent shifts in households by income levels and gentrification. We dig into some space and infrastructure considerations and limitations. We talk about how people are planning regionally and the uniqueness of that in Massachusetts. We talk about how different types of government in different municipalities approach the issue differently. We talk about abundance and why Senator Brownsberger is a fan of the term. And then we touch on some of the federal impacts, emergency housing programs, possible 40B updates, and parking minimums. 

For more information and to share your thoughts, please head over to willbrownsberger.com. 

Transcript

Matt Hanna: 0:00

Welcome to the Will Brownsberger podcast. Hi, I'm producer Matt Hanna. In every episode I'll be sitting down with Massachusetts State Senator Will Brownsberger to explore some of the biggest issues facing the Commonwealth and its people. Last time we talked about housing in Massachusetts and today's episode stays on the same topic as we follow up on some feedback and questions that we got in response to the first episode. So I recommend you listen back to the first episode, titled How Do We Address the Housing Crisis in Massachusetts, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can listen to that first, to give you some ideas of where we have come from in this conversation previously.

Matt Hanna: 0:34

In this episode we talk about recent shifts in households by income levels and gentrification. We dig into some space and infrastructure considerations and limitations. We talk about how people are planning regionally and the uniqueness of that in Massachusetts. We talk about how different types of government in different municipalities approach the issue differently. We talk about abundance and why Senator Brownsberger is a fan of the term. And then we touch on some of the federal impacts, emergency housing programs, and parking minimums. So let's get into the conversation where Senator Brownsberger will address some of these topics. Any comments before I give you the first one here.

Will Brownsberger: 1:12

No, rock it to me. Looking forward to the questions, this issue is a central issue for us and it's also an incredibly difficult issue because there's a lot of trade-offs in reality, and so it's a continuing conversation and this is what we need to do.

Matt Hanna: 1:30

Yeah, all right. So the first one that I wanted to bring up to drive a bit of this conversation here is the opinion that you brought in that we need to build more housing is kind of the main way of addressing this issue, right? So I was looking at some of the numbers and, based on some of the feedback I got from other people, this whole trickle down concept or filtering concept, whichever is the proper term to use for this, is kind of something that people are trying to wrap their hands around and see how that is working and, if it is working, what numbers there are for that. And the idea of this trickle-down or filtering is that as we build this new housing, it is mostly for higher income people, those types of housing, correct?

Will Brownsberger: 2:01

Well, the fact is that new housing is incredibly expensive to build, so by definition it's not affordable. I mean, you buy a new home is on the low side $500,000, and it's really hard to go less than that. And I think most of them are 6 or 700,000 in the market space. And what we're actually spending in new public housing units, where we have a lot of rules and requirements on how those units are built, is much closer to a million. So a new housing unit is just expensive period. Unless somebody has a whole lot of help in getting it, it's going to be for middle income and up.

Matt Hanna: 2:33

Right. So that leaves us with this idea of filtering in which, as those new things are built, people who are taking up the housing that would be more affordable for those lower incomes, they move into that new housing. In theory, right?

Will Brownsberger: 2:47

Yeah, so there's an important data fact, which is this. There is housing out there in Massachusetts, according to the American Community Survey, where the rents are affordable to very low-income people or to low-income people, and those homes are currently occupied by people who are not low-income. So that exists out there. So to the extent we can create homes that attract middle to upper middle and up, then people can move up to those, make available homes they're currently keeping from the lowest-income people.

Matt Hanna: 3:24

So then, to build on that, then I was looking at one of the studies that you had mentioned in one of your posts from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, and I think it was taking data from the American Community Survey.

Will Brownsberger: 3:37

Most of their work does, or much of their work does.

Matt Hanna: 3:40

From 2010 to 2018, and it was talking about the renters households, all these different income ranges, and how those numbers have changed in that nine-year period. And it was saying, basically, renters or households of renters that make less than $15,000 went down 4,481. The next one, $15,000 to $30,000, went down 14,000 units. 

Will Brownsberger: 4:02

What's going down? 

Matt Hanna: 4:04

So this is the number of households. So we lost.

Will Brownsberger: 4:05

And it's the number of households in those income ranges. 

Matt Hanna: 4:08

In those income ranges.

Will Brownsberger: 4:09

And that's an inflation adjusted number, as I recall.

