Under attack in Ballot Question 2 this election year in Massachusetts is the state’s affordable housing law, known informally as 40B or the “anti-snob” law. Passed in 1969, 40B requires that 10 percent o year-around housing in all towns be “affordable” for low- and moderate-income residents. It gives developers the right to get a comprehensive permit rather than having to go to each permitting board in a town where they want to build housing if 20 to 25 percent of the units will be “affordable,” a designation based on median incomes in the town or city concerned.
The Bigger Not Better Alliance wants the law repealed. The Alliance says it bullies towns targeted by developers and promotes buildout rather than sustainable housing. But a long list of groups, from the state’s Catholic bishops to all the gubernatorial candidates, as well as coalitions of affordable housing advocates and residents, want to preserve the law (a No vote on Question 2 would keep the law in place; a Yes vote would repeal it).
Opponents of the question say that since the law was passed, 58,000 units of housing have been built, 30,000 of them affordable. Without the law, they say, many aging people would have been unable to stay in the towns in which their lives were spent and many low-income families would have been unable to live in Massachusetts.
The buildout issue is important because, in these days of climate change and vanishing agricultural land, many voters who understand the need for affordable housing are nevertheless concerned about the encroachment of development on open space. That concern is hardly lessened by the fact that Vote No on 2, a group opposing the question, lists as one of the reasons for its opposition the fact that affordable housing creates construction jobs.
But Vote No on 2 Western Massachusetts organizer Andrew Baker says affordable housing projects can be economical in their use of land. “Some of the ways in which you can minimize the impact on open space, farms and forestland being used up for housing development are things like infill development and adaptive reuse of existing buildings, both of which are strategies pursued by using 40B permits,” Baker told the Advocate. “The permit is neutral, but because [permits for affordable housing] allow greater density than conventional zoning in small towns, they can result in preservation of open space.”
As an example, Baker, the former director of the Hilltown CDC, points to an affordable housing project the CDC did on a 22-acre parcel in Haydenville. “The hilltown CDC built 11 highly efficient solar condominiums there, pretty near to net zero in energy use, and used only 3.5 acres of land,” he explained. “So there were 18 acres of land in their natural state. With conventional zoning, you would have used pretty much the entire site for housing development.”
Through the years there have been complaints that the required ratio of affordable homes to market-rate homes in projects built under the law has been low; that developers have not been forthcoming about their real costs and profits; and that the quality of building was sometimes low as well. But between the options of repealing the affordable housing law and preserving it as is, there’s another possibility: tweak it where needed. Raise the percentage of required affordable units; institute energy conservation and other sustainability requirements.
Jill Stein, Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, says the law is being “abused by real estate developers” and has not produced enough affordable housing, but that it shouldn’t be scrapped. “I think it’s incumbent on those of us who are saying no to this repeal effort to pledge that we work to rewrite 40B as soon as possible and get an effective affordable housing law in its place,” she says, “one that wouldn’t allow the abuses that are going on now.”
