How Do We Address the Housing Crisis in Massachusetts?

Today's topic is housing in Massachusetts. In this conversation, Senator Brownsberger explains how the issue is at the top of the list of concerns for him and his colleagues as it's the single biggest part of the affordability squeeze that people are feeling. We discuss what the state is doing to help people in different income brackets, the legislation passed, such as the Affordable Homes Act and the MBTA communities law, and what those are doing. We talk about how experts believe we should be producing 20,000 housing units a year, but we're not hitting that number and how loosening regulations might help increase production to help reach those goals. We dive into much more, but we start the conversation with Senator Brownsberger explaining how housing is the biggest problem everyone is trying to crack and his personal journey to realizing how important the issue really is. 

Find out more about Senator Brownsberger and join in the conversation at 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. Today's topic is housing in Massachusetts. In this conversation, Senator Brownsberger explains how the issue is at the top of the list of concerns for him and his colleagues, as it's the single biggest part of the affordability squeeze that people are feeling. We discuss what the state is doing to help people in different income brackets, the legislation passed, such as the Affordable Homes Act and the MBTA communities law, and what those are doing. How experts believe we should be producing 20,000 housing units a year, but we're not hitting that number. And how loosening regulations might help increase production to help reach those goals. We dive into much more, but we'll jump into the conversation with Senator Brownsberger explaining how housing is the biggest problem everyone is trying to crack and his personal journey to realizing how important the issue really is.

Senator Brownsberger: 0:54

A meeting I had with a group of my colleagues about a year or two ago, people in leadership roles, and the Senate president asked everybody, you know, what's at the top of your list? What are you most worried about right now? And to a person, everybody went around, 12 people around the table, everybody said housing, housing costs. Top of everybody's list, top perceived problem. By the way, it's not just a Massachusetts problem. I went up to a conference in Toronto of Eastern states and Eastern province legislators. Everybody's talking about the same thing. Housing is at the top of the agenda. It was at the top of the agenda at that conference. We did a conference in Boston earlier this year. We're going to do another in Providence. Same agenda all over the East Coast. It's not just a Massachusetts issue, but it's definitely a Massachusetts issue. So I've kind of caught up with people on appreciating the seriousness of this issue.

Senator Brownsberger: 1:41

When I was first involved in public life as an elected official, it wasn't at the top of my agenda. When I ran for the select board in Belmont in 1998, the issues were funding the schools and building a senior center. And then the third issue which came on my radar screen as I campaigned, and not that it was one of the things that drew me into the race, was protecting the land at the McLean Hospital, which was in the middle of a redevelopment process. So in that conversation I was on the side of preserving the land. In a subsequent big fight, which followed close on the heels of that one which we did raise a compromise about, there was a preservation of the land down at the Belmont Uplands, the Silver Maple Forest. They wanted to do a commercial development down there and there was a threat that they would do 40B. And I can remember very clearly the developer saying to us well, if you don't let me do 40B.

Senator Brownsberger: 2:26

This is a phone call. I’m sitting in my office. If you don't let us do commercial development there, I'm going to do the biggest, baddest 40B project that I can do, affordable housing. And I said, you know, make my day, I'm not against that. But my goal then was still preservation of land. 

Matt Hanna: 2:41

Briefly, what is a 40B? In case anyone doesn't know that term.

Senator Brownsberger: 2:43

Yeah, no, 40B is that provision of our state law which allows a developer who benefits from any kind of state subsidy to override local zoning, if that zoning would make their project financially unfeasible. 

Matt Hanna: 2:56

Got it.

Senator Brownsberger: 2:57

But you know, as I've come to represent a larger space, a lot of my constituents are tenants or renters, people having trouble affording their housing and that's just become a worse and worse problem over the past 20 years and I've seen kids leaving the state. My daughter, my middle daughter, moved around a couple of different apartments in Fenway and Brighton and then basically kind of gave up and moved home. And then moved to Maine and then moved further out in Maine to find affordable housing. So I really get it now that housing affordability, broadly, is probably the top issue we face. It's an economic development issue. It's a justice issue. It's a quality of life issue. And it's just something that everybody feels in their pocketbook right now. It's the single biggest part of the affordability squeeze that people are feeling.