Matt Hanna: 4:13

Yes, I am looking at it. Incomes are adjusted for inflation.

Will Brownsberger: 4:16

Yeah, so the number of households in those income ranges went down in absolute terms, and I'm not quite sure what that means. But go ahead.

Matt Hanna: 4:25

So then, if we go up to the next range again $30,000 to $45,000 also went down in total number of households, 2,300. And then, once you get up to $45,000, it starts to level off minus 500 households. And then, when you get to households with renters $75,000 or more, it exploded by 73,461, a growth of 40%.

Will Brownsberger: 4:48

So that universe is Massachusetts as a whole.

Matt Hanna: 4:50

So this is the metro area.

Will Brownsberger: 4:52

Metro area, boston metro area, 

Matt Hanna: 4:54

Right.

Will Brownsberger: 4:55

Okay, see, so there's a couple of things going on there, right, and I'm not sure I can disentangle them fully in this conversation. But it's inflation adjusted, but it's not growth adjusted, I mean economic growth adjusted. So to the extent you have people, people becoming more prosperous, there's a bit of a shift upwards on those ranges, even with inflation adjustment. But then, for sure, you've also seen a displacement of people out of the Boston area. There's no question about that. That's a known fact that just lots of people talk about.

Will Brownsberger: 5:23

Even in the lowest income areas in Boston, prices have, they've experienced pressure and they've grown faster than people's income. So you see people moving out of Dorchester or Roxbury to Brockton. You see people moving out of East Boston to Chelsea, from Chelsea to Lawrence, from Lawrence to Fitchburg. So there is a, there has been, if you will, a gentrification. There has been displacement happening in the greater Boston area. No question about that. You could view that in a bunch of different ways. Does that contradict the idea that building more housing will create more housing for people of moderate income? Not necessarily. One way of reading it is we're just not building enough housing. And that's, I think, the way I would look at it is there's so much demand out there that we have demand coming in from outside and pushing people out. And so we're not keeping up with that demand, not building enough supply to accommodate people coming in from outside and to preserve homes for people who are there at a reasonable price. We're just not building enough housing.

Matt Hanna: 6:27

So this, we lost 21,000 of those lower numbers and then we gained 52,000 of these higher income numbers. If you combine everything below $75,000, we lost 21,000 households and everything above $75,000, we gained 52,000 households difference between those two. 

Will Brownsberger: 6:45

I think that's a good observation and that says that what's been happening is, no, the housing that we've built has not sufficed to preserve capacity for people of low and moderate income. That's definitely true, no question. That doesn't mean that building more housing won't help that situation. Now it's reasonable to acknowledge that you just don't know how that's going to work out. You know, it depends on all kinds of economic trends. Do people want to move to Massachusetts? And if they do, then, you know, the competition for housing, the demand for housing is great and maybe we can never build enough housing to soak it up. Frankly, I think people are going to want to move to Massachusetts, people are going to want to move north. I think, you know, in the long, long run, I think we're going to face in-immigration pressure. I believe Massachusetts is an attractive place to live and so that's part of our challenge is keeping up with that demand enough that there's room for everybody.

Matt Hanna: 7:38

Right. So then I guess a follow-up question would be, do we have the physical space to actually build enough to accommodate both the keeping people here and the immigration in from outside Massachusetts?

Will Brownsberger: 7:51

So that's a great question. And when you say do we have the physical space, let's add, not just space, because clearly we have the space, right. We could easily accommodate a whole lot more people in the space that we have. We can always go up. And so, you know, just pick any small community right now that has 25,000 people on it. You could probably put, you know, a million people in that community if you're willing to go up.

Will Brownsberger: 8:16

So the real question is space in a sense, but also traffic. Do we have the road capacity, public transportation capacity to take additional housing? Do we have the sewage infrastructure, water and sewage infrastructure? Now that, of course, we've got great water and sewage infrastructure due to the foresight of people over the last couple of centuries who have invested in water and sewer infrastructure in this city, we're really blessed. We could take more from that standpoint. And then, just what do people want? Do people want to live in that dense area and do the people who live there now want to become that much denser? And so those are the challenges.

