IT SEEMS INCREASINGLY impossible for an average family in Massachusetts to afford an average-priced home. All of that points to the breakdown of a basic pillar of middle class life.
“The situation threatens a fundamental social contract,” said Nicolas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “That contract says if you work, you can find a decent place to live. And if you’ve got a good job and work really hard, you can achieve the American dream – home ownership. That contract is void here.”
It’s hard to argue with Retsinas’s grim take as anything but an honest appraisal of where things stand. Just as it was hard to argue with it more than 20 years ago when he said it.
If there’s a single takeaway from a recent Boston Globe Spotlight series on the regional housing crisis, it might be how persistent the housing challenge has been. The numbers have changed, and home ownership has moved even farther out of reach when price increases are compared with income growth. But the story has remained remarkably constant.
Suburbs resist new growth, especially anything but huge houses on large lots, and they are particularly wary of housing that will bring lots of children to educate in their school systems.
Zeroing in on resistance to new housing in Milton, the first installment of the Globe series said, “About 90 percent of the town’s subsidized housing is for seniors, data show, which some housing analysts see as a common sign of suburbs being unwelcoming to young families, especially those who might add burdens to the school system.”
Back in 2002, this CommonWealth story reported on a consulting firm analysis commissioned by Plymouth that came up with a “service demand index” that pegs the cost to the town of four different types of residential development. The cost to the town of a new home likely to house school-age children was $8,641, with the report noting that only at assessed values of $474,500 and higher would such homes return as much to town coffers in tax payments as they draw. An age-restricted housing unit that would have no school children, in contrast, would cost the town just $2,215 per year.
Then-state Sen. David Magnani said that through land use rules and other measures, communities had come up with “different ways, publicly and privately, to say, ‘don’t bring any new kids.’” The Framingham lawmaker memorably termed the various schemes “vasectomy zoning.”
Other contributors to the housing crisis have also been long in the making.
Among those are issues tied to the Community Preservation Act, a law passed in 2000 that allows communities to levy a small surcharge on homeowners to be used for affordable housing, historic preservation, or open space and recreation uses. Although the law requires that at least 10 percent of a community’s CPA funds go to each use, a report issued last year by the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board found that less than 1 in 20 CPA projects has been dedicated to the creation of new homes.
Municipalities point to the sky-high cost to build as one of the key reasons CPA funding doesn’t always result in new affordable units. But communities have gone to great lengths to finesse the law in ways to spend on other uses, including figuring out ways to skirt follow-up legislation enacted specifically to ban the use of CPA funds to pay for artificial turf on athletic fields.
Meanwhile, one approach to the state’s housing affordability challenge – the development of more manufactured homes – which got a plug last week in a Globe editorial, was identified several years ago as an underutilized arrow in the affordable housing quiver.
Drawing more attention to the housing crisis surely can’t hurt, though the persistence of the problem underscores the strength of the forces resisting efforts to put a big dent in it.