Matt Hanna: 3:44

Right, and before we delve into what the state has done lately, do you want to define some of those terms like rent burdened and what that means for people?

Senator Brownsberger: 3:51

Well, yeah, I mean, people have the idea that, it's kind of common sense really, that a metric of the squeeze that you're feeling is what percentage of your total income do you have to spend to provide for your housing, including your utilities. So that gross rent divided by household income, gross rent meaning including utilities, is a metric of rental cost burden or housing cost burden. You can define housing burden for homeowners too, comprised of their mortgage and their taxes and their utilities and other maintenance costs, but so total housing costs. And that's just a number that's been going up for everybody.

Matt Hanna: 4:23

Right, so let's dive into our second point here, which is what has the state done lately to address this issue?

Senator Brownsberger: 4:28

Well, there's a couple of big pieces. One, of course, is the MBTA zoning law, which I think is really going quite well. Which basically said communities that benefit from transportation services from the state, from the MBTA, need to provide some zoning which allows the development of additional housing and some increased density. A lot of communities have moved along with that. You know, the newspaper stories about the ones that are fighting, but most of these communities are doing it and we're starting to see some benefits. There's been significant movement for housing production in Lexington, so much, in fact, that they've backed away a little bit, because they went way beyond their obligations under the MBTA zoning. So I was involved with that a few years ago. But our most recent thing is the big housing production bill we passed about a year ago, in the summer of 2024.

Matt Hanna: 5:11

The Affordable Homes Act.

Senator Brownsberger: 5:13

Yup, and that bill was something I paid a lot of attention to and I ended up leading the Senate side of the final negotiation between the House and Senate about what that bill should look like. So when we put it on the desk in the House clerk's office at 9 am on August 1st, after all the final negotiations that did indeed go through the night of July 31st, the reporters asked me for a comment. I said well, I think we made a dent in the problem. So I spent the next six months or so trying to figure out how much of a dent we'd made. The way I break it down as follows is, you know, there's a lot of great things in the bill. It's a bill I feel great about. And there's a lot of zoning improvements and things to protect tenants, things to protect homeowners. One of the things that's gotten a lot of visibility lately is this thing about making sure that everybody has the right to inspect the home before they buy it. That's really important to first-time buyers. All of that.

Senator Brownsberger: 6:00

But the core of the bill is increased spending. So we authorized a lot of borrowing by the state to invest in housing production. Now, one part of that was our increased investment in public housing maintenance. So the various public housing authorities. Not everybody knows this, but you know, Belmont Housing Authority, Watertown Housing Authority, these are quasi-state agencies. They're all funded entirely by the state and they're dependent on the state for the operating subsidies and maintenance subsidies that they need to be able to continue to provide housing for some of our lowest income people. They provide housing for people who are elderly, without pension or disabled. People that may have incomes as low as $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a year. It's kind of typical for the extremely low-income group. Very important service and we've been under-investing in it for years. So I'm pleased that we were able to, I think, in real terms, increase investment in that and I think we're going to preserve the quality of that housing. But it's preserving the quality of that housing as opposed to actually producing any new housing.

Senator Brownsberger: 7:06

And all of the public housing in the state, all the state-funded public housing in the state, is really a very small portion of the total housing need in the state. It's one or two percent of the total housing units in the state are in public housing. And even if you sort of limit the lens to housing for the lowest income people, the state-funded portion of that is actually dwarfed by the federal programs in the state. It's sort of about 80%-ish of the extremely low-income housing is provided by federal funding, not by the state funding. So we're dependent on, there's old federal public housing and there's these old project-based Section 8 apartment buildings that have a contract with the federal government to provide their rental units at below market.

