In Massachusetts, the need for new housing is staggering. So the state is taking charge — whether cities and towns like it or not.
In Plymouth, which has been growing rapidly for years, officials hope a new state law aimed at encouraging more housing will help give the town more control over when and where that growth happens.
State housing officials and experts blame exclusionary zoning policies in cities and towns for the huge housing deficit. Last month, the state released initial results of its first comprehensive housing plan, which found the state must build 222,000 homes in the next 10 years.
Building has slowed because of individual communities blocking new construction and zoning, said Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, even though the state has constitutional authority over zoning.
“Over the last 30 years, towns have had the ability to say, we’re not going to build apartment buildings, we’re not going to allow accessory dwelling units, we’re not going to reduce lot sizes and allow smaller single-family homes to be built,” Kanson-Benanav said.
“That’s what’s driven the housing shortage. It’s not just saying you can’t build certain types of homes. It’s meant that across the board, the 222,000 homes we need just haven’t been built.”
Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, said that the halt in development that led to a 222,000-home shortfall is a direct result of town zoning laws. Connor said one of the biggest concerns for the state now is a high proportion of people between the ages 25 and 40 leaving the state in search of cheaper housing.
Over half of the people who left Massachusetts in 2021 were between ages 26 and 41, which is disproportionate to their share of the population, according to a report from the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. Connor said this is especially concerning when the state has invested in young people’s education and professional development, only for them to leave.
“That’s something that hurts the long-term growth and future of the state. That’s something that hurts the workforce of the state,” Connor said.
Generally, homeowners don’t want more housing because they’re concerned about their own property values, despite the fact that new housing likely wouldn’t affect them, according to Katherine Levine Einstein, an associate professor of political science at Boston University. They also fear change and have class- and race-based prejudices about who new housing might bring to their towns, Einstein said.
But people who don’t want new housing aren’t necessarily the majority group, they’re just the loudest.
Einstein wrote “Neighborhood Defenders,” a book that examined where the push against new housing was coming from and why so-called neighborhood defenders have so much power. She found that in planning and zoning board meetings in almost 100 communities across Massachusetts, the people who showed up overwhelmingly opposed new housing. They also tended to be white, older homeowners. Across the board, the people at these meetings were unrepresentative of their broader communities.
“One of the ways that zoning and land use regulations make housing more expensive is that they create these public meeting processes which lead to very politically unequal proceedings that hamper our ability to build new housing,” Einstein said.
The MBTA Communities Act has started to change this. This law requires all towns and cities that are served by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or are adjacent to communities served by the MBTA, to update their zoning laws to allow for at least one district of reasonable size in which multi-family housing is permitted.
The state Supreme Judicial Court ruled the law constitutional in January, and the state issued new deadlines for towns to comply.
The Communities Act is not a solution to the state’s widespread affordable housing crisis, which in many towns has led to an increased homeless population. But it is a move away from allowing an unrepresentative body to prevent new housing in their towns, and the first real example of the state taking zoning power back from towns.
But it’s not been easy.
Six towns still aren’t compliant with the Communities Act, according to Connor. Four of those towns failed to submit an Action Plan by their deadline, including Middleborough, which sued the state over the law at the beginning of the month. The town argues that it already has enough multi-family housing, and that it cannot afford to make the necessary upgrades to its water supply and sewer system.
This lawsuit comes despite the SJC ruling, but after State Auditor Diana DiZoglio pronounced that the law contains an “unfunded mandate” for which the state is required to cover costs.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell released a statement saying that DiZoglio has no power over the implementation of the law and that her determination is false.
“If those who oppose housing affordability try to make a similar claim in court, the state will vigorously defend the law, and we intend to be successful, as we have been so far,” Campbell said in her statement.
A close look at the MBTA Communities Act in Plymouth
Plymouth was already compliant with the MBTA Communities Act. But because its total housing stock remains under the 10 percent “affordable” threshold mandated by the state’s Chapter 40B law, developers can still circumvent most zoning rules if they meet certain affordability restrictions. Such projects have met with strong resistance in town – and elsewhere.
According to Lee Hartmann, the town’s director of planning and development, and Derek Brindisi, the town manager, Plymouth’s growth is having an adverse effect on local services.
Hartmann and Brindisi said it needs to see some state benefits from all the housing it’s built in recent years. Plymouth’s fire and police resources are strained, and the town’s traffic has increased exponentially, they said.
“We’ve gone above and beyond for housing production in this town,” Hartmann said. “But I think at this point, if I polled the community and the police and fire chief and the [Department of Public Works] director, they’d all feel like it would be nice to take a breath for a few years and not have the kind of growth that’s going in this community.”
Hartmann and Brindisi said that residents, many of whom are 55 and older, were not asking for more housing. If anything, in line with Einstein’s research, the people they’ve heard from opposed it.
“It really isn’t the town’s need,” Hartmann said. “The state has identified a need, and we are just a great place to live and have available land.”
Hartmann said the state should be providing incentives to towns that create housing that could supplement the increased costs.
Brindisi said new environmental building standards are a good thing, but they’re increasing the cost of building. He said the state needs to find a balance between these regulations and affordable housing, and to reexamine what “affordable” means.
“It’s easy to say, ‘We need more affordable housing,’ but part of the reason we need more affordable housing is because many of the policies that have been created are making it so costly to build housing,” he said.
Connor said that while he isn’t familiar with Plymouth’s specific case, the Communities Act is designed to give towns control over where they zone for housing while offering funding and technical assistance to towns that request it.
“We’ve provided support to something like 150 communities, all of whom requested it to help get them across and help bring them into compliance,” Conor said. “Nevertheless, we really want to make sure that this is still a local process.”
As far as Massachusetts towns go, Plymouth is fairly average. With a median household income well above the national average, but just a little above the state average, it presents a good example of how towns might react to new zoning.
“It’s a beautiful community and people want to live here,” Hartmann said. “We hear it time and time again, that’s the first statement people make: ‘We love Plymouth.’”
Abigail Pritchard is part of the Boston University Statehouse Program.