Will Brownsberger: 9:00

There are many people in many neighborhoods who would say look, we got enough already. You know, the congestion is ridiculous, can’t park my car, can't get out my door. More housing, are you out of your mind. But that's not true everywhere. Right, there's plenty of places that, you know, in my district there's a big difference among neighborhoods. I mean, Belmont has not built a lot of housing over the past few decades and it's built to plan that makes it pretty spacious. And the big zoning changes through the 80s and the 90s sort of reinforced that plan and made it even less dense on paper. So, for example, the lot that I'm on now, this is a two-family house that I'm living in, that we're sitting in. It's a 5,500 square foot lot. That lot is too small. You couldn't build on that in Belmont now. Belmont has restricted density. By contrast, there are neighborhoods in Brighton that are considerably more dense. And the city of Boston basically, I mean to speak in simple terms, doesn't really have zoning because it's so easy to override zoning that you have more and more buildings going in there.

Will Brownsberger: 10:03

So I think it is a political reality, it is a balance that we need to strike. And I think in a moral sense and in a practical sense it is also a balance we need to strike. And we need to invite more density to the areas that are relatively more able to accommodate it. And I certainly feel that personally as a citizen, that that does mean more density in communities like Belmont. And Belmont is by no means the least dense community. It's actually a relatively dense community. Compare it to a Concord or a Sudbury. There's tons of room. You don't have to go very far outside of Boston to get to places where there's just a lot of room.

Will Brownsberger: 10:36

But as you get further out there you start to run into that other issue. Is there sewage and water infrastructure? And so you can't just say to a community, quadruple your density, because they don't have sewer, necessarily. So that means lots have to be big enough to absorb the sewage coming out of the house, right, you know, in a leaching field in the backyard? Okay, well, that sets a very practical limit on the amount of density you can achieve. So these are the challenges.

Matt Hanna: 11:01

Right. Let's maybe get into some specific examples, because I think that's another thing that people were interested in hearing. So, like Belmont you're talking about, for example, like they have this kind of down the road here, this new development in Cushing Square, which is kind of one of the bigger apartment buildings that have been built here recently, right. 

Will Brownsberger: 11:18

Yeah, it's one of two decent-sized apartment buildings. I mean there's that one and there's the one on the other side of Belmont by Little Pond, Acorn Park Drive. That's basically it. Two major apartment buildings built within this community in the past couple of decades. 

Matt Hanna: 11:31

And any stories of getting that off the ground that were successful or challenges or what were community thoughts on that, all that type of stuff.

Will Brownsberger: 11:39

Well, those are both huge struggles and, frankly, on the Acorn Park Drive, I was on the other side of it. I mean they initially wanted to do commercial development there and there was a strong constituency, for the land there, which is the parcel that they did that on, is actually surrounded by parkland and most people thought of it as part of the parkland. So it's a state park along the Alewife Brook and around Little Pond, the Alewife Reservation. That is a state park. However, there's a big development plot sitting right in the middle of it. And so the fight to preserve that, or the fight to, in fact, I tried to have the state acquire it. I failed at that enterprise for a bunch of different reasons. And then, when they said, the developer said to me if you don't let us build commercial there, I'm going to build the biggest, baddest 40B development that I can build. And I said, well, make my day. I mean, it's not that I'm against affordable housing. I would like to preserve that property. Right or wrong on where I was then, I think my overall emphasis now is much more on finding ways to increase the density and build housing.

Will Brownsberger: 12:35

The other property mentioned, in Cushing Square there, that took years to get through. And a lot of that was local opposition. There were people that were concerned that this structure, which was four stories, I guess, at the highest point, would cast a shadow on the yard. And you know Belmont, being a town meeting form of government, is extremely sympathetic to every individual's concerns about how development might occur. So I think the interesting contrast between Belmont that I represent and Boston that I represent, is the form of government. So in Belmont everything needs to get approved by town meeting.

Will Brownsberger: 13:09

You know, every material increase in density needs to get approved by town meeting in the form of a revised zoning bylaw, because we really do follow the zoning bylaw here in Belmont. Whereas in Boston it's basically driven by what the mayor wants to do through the Boston Planning and Development Department. And they have the ability to grant variances, which in Boston means a real change in the zoning code to accommodate apartment building developments. And so they've been able to build a lot more housing. And Watertown's somewhere in between. Watertown has a city manager form of government, city council. It does have to approve increases of zoning, but it's nine members, and so it tends to take a little bit of a more broader perspective on the goals of development. So Watertown has done a fabulous job of upzoning Watertown Square, you know, to accommodate more apartment buildings. Belmont has complied with the MBTA Zoning Act, but I think Belmont could go a lot further to accommodate apartment buildings.