Senator Brownsberger: 7:51

And now we have the Section 8 mobile vouchers, housing choice vouchers, which everybody kind of knows about. Those are sort of the generations. You know, people decided public housing was not such a great idea, it was hard to manage. So they went to let's give it to apartment building owners and make contracts with them and have low-income housing be provided by apartment owners. And then said oh, you know what, let's just create mobile vouchers because we don't want to force all the poor people to live in just a certain set of buildings. Let's make our environment economically integrated and that's basically the model that people buy into. But all of these models exist in the state today and together they cover the needs of, I believe, and this is a complicated number which we can delve into later, but they cover about 60 to 80 percent of the needs of the extremely low-income population. Some would quote a lower number, but I believe that number is about right, 60 to 80 percent. We do a pretty good job housing those in greatest economic need in the state. The group that I'm really most worried about is the group just above that, the folks that are making $30,000, $40,000 a year. Maybe they're human service workers, early education teachers, just not getting paid enough. And so they really are actually they're working, but they are not quote unquote extremely low income, but they would be referred to as very low income. That's the group that we're doing the least for. So that was all about kind of putting public housing in context and, yes, we're making good progress on public housing, on preserving it.

Senator Brownsberger: 9:20

The next big thing we poured a lot of money into in this bill was subsidized housing production. Producing new subsidized housing units or investing in the rehabilitation and preserving existing subsidized housing units. And the way that works today is basically we spend about a billion a year for the purpose of supporting those categories of production and preservation of affordable housing. That billion comes in basically three roughly equal-sized slices. One is from federal tax credits. Two is from state tax credits, which basically track the federal tax credits. And then three is the bond money we put in place in this housing bill. Now, we increased the amount of bond money and in a late 2023 bill we increased the amount of state tax credits. But the framework for the federal tax credits isn't going up much and the costs of producing units are going up. So basically, what we did with our bond bill was keep up with inflation, in terms of housing production. So I spent a lot of time trying to get those numbers, but one of the things you'll learn is well, how much are we actually producing?

Senator Brownsberger: 10:44

Well, you know, the cost of units per unit just keeps going up. So it's close to a million dollars a unit, sometimes above or sometimes a little below, but it's in that just below a million range for most of the units we're producing now. Which is kind of crazy, and I think there's a conversation to be had about why they're so high. But for all we're putting in place, that translates into maybe we're producing a couple thousand units a year. A couple of thousand units a year. And the data is not good. We don't know exactly how many of those are new units versus preserved units. What's a preserved unit? You know, it's either a unit that previously was at market rate rental or it's a unit that maybe was previously affordable but was coming off of the affordable restriction. A lot of these deals say you're going to be affordable for 30 years, but then you can become market rate. So the developer, it makes a new subsidized investment to rehabilitate the units and guarantee another 30 years or 45 years of affordability. But so let's step back and ask how does that fit in terms of our overall housing need?

Matt Hanna: 11:51

Right. So you say 2,000 units, but what is it that we're shooting for, right? What are we trying to produce ideally?

Senator Brownsberger: 11:58

Yeah, so that number is more like 20,000 units a year. Now, that's obviously one of these goal numbers, but it's a number that people tend to find credible and it's composed of a few different parts. One is, and this is kind of the most important questions, is what do we need to produce to start to create some kind of slack, you know, to have demand be enough above supply that the prices don't keep rising up quite as fast and so that people can just find a place. You know, if only 1% of the inventory is available, whether it's for sale or for rent, at any given time, people are going to have a hard time finding a place and they're going to bid up. And that's what's going on right now. And there are various economists that have their numbers as to what you'd like to be at in terms of a vacancy rate or a for sale rate. Rental vacancy, homes for sale rates. And that translates into a certain number of housing units you'd like to be producing to kind of create that slack. And then there's units you'd want to produce to accommodate some reasonable growth of the number of households in the state. The number of households is growing for a bunch of different reasons. I mean one is that people have tended to form smaller households, so the number of households we need to support the population has gone up. But then you also have some in-migration as well. So we have some growth in the number of households. And then we also have the fact that right now there's a lot of people who are doubled up in housing. You know, two families that could be in different households are together. And when you start to create slack, that's going to unpack.

