Five years since the MBTA Communities Act changed the rules around multifamily housing production in the state, there are thousands of projects in the pipeline. But that progress represents only a modest improvement to the state’s ongoing housing crisis, according to a new report, and further reform is needed.
The report from Boston Indicators, titled “An Early Look at the MBTA Communities Permitting Pipeline,” finds nearly 7,000 homes in 34 communities underway, most of them in the permitting stage.
If not for the January 2021 MBTA Act loosening zoning restrictions in many places, most of these projects wouldn’t be in the pipeline, according to Amy Dain, a senior fellow at Boston Indicators.
“These are going to be real homes that people need, that people will live in,” said Dain, also the author of the report. “That’s so gratifying and so exciting. And this is a type of reform that 10 years ago, a lot of housing advocates didn’t think was possible.”
But the homes account for only a 1% increase among the two million homes located within all MBTA communities.
“It represents progress that is modest compared to need,” Dain said. “It’s not necessarily transformative gains; it’s more incremental and modest. It’s important to progress, but it’s just one step towards ending the housing shortage and addressing our patterns of development that are very car-dependent and moving toward transit-oriented development.”
The 7,000 homes being built fill the need for a certain type of housing the state is prioritizing. For one, they won’t have any prohibitions on families with children. Also, they are also in areas that support “multimodal mobility,” an approach that blends various transportation methods like walking, biking, public transit and personal vehicles. The report found that about a third of the units are within a half-mile of a train station, with 57% of the units being within a mile of a train station.
The Healey-Driscoll Administration has set a goal of creating 220,000 new housing units by 2035 to stay competitive and lower costs. Massachusetts has added 98,000 units, including 71,000 in Greater Boston, in the last five years, according to Boston Indicators’ most recent housing report card.
Dain said that while the 7,000 units spawned from the MBTA Act are just 3% of the state’s goal, they are a much-needed step in the right direction.
Directly after the passage of the law, some felt that hundreds of thousands of units would spring from it. But over time, it’s become clear that only modest gains could come from the MBTA Community Act in addressing the housing crisis.
Instead, Dain says that what’s needed is larger and wide-ranging reform — including incentivizing cities to reform zoning and even allowing the state to bypass local zoning to directly allow different types of housing development.
“I see a lot of opportunities for advocates to continue working at the local level to reform their zoning to allow more housing,” Dain said. “There are a lot of opportunities for wins there.”
Despite the modest gains from the MBTA Act, the state has made additional efforts to fast-track housing projects, including speeding up state review processes which can take upwards of a year in some cases.
“This is about cutting red tape so we can cut more ribbons on more new homes and get to more reasonably priced housing around this state,” Gov. Healey said in September.
The law applies to 177 cities and towns, and as of January, 165 municipalities have put zoning in place to comply with the act. However, 12 communities remain noncompliant with the act.
Last year, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court upheld the MBTA zoning law after hearing a legal challenge from the town of Milton.
The office of Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell has said it is prepared to bring an enforcement suit “against any MBTA Community that has failed to both adopt the required zoning and apply for a determination of district compliance.”
Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of the Boston nonprofit Abundant Housing Massachusetts, said the cities in noncompliance are a minority, and don’t reflect that great strides brought about by the MBTA Act over the last half-decade.
He said the law has helped drive the conversation about the housing crisis in Massachusetts and the variety of strategies being implemented to address the housing shortage. While there could be tweaks to improve the MBTA Act, it would be most impactful for the next five years to focus on other zoning and permitting reform statewide to address the housing crisis.
“It’s a very important tool to address our extreme housing shortage,” he said. “But the MBTA Communities Act itself is not the silver bullet.”