Matt Hanna: 14:04

And I guess I'll inject myself a little personally here. I am a resident of Watertown, I'm a renter. So they've been doing a good job, you say, in the past however many years. And I've been here since 2010. And, just personally, I've seen my rent go up 150% in that amount of time. And not for a bigger space, staying in the same space. So even for someone who is doing a good job, a city that is doing a good job, again, how does this, is this, we just need to give a longer run, we need to build more, or you know what is the.

Will Brownsberger: 14:36

Well, look, no city. This is something that's a really big part of our dynamic here, right, is that we are a state comprised of 351 cities and towns. We're a state of 7 million people. We're not that much bigger than some counties that have a single zoning authority. We have 351 zoning authorities. So any one community can be doing a fabulous job, but they're immediately adjacent to other communities who may not be doing such a fabulous job at welcoming apartment buildings. It's one single housing market. I mean, no community is like okay, here's the Watertown housing market. No, most people are going to look at okay, Watertown, Belmont, Arlington, Cambridge, Boston. You know, how far is it from work? I could live in any one of those five places. So the housing market is a regional thing. It's at least sort of at the metropolitan scale. You know, to the extent the overall metropolitan area is not doing that well at producing housing, then the efforts of one community are only going to take it so far. Which is why it requires more state leadership.

Matt Hanna: 15:41

Right, you're leading me right to what my next question was. So if everything is so piecemeal, first, who is working on this and how is everyone working together to try and address these in a community effort, a regional effort? How is that happening?

Will Brownsberger: 15:56

So we do have a Metropolitan Area Planning Council and they're an energetic, well-funded entity that produces a lot of data, does a lot of advocacy on housing. But they don't have planning authority. And there is no political discussion of giving them planning authority. That would sort of completely alter the political structure. There's no sort of okay, let's give metropolitan area planning councils control over local zoning.

Matt Hanna: 16:25

Yeah, that's interesting because I was talking with a city planner recently who had come from a different part of the country. It surprised him that the county level wasn't the more important thing, so it is interesting for this area.

Will Brownsberger: 16:34

Yeah, I mean and let's come back to your original question in a minute which is, you know, what's happening at the state level to address this. But part of the challenge that we have, and why most local officials would really push back ferociously at the idea of giving up control of local zoning to a regional planning entity, is because they perceive a direct link between local zoning and their financial situation through the form of, you know, does commercial property increase their tax base? Does residential development increase their costs? And they tend to particularly think about costs of children coming into the schools. And so local authorities, whose job it is to manage a budget and a collection of services on behalf of the residents of their town, tend to be extremely sensitive to local zoning decisions. Their sensitivity is exacerbated by Proposition 2.5, which says they can only increase their taxes by 2.5%, with some adjustments. If they get a whole bunch of new commercial property, that new growth, the taxes on that new growth is over and above the 2.5%. So they're looking for new growth, but they're skeptical about whether new growth will come with increased costs. So that's the conversation that people are having and that's why local officials are going to push back so heavily on.

Will Brownsberger: 17:59

Okay, what if the county just says, okay, you know you're going to welcome a whole lot of new housing, but they don't give us any more commercial development to provide us taxes to support it. But we can't raise our taxes without a vote and the people don't want to vote for new taxes. So we're going to be in a box and it's going to be a disaster and there's going to be no library assistance and the class sizes are going to grow in the schools. And that's the thought process that people go through and that's reflected, that thought process is absolutely reflected, in conversations, for example, at town meeting in Belmont when they went through the discussion about upzoning in compliance with the MBTA Zoning Act. So I don't think people want to shift and create a new political entity at the county level.

Will Brownsberger: 18:39

The more vibrant discussion, which is still subject to the same political constraint, is well, what if the state just said, you know, the following certain types of structures are going to be buildable anywhere. Or are going to be buildable anywhere that is zoned residential. Or are going to be buildable in a place that is zoned residential and also already has water and sewer. You start to get into a bunch of conditions the more you think through the practicalities of it. I mean it's easy to thump the chest and say, well, let's just zone to allow buildings of up to four stories anywhere in the state. If that vote was on the, I'd have to vote for that, but I'm not sure what the consequences would be. It would probably end up as a ballot question, and, you know, the people of the Commonwealth would, because there's definitely some folks that would push back on that. And it might not be the right thing in every place. It might not really be fair and practical in every location.