Senator Brownsberger: 13:27

People are going to move out. So that 20,000 number, 20,000 per year, or 200,000 and change over the decade, a decade. It's funny, that's sort of a rolling goal. We haven't been able to keep up with it. People said we needed to produce 200,000 in the 2020s. That's not happening. We're maybe 13, 15, 18,000, bumping around well below that level. So we're not going to achieve that goal. But so, okay, what's the next decade? Well, let's stick with the 200, that's kind of about where it is. And partly because we've been losing people. I mean, it's happening right. We're losing people instead of gaining people or keeping people. So we're trying to build 200,000 over the next decade, 20,000 per year.

Senator Brownsberger: 14:04

Of that, 2,000 is what we're paying for with our ambitious bond bill. And I think we should think of that bond bill, you know, that rate of spending, as high as we can do. You know, we certainly put it in place as much as we can. One of the interesting dynamics that not everybody understands is when we, the legislature, put money into a bond bill, what we're really doing is just authorizing spending. We're not mandating spending.

Senator Brownsberger: 14:32

So if we say $5 billion and that's what we put in this bond bill is $5 billion worth of authorizations, the governor then has to work with her finance people and say, well, how much can we afford to borrow? And they come up with an overall number for all purposes of the state, transportation, public education, parks and recreation, environmental land acquisition, school building. All the purposes that one might have for borrowing money. One can really only issue so much debt without running into problems of affordability. And the state has a good system for staying within reasonable limits. I think we're doing a lot better than the federal government right now in terms of recognizing the state's affordability limits and staying within those. But what that translates into is the governor can really only spend quite a bit less than we authorize with these bond authorizations. So it's going to be more like $2 billion or $2.5 billion instead of the $5 billion.

Matt Hanna: 15:27

But then, so how do you bridge the gap between, you're talking about 2,000 coming from the bond bill or all those things we've talked about before, but we're hoping to get 20,000. Where does that other 18,000 supposedly come from?

Senator Brownsberger: 15:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and even if you could double that, even if you could double it, you know there's no real proposal to do that, but even if we take it from 2000 to 4000, still most of it's got to come from market rate production. Unsubsidized housing production. Developers going out, borrowing the money or spending their own money, some combination, and building housing without state support. So how's that going to happen? That's how most of our housing has gotten built. That's how most of it has to be built. Now, in today's world, a lot of that is being built not by people that are building onesies and twosies, but by people who are building, either, you know, tract housing or, mostly in this state now, apartment buildings. And, by the way, apartment buildings are what we need, right. I mean apartment buildings are more likely to be somewhat affordable to people who are in the market, and they're also environmentally better. Part of our greenhouse gas problem in the building sector is that we keep building bigger and bigger houses. And so the number of square feet per person has continued to go up steadily over the past few decades. And that's at war with our energy goals. So apartment buildings are what developers can make the most money on. They're what meet the affordability need and they're environmentally best. So that's what we're looking at. And those things are built by professional developers who are mobile. Professional developers are mobile. They're going to deploy their capital, and it's not usually their capital, it's some investor's capital, in the place where they're going to get their money back fastest, where they're going to have the highest return. So I believe, and it's complicated and I don't want to be over simple about this, but I do believe that what we need to do is make Massachusetts as attractive as possible to people who want to build housing.

Senator Brownsberger: 17:09

Now I'm thinking about a story of a, I had a conversation with a developer, and this is an affordable housing developer. This is somebody who's very much concerned with supplying housing and, for the past few years, was not in the business of building but more in the business of data and helping tenants find housing and so forth. So somebody who had a, I'm going to say a pure heart in this context. I didn't perceive her as somebody who was trying to spin me because they wanted to make more money.

Senator Brownsberger: 17:35

She told a story about how, when she first came out of her training, she built some housing in Somerville. She went through all the neighborhood meetings and repeated hearings with the planning board, and after about two years she got a permit to build, I think she said, 40 units of housing. So then she decided to go back home to Nashville and she had a proposal to build a couple hundred units of housing. And she came in to the planning department and filed her papers. And you know, after a week or two she came back and said so how should I get started on the hearing process? And they said oh, don't worry about it, it's on the consent agenda for the next meeting of the planning board. You'll have your approval in a few more days.

