The Healey-Driscoll administration is offering hundreds of acres of state-owned properties to developers with the hope of creating more than 3,500 new housing units.
“I directed our state agencies to go out and scour the Commonwealth and identify any parcels of state-owned land that really aren’t being used and identify them as parcels that we can offer up to the development community,” said Governor Maura Healey at a news conference on Monday announcing the current eligible properties. “Today we released the results in Massachusetts’ first ever complete inventory of state-owned surplus land that could be used for housing.”
Governor Healey, Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, Housing and Livable Communities Secretary Ed Augustus and Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) Commissioner Adam Baacke shared details about the surplus state-owned properties at a Developer’s Summit prior to the news conference.
“In total, we’ve identified more than three dozen sites covering about 450 acres of land that could be used to build several thousand homes.” Healey explained.
The comprehensive review of DCAMM’s property inventory considered criteria including whether the sites are state-owned, underutilized and viable for housing development. The first tranche of properties are at 17 sites across the Commonwealth ranging in sizes from about five to 400 acres according to the DCAMM’s commissioner.
“And we’re ready to get these properties into production because we’ve streamlined the process of developing public land as part of the Affordable Homes Act,” the Governor said, referring to the law passed last yearto encourage production of affordable housing. “It’s gonna be good for the state as we look to unlock more public land.”
“They really will create opportunities to address the housing needs in all parts of the Commonwealth,” said Baacke. “I think the important thing is, it’s just the beginning. There are many more that we’ve identified that are not quite ready to put the solicitations out, but will be in the coming years.”
The eligible properties are expected to be in the pipeline by September with an additional 17 locations being made available next year. The state said the land deals would be handled in one of two ways.
“The Affordable Homes Act requires us to do some sort of a competitive public process. In some cases it will be an auction, which will literally be bidding. In other cases, it will be a request for proposals where we’ll put out a solicitation and we’ll see what sort of proposals we receive and those will be reviewed against established criteria,” said Baacke.
DCAMM said the properties have sat vacant for long periods of time because the process to offload them has been quite cumbersome. “They all are under the care and control of either a state agency, an institution or a branch of government, And I think in the past, there has been very little incentive for those entities to declare them surplus and make them available,” said Baacke. “One of the wonderful things that the Affordable Homes Act did was it actually created some incentive for those agencies to say, 'You know, we really don’t need this. Let’s make it available.’”
Joseph Goncalves is a developer and owns New Vision Enterprises, based in Brockton. “I’ll definitely be interested in downtown strategic properties where there’s a lot of state-owned properties,” he said.
Goncalves said he has been working with the state and has been awarded as a developer for 36 Main Street in Brockton. “It’s one of their current properties and we’re going to be developing 35 residential units with four commercial bays, in the Brockton downtown corridor,” Goncalves said. “We’ve actually completed one directly across [the street] that wasn’t a state-owned property.”
According to Goncalves in the past there has been a lot of uncertainty whether properties like 36 Main Street were available. “I think with the new plan, they’ve identified the ones that need to be disposed of and the ones that are actually primed for hopefully residential development,” he said.