Matt Hanna: 19:33

Well, that's another thing. How much, I mean I know you already said it's kind of a balance, but how much of it is going to take some people politically maybe sticking their neck out a little bit to get some of this stuff done?

Will Brownsberger: 19:42

Yeah, and I'm sticking my neck out and I'm saying this that we need to build a lot more all across the state. I'm saying that on the record and I'll say in this podcast and I've said it multiple places and I'll keep saying it. So that's the direction I'm rowing in. But there's a lot of folks involved and people are going to push back, so we'll see how far we can get.

Matt Hanna: 20:00

Yeah. So another way to look at this is how are you gathering all your information, who is keeping track of all this stuff and how are these decisions being made? I guess, so you have, like the metropolitan area, but where is all this information coming from that people are able to make these decisions from?

Will Brownsberger: 20:16

Data sources? 

Matt Hanna: 20:17

Data sources is one thing. Also feet on the ground.

Will Brownsberger: 20:20

Yeah no, look, I mean, I think there's a wealth of data. There's a wealth of data on these issues coming from every level of government. That includes the localities, and many localities have their own sort of planning databases that are increasingly very sophisticated. The state has a great GIS system that can tell us what's happening across the state or give a view of it. The planning councils, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, has got a wonderful data perspective. And there's a bunch of different nonprofits who take an interest in this. There's the Boston Indicators Project, which is a great resource. So there's a lot of great data resources. And, of course, our system, our political system, is elected officials whose job it is to listen to people, to hear the feedback and to translate the data, the dry numbers, into a set of perceptions and feelings by listening to people. Okay, I heard this number, but what am I hearing from my constituents? How do I put those things together? And that's a human intelligence challenge.

Matt Hanna: 21:24

Yeah. So is it your role or is it other group’s role who are educating the public on these issues, or educating even, like, city leaders in all the municipalities? Where does that role land?

Will Brownsberger: 21:35

Well, I think I do feel that, elected officials, one of the things I believe it's my job to do is put forward the ideas, you know, as I perceive the problems based on all the feedback that I'm getting from every direction, data feedback, human feedback, and institutional feedback, what the direction is we need to go and to put that out there and to get feedback on it. So I think elected leadership does need to speak out on these issues and to accept the consequences. Right? I mean to say okay, you know, I'm rolling in this direction. Is that okay with you? Will you vote for me again anyway? You know, that's the conversation that I think every elected leader at the state level needs to have with their constituents. I also think that people at the local level and at every level, you know, need to sort of engage on this issue. So there's not one place that the leadership comes from on this. But I think one of the reasons we're doing this podcast again is, you know, we're on this subject again, or staying on this subject, is because I think the more conversation about it is incredibly important and healthy.

Matt Hanna: 22:34

Yeah, and along the lines of being able to communicate this issue to people, are there other framings on the housing issue that kind of can be wrapped in, other than affordability, that help this conversation or complicate the conversation in terms of other issues that tie in with it?

Will Brownsberger: 22:48

Yeah, well, and look, affordability is a somewhat loaded term because you say affordability, then people go to affordable, which in today's world implies subsidized, because basically all new housing is expensive and it's not affordable for, you know, half to two-thirds of the people. So if we talk about affordability, you know, that goes back to our original conversation about shifting or trickle down in the terms of housing supply. I think we need to talk about, you know, the conversation about abundance is a fraught one because people hear deregulation and they hear de-emphasis of the environment and other legitimate concerns. But I think abundance is a great word, right. I mean let’s not just talk about affordability, let’s talk about it, hey, you want to move? There’s probably a space for you. You want to come to Watertown. You want to move to Cambridge. You prefer to live in downtown Boston. You want to live out in the suburbs. You’re going to find a place. Today you basically can’t even find a place. A lot of the time you just can’t find it. So the idea that we could have a housing universe that was big enough that people had latitude to move around in it, to make shifts, that's a great word. I like the word abundance as applied to housing.

Matt Hanna: 23:57

That's why it's caught on. It's catchy. 