Senator Brownsberger: 18:15

And that's night and day difference. And that night and day difference is very significant financially. It's not like okay, well, eventually you're going to get your money, so don't worry about it. No, that delay costs money. It creates uncertainty. Each time you change the design it costs more money and you don't know whether you're really ultimately going to be able to go forward. So you're tying up a lot of capital, a lot of management attention in a process that may or may not be successful. So we got to move away from that message. We've got to streamline our development process. I believe that. And I think most people, most of my colleagues, believe that. We understand that it's complicated

Matt Hanna: 18:53

Yeah, and is it that we have lots of sites that are sitting undeveloped and we need these to go quicker? Or is that part of the issue too, you know, making more sites available, or is it really just making these develop quicker?

Senator Brownsberger: 19:04

So, yeah, that's the right question. There are questions about what people want in the community, you know. So this conversation about accelerating housing production is very much a conversation, right. Nobody is going to be able to slam dunk change the world because there's so many local interests involved that we've got to move with recognition of that. But I believe we just need to keep talking about it and part of why I wanted to focus on this in this podcast is to just keep talking about it. We need to evolve our consciousness, our kind of group consciousness, in the direction of accepting more housing and feeling comfortable with letting go of some control. I mean there's just a huge tradition of community control here. But now let's say we do all that. Let's say, for the sake of argument, we do all that and let's say it works and we start to have a lot of housing production.

Senator Brownsberger: 19:51

I'm not here to tell you that next year it's going to solve the affordability problem. I think it's taken us 100 years of local control and restrictive zoning to get us into the predicament we're in. And that's not just a Massachusetts thing. The zoning movement that happened in the early part of the 20th century happened all over the eastern seaboard and many other parts of the country. So it's been 100 years of that and it's going to take us 30, 50, 100 years of something different to get us to a real different place where we've got a whole lot of housing.

Senator Brownsberger: 20:20

And I also want to acknowledge another set of issues. It's not just about loosening the reins on zoning. I think we have to do that. We also have to take a look at how we're doing affordable housing at the state level. Because maybe that $2,000 could be $3,000 or $4,000 if we took a hard look at why units are costing so much. Basically our affordable housing production model is kind of a cost plus plus plus model. So developers in the affordable business don't have a lot of incentive to lower costs. In fact, they have every incentive to drive up costs. And they very happily go along with all the mandates that we impose on them about what their development has to look like. Because it's just more money in their pocket at the end of the day if they achieve passive house standards or from an environmental standpoint or achieve various other community goals as they go.

Senator Brownsberger: 21:11

But yeah, there's another dimension to it and this is where we have this abundance conversation. There's a live conversation out there about abundance and the idea that we need to get out of the way. That we in blue state Democrats we need to get out of the way of housing production and energy production and innovation and so forth. There's definitely some validity to that and the thrust of this conversation so far has really been consistent with that. I think housing is the best example of us getting in our own way with a lot of restrictions, most importantly the local restrictions, but also other state level restrictions. But let's not ignore the problem of corporate investment perhaps operating in a way that's driving up costs.

Senator Brownsberger: 21:52

There's a lot of money going into real estate investment trusts now. There's a question mark, in my mind, about how much of that is actually happening in Massachusetts. How much of our housing stock is under control of corporate interests who are systematically trying to drive up costs to maximize return for their investors? Do we have people coming in and flipping and flipping to higher prices? Do we have people buying and holding at enough volume, at enough scale, to actually make a difference in the rental market? We don't know, but those are some of the questions that are out there.

Matt Hanna: 22:27

Right. And then, just in general, with the question of building more housing equals more affordable housing. Are there other communities that have done this and it's worked out. Like where is the basis that this is coming from? I mean it seems to make common sense that build more housing lowers the prices down, but what is the basis for all that coming from?

Senator Brownsberger: 22:45

Well, let's talk about that. I mean, let's say we loosen up restrictions and we succeed in building more housing. Is that going to be affordable housing? Well, first, what is affordable housing? Well, there's a whole framework, basically defined by the Federal Housing and Urban Development Apparatus, HUD, defining different levels of income and what affordability means. So affordability is defined as housing is affordable for a household if it doesn't cost them more than 30% of their income. So that whole rent burden thing we were back at. If the rent's not more than 30% of the income, it's deemed affordable.

