EVEN AS PROPONENTS of the MBTA Communities Act cheer its high court green light and await forthcoming emergency regulations, they’d like everyone to keep their feet planted solidly in reality about the possible impacts of the sweeping housing law.
“This is a good moment to reflect back on the last couple of years of debating the law,” Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators at the Boston Foundation, said on The Codcast. “With that in mind, I’ve been worried that both sides of the debate have been overstating the promise of MBTA Communities for a while now. And I come at that from the perspective of thinking this is directionally exactly the sort of thing we need to do as a state. We need to act collectively across municipal boundaries to build more housing.”
But the controversial zoning act, which requires cities and towns served by or near the MBTA system to zone for a multifamily district, is not about to open the housing floodgates.
Schuster thinks language and estimates around “zoned capacity” – best guesses of how many units could legally be built under the new zoning rules – has led to confusion and strife in the rezoning process.
While the total upzoning promises hundreds of thousands of possible units, “I think many just very sincerely confuse that zoned capacity number with what would actually get built,” he said. Boston Indicators research into similar upzoning across the country found that only about 5 to 10 percent of those units actually change ownership – and therefore could be built with more units on the same lot – in a decade.
His back of the napkin math of “a positive optimistic scenario” for MBTA Communities estimates that the law might yield 40,000 new housing units in 10 years. It’s more housing in the pipeline, but falls far short of the roughly 200,000 units the Healey administration estimates the state will need in the coming years to meet demand.
“40,000 seems small compared to that,” Schuster said. “On the other hand, any new home we build is another family that can live in our communities, contribute to our local economy. And if we pass a few laws like MBTA Communities over the next several years – 40,000 here, 10,000 here, the governor’s legalization of accessory dwelling units is a few tens of thousands of units – that starts to really add up. So I think, big picture, this is exactly what we need to do. It’s just not a single silver bullet. And I think both sides have sometimes confused that piece of it.”
Some municipalities have taken a more cynical swing at the rezoning, opting for “paper compliance.” Greg Reibman, president of the Charles River Regional Chamber, pointed out last year that an 850-unit apartment project underway before the rezoning began was being counted as about 60 percent of the “new” units in Wellesley’s proposed multifamily district. The final approved rezoning plan would allow a total of 1,727 multifamily units, including the 850 already zoned for at Wellesley Park.
The Charles River Regional Chamber represents Newton, Needham, Wellesley, and Watertown.
Needham is still poised to hold a referendum vote on Tuesday to reject or accept a zoning plan approved by Town Meeting after two years of planning, Reibman noted. The town is torn – in a stark echo of Milton just a year ago – over the proposal’s top-line potential unit number.
The referendum’s timing is unfortunate, Reibman said, because the state will soon roll out new emergency regulations on MBTA Communities compliance after the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the law but decided the regulations had been promulgated incorrectly. The regulations, initially promised by the end of last week, are now likely to be announced early this week, a housing office spokesman said on Friday.
The zoning unit counts and the name of the law go to the heart of the years-long debate, with about 28 communities opting to blow past their compliance deadlines while the high court deliberated.
“If I could roll back the hands of time, go in the way back machine, I would say please don’t call this the MBTA Communities Act,” Reibman said. “It’s just caused so much confusion about it.”
He and Schuster noted that housing policy is tethered to climate goals, local and regional economics, education access, and, yes, transportation.
“The reality is that transportation is a huge impediment here,” Reibman said. “You can have debates on the floors of city councils and town halls, and when an opponent gets up and says, ‘But our schools; it’ll overcrowd our schools,’ say, ‘Well actually school enrollment has declined. Statewide school crowding is not really an issue.’ And they can say, ‘But water and sewer,’ and you say, ‘Well actually our water and sewer systems have been upgraded, or there’s a way to upgrade it, so that’s not a problem.’ And so on and so forth until they say, ‘but transportation’ and you go, ‘got me.’ Our transportation is not adequate to meet the needs for our housing.”
The MBTA Communities language was never designed to take the quality of transit service into account, which critics seized upon during the years of slow zones, long headways, burning trains, derailments, shuttles, and staffing shortages. After years of shutdowns for track work, the system quality has improved, with MBTA leadership celebrating a slow zone-free system this year.
The long-term well-being of the transportation system is still something of an open question, as a fiscal cliff looms this summer, and Universal Hub diligently reports on the regular travails of passengers dealing with cracked rails and signal switch issues.
“I’d say there’s no way to fully separate the transit conversation from the housing one,” Schuster said. “So I think they’re going to have to be related to some meaningful degree no matter what. One challenge with MBTA communities is that I think it’s been a bit of a Rorschach test for people wanting to address different pressing challenges we face as a region.”
Organizations across the political spectrum have been pushing for implementation of the MBTA Communities Act, from the discrimination-focused Lawyers for Civil Rights, to the pro-housing Abundant Housing Massachusetts, to the free-market think tank Pioneer Institute. The blend of housing advocates, environmentalists, business groups, and even clergy working toward the rezoning goal, Reibman said, “should change the dialogue for years.”
For more with Greg Reibman and Luc Schuster – on what the ruling tells us about state versus local power, historic opposition to new housing, and the actual scale of what could be built – listen to The Codcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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