Will Brownsberger: 23:59

That's why it's caught on, I know it's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. It's sort of part of paradise, right. Abundance. Reach up, grab a grape, look in the paper, find a house. Or go online, find a house. That would be wonderful, right. And so obviously it's always, let's not live in a dream world. Everybody's got to work and we can only reach so far with the incomes we have and so forth. But we could be in a much more flexible, dynamic, abundant housing market if we could build a lot more housing. That's a vision that I think is positive. And I think it absolutely goes hand in hand with economic vibrancy. Because employers are completely convinced that housing is a big part of their challenge in recruiting people to come to work for them here in Massachusetts.

Will Brownsberger: 24:42

You know, they can't find enough people to do X, Y, or Z. Guess what? People can't live there. I mean the most dramatic example of that is the islands, right. Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. You have people that like get up at three in the morning to take a bus to the ferry, take the ferry over to do a day's work, you know, as a carpenter on Nantucket, because nobody can, nobody of middle income can afford to do it, Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. I mean it's crazy. It's crazy. There's just absolutely no housing for people to do the jobs that need to be done on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. But that's sort of just the extreme example of what's happening to the whole state. It's just an expensive place to live in. Or certainly the metropolitan areas, the center metropolitan areas, very hard for people to afford those places.

Matt Hanna: 25:26

We're making our own kind of expensive island on the city.

Will Brownsberger: 25:29

Yeah, we're making ourselves an expensive island. And in the long run that chokes growth and that chokes the ability to do a whole lot of things we want to do. And not just growth, I mean not just sort of private sector growth, but the ability to do government things that, you know, if we're going to redo our housing stock to be more efficient, if we're going to upgrade our grid to be able to handle cleaner power and cleaner vehicles and cleaner heating systems, we need people to do all that work. That's basically going to be the limiting factor over the next few decades. Money is a limiting factor to our environmental ambitions, but even if we had the money, we don't have the people.

Matt Hanna: 26:07

All right. Why don't we shift here to something a bunch of people brought up too that I guess we maybe didn't touch on enough in our first conversation, which was let's even go another level up. Federal. How is what's going on federally affect us in the state and our municipalities right now? Is there anything that has changed recently that has dramatically affected our programs or our funding abilities for what our hopes are?

Will Brownsberger: 26:29

Well, I think what we see happening is cuts in the federal budget, most notably for health care, right. So Medicaid, which we call in Massachusetts, we call MassHealth the program that we've built on the foundation of Medicaid, that depends on a huge federal subsidy, something like 15 or 16 billion a year, which is roughly, round number, is a quarter of our budget. So to the extent they cut that, we in Massachusetts state government are going to have less resources at our disposal to do anything. I was already of the view that we had reached as far as we could possibly reach in terms of increasing our housing investment.

Will Brownsberger: 27:06

You know, we already in 2024, we reached as far as we could financially to increase the state's annual investment in supporting housing, meaning subsidizing monthly rent for people, and in building new affordable housing that's going to be rent restricted. We're not going to be able to put a whole lot more resources, or materially more resources, into that fundamental goal and the additional budget cuts only reinforce and tighten that picture. So just reinforces that, I mean, I've already made the point and I'll just repeat it here, even with that maximal stretching of construction investments, the new supply of homes that we can create that are subsidized is only about 2,000 a year, which is only about a tenth of what we need to build. So that's why we're so dependent on attracting private capital to come to Massachusetts and build new apartment buildings and other housing.

Matt Hanna: 28:00

And the federal hasn't affected any of their grants for their federal subsidized housing, because you said that's the majority of what's going on in the state, is the federal subsidized housing, right?

Will Brownsberger: 28:09

Yeah, I mean to underline that, rent that is based on income, so that you can be making $20,000 a year and you qualify for this program you get into a house, your rent is only going to be 30% of that. So you're going to pay $6,000 a year, $500 a month, if your income is that low and you're going to be able to afford it. So apartments where the rent is based on income, about 80% of those are funded by the federal government, right here in Massachusetts, even where we're making a maximal effort to provide state support for those. The federal government has not threatened to take that away.