Senator Brownsberger: 23:19

That's a rough and ready kind of number. Obviously, spending more than 30% is one thing if you're making $15,000 a year, it's another thing if you're making $500,000 a year. If you're making $500,000 a year, you can spend 50% of your income. You can live in Manhattan in a nice apartment and you still have enough mad money to do just about everything else you want to do. So, but that is the number that people work with and it's a ballpark that's generally accepted.

Senator Brownsberger: 23:45

Then HUD also defines different income levels. They take into account basically the local income levels in the area. They define an extremely low-income group, which is those disabled, elderly people that are basically with minimal income, probably only some kind of public supported income, SSI or welfare or something like that. Then you have the very low income, which are the people who are maybe working quite hard but they're making $20 an hour, $15 an hour. So they're making $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Then you've got your low income, which might be sort of $50,000 to $100,000 a year. I'm talking Boston area numbers. So you ask the question, how will our housing production map into those different categories? So for the lowest income, the extremely low income group, you cannot build, with any amount of subsidy, housing that will be affordable for the extremely low-income group. The extremely low-income group is so low-income that you need a continuous operating subsidy. You basically need a Section 8 voucher of some kind attached to that unit to subsidize the operating costs of the unit, never mind building it. So the amount of housing that we have for the extremely low-income is a function of the amount of mobile and project vouchers that we have. 

Senator Brownsberger: 25:01

So there's good news and bad news there. The good news is that if you kind of fight through the combination of census data and administrative data, and by administrative data I mean data from the various bureaucracies about how many people they're serving, you find out that probably the best way to reconcile that is that the census data kind of overstates rent burden. It doesn't recognize what we're actually doing for the extremely low income population. And probably, as I said earlier, we're doing about 60 to 80% of that population, of that need, is getting met. We would like to do more for that population, extremely low income population. Make it 100% because these are people in real need. But that's totally a function of our ability to subsidize operations. Most of that comes from the federal government right now. Look what's happening. We're not expecting more there. So the pressure will be to come up with more money from the state. I'm going to make sure people have health care first before we sort of expand that subsidy base.

Senator Brownsberger: 25:54

And you know, one of the things I'm trying to get a handle on for the extremely low-income group is who's on waiting lists, who's not getting served. Who are the people that are not able to get into extremely low-income housing? It's a group of concern, but I'm trying to figure out how big that group is. Are there people with real disabilities, severe disabilities that we aren't able to get into housing? I think those people are getting housing. That group's getting housing. Who are the folks that are not getting housing in that group? 

Senator Brownsberger: 26:17

Okay, so that's your extremely low income and that's coming through the operating subsidy programs. Now let's talk about the various production programs. You know, that billion a year that we're spending to produce new or to preserve existing affordable housing. That housing is mostly targeted to people in the 50, 60, 70, 80% of income range. Except in the cases where you've got some of that voucher subsidy to go along with on top of your construction subsidy. Most of it is going to people who are over 50% of the area median income, in other words, that are low income as opposed to very low income or extremely low income. So that housing that we're building with that billion a year is very good quality housing. It's going to be well run. It may be in very desirable places. It's good housing. But there is plenty of naturally occurring affordable housing at that income level. It may not be on the most desirable address, it may be in a gateway city or whatever, but there's plenty of housing in the state at the 60, 70, or 80% of area median income, which is what they call low income as opposed to very or extremely. So that's a good program, but it's not meeting the needs of the very low income people. So we don't really have anything that's responsive to the needs of the very low income people, of the truly working poor. And that's a huge gap that we need to focus on addressing.

Senator Brownsberger: 27:49

Going back, sort of zooming back out, we're talking about the reality that most of our development has to be market rate housing. Okay, well, new housing, new market rate housing, is going to be probably not responsive to the needs of very low income or necessarily even low income people. It's new, it's brand new, and it's kind of expensive to do that. Right now, even without the sort of pressures that drive up costs in the subsidized world, it's pretty expensive to build housing. You know, half a million, $600,000, $700,000 a unit. So those units are coming in at a price point that is middle income or even a little above middle income, or, in fact, luxury.

Senator Brownsberger: 28:34

So how does that meet everybody else's needs? Well, people move up. I mean it's increased supply. There is this issue with these luxury condos in downtown Boston that are just being bought up by some oil wealth or somebody coming from China or Russia or something that is looking for a place to park their money and they're not really using it. That's very distressing. That's part of the picture. But a lot of what's getting built is getting occupied by people who are moving out of other housing. So if somebody moves up into nicer housing, well, the housing that they were in becomes available. And in fact what the census data indicates is that a lot of people who are not low income or are not very or extremely low income are residing in housing which would be affordable to lower income people. So as those people move up, that housing will become available. 

Senator Brownsberger: 29:26

So to summarize, we don't have any affordable housing program in the state that really meets the needs of the working poor. We've got some small things we're trying to do, sort of pilot type things, but at scale, we're kind of meeting the needs of the extremely low income with operating subsidy. We're kind of meeting the needs of low income in a pretty good way with the affordable housing programs we have. But those very low income folks kind of are in a donut hole there. And the way, the only way, we can do anything to help them is really to just build a lot more housing and we'll see the movement that creates some opportunities for a more slack market, a more welcoming market for renters in the very low income bracket.

Matt Hanna: 30:05

Gotcha. Did you want to talk about zoning more or did you feel like you hit on all the zoning you wanted to talk to there? We touched on it, but did you want to touch on the specifics about the zoning at all?

Senator Brownsberger: 30:16

Well, here's where I think we are with the zoning. First of all, we're in 351 different places, right, because we have 351 cities and towns that have a lot of influence on their own on what's going to happen within their borders. We have at the state level passed the MBTA zoning act, which requires some upzoning for housing. My sense is that that's still, we're kind of living through that still and seeing what the impact will be. I do believe we're going to need to go further than that at some point in the future. Whether it's something we can do over the next year or two or something we end up doing three or four years out from our last bill. We'll see. But I can imagine something like what Cambridge did, but at a statewide level. So Cambridge basically just said you can build an apartment building, subject to certain limits and height, whatever it is four, five, six stories, anywhere in the city, period. So your existing single-family zoning becomes an option. The other option is for the developer to use the citywide zoning which just says look, I can build an apartment building here even though it's a single family neighborhood. Now some states have done that on a statewide basis in some form or other, saying there's no such thing as single family zoning anymore. You can always build two families as long as you meet the other requirements and so forth like that. So there's a whole lot of levers there. And that's what I come back to that word conversation because for us to do that at a statewide level would be a tough vote. A lot of people would feel a lot of blowback if we did that. And you know, that sort of hard bar approach might be too far. But what we do want to do, I think, is pull some statewide levers in a way that creates additional opportunities for construction of apartment buildings. Whether we zone them just statewide or whether we zone them in neighborhoods meeting certain criteria, I don't know. But that, I think, is the conversation.

Senator Brownsberger: 32:08

The other part of the conversation is just looking for all the different ways we can streamline, for example, wetlands. Wetlands are kind of a sacred thing. There's all this vibrant nature that lives in wetland areas. But we've allowed there to be both state and local regulation of wetlands. And local regulation of wetlands becomes sort of an additional barrier. The statewide regulation is pretty strong in itself. So that's something we have to look at. And we have to continue to look at just every other way we can streamline things, you know, coming up with more uniform definitions of the kinds of reviews that zoning boards and planning boards can undertake, setting timelines, and that kind of thing. The governor had a housing task force that looked at barriers to housing and they came up with like 100 different ideas of things we could do. And so working down that list and trying to do as many of them as possible makes sense. But that's all about removing barriers to housing. I think we also want to keep in mind, you know, the other side of it, the market influences, those real estate investment trusts, and what they're doing, and trying to create some more transparency into that as well. And it's not obvious what the next step would be.