Will Brownsberger: 28:43

The Section 8 budget is not something I've heard a threat of cuts of. And also their federal tax credits available for support of new housing production, which is critical to everything we do, and the federal tax subsidy in the form of tax exempt bonds, which is the other sort of pillar of federal support for housing development. Neither of those have been threatened. But they're not going to go up. So we're not going to be able to accommodate new households in those programs to any significant degree. They have long, long waiting lists and they're really going only to the highest priority households, people who are homeless, etc. Or meet other criteria like veterans and so forth.

Matt Hanna: 29:23

Then also a point that was brought up was the refugee housing and how that program is kind of coming to an end here, and was that seen as a success? Is that model looked at as something that worked well, could be used in the future? What are the thoughts on that?

Will Brownsberger: 29:36

Well, I think what you're referring to is there's different layers of that. I mean, the thing that had everybody crazy was there was a big flow for a while of new immigrants arriving in Massachusetts, who, you know, there was no structured program to accommodate them. And we stood up this system of putting people in hotels and working to try to get them English instruction and jobs and so forth and get them into permanent housing. So you had a pipeline. You can only get so many people out of the system and there was a lot of people coming into the system, so the system had to grow for a while. But now the inflow into that pipeline is basically zero and people are going on out of it. And so what's left in that system now is the people who are always in it, who are Massachusetts residents, who are, you know, have severe challenges that prevent them from getting shelter and paying for shelter the way most people do.

Will Brownsberger: 30:24

But that system is dramatically smaller. That's not a model for anything. You know, anything that we want to continue. That's a necessary, unattractive, but necessary response to a situation that has passed now. People are not coming to the United States as a result of all the changes that the current administration has made.

Matt Hanna: 30:44

I think the question was more, did we learn anything from that process of having to go through something so quickly? Did it teach us something that we could use on a smaller scale for unhoused people or anything like that to move them through that pipeline?

Will Brownsberger: 30:56

Well, you know, when we're doing it at the sort of normal pace, you know, we've got a lot of people who have given a lot of thought to how to get people back on their feet. We're kind of good at that until we get really overwhelmed and then we don't really have the resources to accommodate it. There's an existing program which was designed to handle the immigrants or refugees who have come here through the sort of whole vetting process for asylum and so forth. They're coming across with permission, have a lot of checking into who they are, and they've been run through multiple databases and they're all certified as okay to admit to the United States. They come in through a federal program like that, they actually get into housing relatively quickly because the supports are there. There is a system to handle them.

Will Brownsberger: 31:40

But I really kind of bifurcate the conversation between the sort of emergency housing, the shelter situation, you know, the victims of domestic violence, they have mental health issues, whatever it might be. You know, who have emergency housing needs. It would be great if we could build enough housing so that, hey, if we had abundant housing, then you put those folks in apartments and they'd be stable from jump. But now, because there's not enough stable, permanent housing, we have trouble doing that. So to me, what the whole episode underlines, the whole episode of the emergency shelter system swelling and then contracting to its normal size, just underlines the need for more abundant housing

Matt Hanna: 32:22 

Right, let's see what other more hodgepodge questions can I throw at you here that came in, let's see. So another point that was brought up was well, if we're kind of in a unique situation here in Massachusetts and we can't necessarily maybe look at other examples around the country because we have municipalities that are split up and all that type of thing, what's worked in the past? And you had mentioned a little bit in the previous episode about how the 70s had a great boom and part of that was because of this 40B thing. So maybe we could talk a little bit more about what 40B is and then also, would raising the requirements or raising the amount that 40B could do, would that again help the situation? You know, talk us through that type of solution.

Will Brownsberger: 33:02

Yeah, no, I think. So 40B was the law passed in the late 60s which was in response to suburban exclusion, you know, zoning that was being adopted to exclude moderate income housing. And I say moderate income housing including not just subsidized housing but anything that, you know, apartment buildings and so forth. That law was passed to say if a builder is trying to build housing with any kind of subsidy and, by the way, subsidy is written in a way that's extremely broad so that it includes folks that are not really taking any real financial handouts from the state to build, so they're quasi-market apartments but they have some affordability dimension to them. Then if a local government is making it impossible for them to build by zoning, most likely, or by some other restriction, then they can appeal to the state and get a comprehensive permit which says, thou shalt be able to build, and municipality, thou shalt let them build. That's the housing appeals committee. So there are safe harbors to that. And the rule was if 10% of your housing is already subsidized housing in some, in this very broad sense, then you're exempt. So a lot of communities have achieved that or they've achieved, you know, there's other exemptions, as you can talk about a percentage of your land area and there's a couple other rules. But we could change those rules and say, nope, 10% is not enough. 20%. That would be a way of opening the door. So that's on the table.