Matt Hanna: 33:14

Right. And then maybe one thing we haven't touched on just a little bit is, in that bill, was the accessory dwelling units too. Is that like a tiptoe getting into different zoning within those residential areas, like as a test out type thing, or how would you frame the accessory dwelling units?

Senator Brownsberger: 33:29

Yeah, no, the accessory dwelling units is an example of imposing a statewide rule, a statewide framework on municipalities. And we could imagine, as I say, doing something else like, okay, two family anywhere, that kind of thing. But I think the ADU thing is probably going to have limited impact. There's some numbers that people came up with by comparing what happened in California, but this is also specific to the context of particular places and the kind of other rules that they have and the lot size and the sizes of the homes that are existing on those lots and so forth. So we'll see. I personally have no idea how much housing we're going to get out of the ADU rule. We'll see.

Matt Hanna: 34:06

At least it's an experiment in the zoning. And then the last other thing could be, are there any common questions or oppositions that you feel that you're having to answer or fight back against in terms of this conversation that we didn't touch on?

Senator Brownsberger: 34:18

Well, I think there's a lot of pressure to do things sooner, to do things that will immediately benefit tenants. The one that keeps coming back that I remain uncomfortable is rent control. Rent control will help a percentage of people immediately. It will help some people who don't need help, but it will help some people who really do need help. It's a very, very blunt instrument and it's pretty much a death knell to investment in real estate. I think we have to strike a balance in favor of production over putting in place one of these short-run beneficial things like rent control.

Senator Brownsberger: 34:56

It's kind of the flip side of the zoning issue, because there's nothing really beneficial, or immediately beneficial, for a resident of a particular neighborhood to have it upzoned, right. It means okay, well, I might have an apartment building next to me and that's probably not something I'm eager for. I may be okay with it, but it's not something begging to happen. And people kind of like being able to leave the windows open and not hear a thing at night. That's a beautiful thing. And the more people you have in the neighborhood, the more car doors, and the occasional car alarm, and the occasional argument or whatever. You know, it gets denser, it changes the feel of a neighborhood. But in both cases, as to preserving the quality of life in particular neighborhoods or preserving tenancies through rent control, I think we have to lean towards the future benefits of producing more housing over the long run. That's a judgment call. It's a conversation. It's not one person's decision. But it's the conversation we have to have.

Matt Hanna: 35:51

It feels like we've hit on a good amount. Is there anything within the context of what we've talked about so far today that you feel like we didn't tie up a loose end on?

Senator Brownsberger: 35:59

I feel like maybe it's just a couple of sort of aspirational thoughts, you know, to wrap up. 

Matt Hanna: 36:05

Some forward-facing thoughts, yeah, like what's your ideal situation going forward? Like if we succeeded with all these things we've talked about, in 10 years, you know, what's happened?

Senator Brownsberger: 36:13

Well, look, here's how I see the big picture, and I think I said it earlier in the conversation, but it's important to kind of come back to it. This is a long-term problem. It's taken us a long time to get to where we are. It's going to take us a long time to get out of where we are. So I think we need to take fairly extreme measures to facilitate production. There will be lots of barriers to production anyway, and then, of course, there's interest rates and tariffs and all kinds of other things that make it hard to build anything. Right now, it's true in the state that there are tens of thousands of permitted units that are not getting built. So it's not a panacea to loosen up the zoning regulation. We need national support and we need conditions that are going to work in our favor. But those conditions do come and go and they swing. And so my hope is that we make decisions now to do the best we possibly can, as a political matter, to facilitate housing production and then, over a period of decades, my belief is we'll be glad we did that. Our kids will be glad that we made a decision to remove as many barriers as possible to the production of housing. They're the ones that are going to see the benefit. It's not going to be today or tomorrow or next year, or even five or 10 years from now. At scale, I think, the benefits are going to be in the longer future.

Matt Hanna: 37:29

Well, I think we've got a pretty good outline here of what we're looking at in the state, what's been done recently, and kind of your views on the conversation to have going forward. So that's it for this episode. If you'd like to join in the conversation, please head 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 the 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.