Will Brownsberger: 34:28

That's something that some folks are discussing, that there's legislation that would be proposed to do that. So that's another way of approaching it. For me, the downside of that way, or one of the limitations, I mean, I'm prepared to vote for that in some form, but what it does is it only privileges those buildings that have some form of state subsidy, which means it complicates the financing process. It's only going to be buildings that can jump through those hoops of getting into some kind of state program and there may be strings attached to that. So I like a simpler approach which just says buildings of a certain size are buildable anywhere in the state period. And so does that just mean a two-family structure, could it be a four-family, you can slice that a whole lot of different ways. But I like an approach that simplifies. I'm all about simplifying what's going on. Because simplification reduces risk, tells people what they're going to be able to do.

Matt Hanna: 35:22

And then I guess one last thing here. So even when you send things down, there's stories of then people doing like parking minimums, you know, being as a way to get around some of the zoning things like that. Well, if you build something new, it has to have this parking space per person requirement that, there are ways to get around it using those type of zoning locally, right. Is there any talk about how to address those local loopholes that can come up around these more general state level things?

Will Brownsberger: 35:50

So parking minimums as a barrier to development?

Matt Hanna: 35:53

Correct.

Will Brownsberger: 35:54

Yeah, so I mean from a 40B perspective, that would just be another unreasonable thing or potentially uneconomic thing, in that appeals framework, then that addresses that. If you were just to sort of authorize two family anywhere which, you know, this has been done in other states, this is not a new idea. Parking minimums could conflict with that, could limit that, could be a way of limiting that. In a lot of communities they don't. It's not an issue because the lots are big enough to accommodate parking. So that may or may not be an issue.

Will Brownsberger: 36:21

If you say to an area that already has a real dearth of parking spaces, that developers are going to build with no parking spaces, then you may be exacerbating a really serious problem. I mean, there are neighborhoods in my district where the streets are constantly lined with parked cars because many of the buildings on those streets have no parking. That's a tough situation. You know, I'm all about getting people out of cars and I'm into bicycling and so forth, but not everybody can do that. In fact, a great many people really have no choice but to drive and therefore they have no choice but to have a vehicle and they have to put it some place. And so where is that? Do you want to say you can develop with no parking spaces and that we're going to just completely do away with that requirement? I have to confess I'm not completely convinced on that, although it's a step in the direction we're trying to go, which is making it easier to develop.

Matt Hanna: 37:15

Complicated.

Will Brownsberger: 37:16

Yeah.

Matt Hanna: 37:17

Great, well, I think we've hit on a lot of questions that’ve come up in response to the first episode. What I do want to just end with again is, you know, I asked you at the end of the last one, what does success look like in five, 10 years? And, you know, you said this is a long-term project. But is there any way, in five, 10 years, how are we going to look and say we did a good job in the last five to 10 years?

Will Brownsberger: 37:39

Look, I think there is a clear way to look at that and the clear way is, did we increase the rate of housing production? We don't know for sure that that's going to reduce rents. It's got to help reduce the growth rate of rents. But demand may be so robust for living in Massachusetts that there is a lot of uptake. Will it be enough to end the displacement phenomenon that is entirely real, where you started in that conversation? We won't know. But we will know that we have failed if we have not increased the housing production. I mean we can increase housing production and not achieve all the goals we want as a result of that increase, but surely achieving that increase is the necessary condition for a whole lot of other things.

Matt Hanna: 38:25

Well, was there any final last thoughts you wanted to put out there to listeners before we wrapped up?

Will Brownsberger: 38:30

No, other than we just need to keep talking about this issue, because this is, for real, our central challenge.

Matt Hanna: 38:36

Great. Thanks for chatting, 

Will Brownsberger: 38:38

Thank you.

Matt Hanna: 38:39

So that's it for this episode. If you'd like to join in the conversation, please head on over to willbrownsberger.com. As this is an ongoing conversation, Senator Brownsberger would love to hear your thoughts on the issue and how it's affecting you. And you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you can know when the next episode is out, where the Senator will continue to dive into the issues and share his thoughts on them. Thank you for listening and take care.