Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities Edward Augustus was in Berkshire County this week. The former City Manager of Worcester stopped in Richmond, Massachusetts for the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission’s annual meeting Wednesday night. Last month, first-term Democratic Governor Maura Healey signed her $5 billion Affordable Homes Act into law. The legislation calls for the construction and preservation of more than 65,000 homes across the commonwealth in an attempt to lower astronomical housing costs fueled by low stock and high demand. Augustus spoke with WAMC about how communities can best take advantage of the historic bill, and which of its provisions will most impact Berkshire County’s housing crunch:
AUGUSTUS: When I think of Southern Berkshire County, I think of some of the communities that we would call seasonal communities that have many second and third homeowners who own homes in those communities. And when you have kind of seasonal surges during the summertime, you might have the populations of some of those towns double or triple, because there's so many cultural amenities and other things – it’s similar to the Cape – so we created a seasonal communities designation that are going to give some unique tools to those communities to try to respond to some of those challenges, things like allowing tiny homes to be built in those communities as year round residents, if that makes sense for those local communities, to set up new trust funds that will help them with resources at the local level, and then we'll have an advisory committee that's going to make some recommendations as to additional things that those seasonal communities might need to help them. ADUs, accessory dwelling units as of right, so removing any local barriers that might have existed. And in Berkshire County, there are many, many single-family homes, and anybody who owns a single-family home would have the right to add an ADU if they thought it made sense for them. So that could be seniors looking to bring in some additional income in order to pay for their bills because they're on a fixed income, or if you're in a seasonal community, and during the summertime, you want to rent your place out to a musician or an artist who's out in the Berkshire area- That would be a nice way to bring in some additional income, or it could be a family member or somebody else that's particularly senior, who's looking to stay in the community. They want to downsize, but there aren't appropriate options. So that ADUs being created can provide some of that movement in the housing space. Somebody who's in that big home wants to downsize, that opens up that bigger home, maybe for family that needs that kind of space for somebody who no longer needs it.
WAMC: Another community in the Berkshires and Western Mass in general are rural communities, communities that might not have that tourism bump that these seasonal communities you just mentioned might have. When you think about how the Healey-Driscoll Administration is working to address the housing concerns in rural communities, how would you describe that approach?
So, we have a special group that's working specifically on rural housing needs. So, we're hoping to come up with a new list of tools that are specifically focused on rural communities, not just here in the Berkshires, but across Massachusetts. So, we're hoping that there'll be some ideas that come out of that working group that we can put some new tools in the toolbox. I've heard from many communities that infrastructure is usually a challenge, particularly in our rural communities. We've created a new HousingWorks program that communities can apply to the state and get dollars to deal with infrastructure improvements, if that's one of the issues that's limiting the production of housing. The challenge in some of our smaller communities, it costs the same amount to build the unit, but they often can't get the same rents or sell the property at the same value, and so that often requires the state to come in with subsidies and other supports to help do that. We have a program called a Neighborhood Stabilization Program that I know has been used in many of our rural communities, and in those cases, it's sometimes preserving the housing that we already have. Could be a senior who is overwhelmed by repairs to their house. These programs can be used to help fix up and maintain the housing that we have, because I've heard from a lot of folks that maybe it's less about building new housing and more about protecting and preserving the housing that we have.
A lot of communities in the Berkshires and Western Mass are concerned about what it's going to take to get access and best utilize this massive bill. What advice do you have for municipalities to take the most advantage of this opportunity?
I would say, stay plugged in with us and with your local planning organizations to make sure that as we roll out the different elements of the bill that you know the guidelines and the regulations that will help folks understand how to access the tools that are now provided in the Affordable Homes Act. That's why I'm out here today speaking to the planning group for Berkshire County, so I can share with them where we are on implementing this bill and make sure they're hearing directly from us what we're thinking about as new elements of this bill and how they might take advantage of that. So, we want to stay very kind of connected with communities, particularly in this part of the state, so that they know how to make these things work for them.
Give us your sort of dream timeline for this bill from where we stand today to actually making a significant material impact on the lack of housing in Massachusetts and the high cost of living out here. Break down for us what that would look like.
Well, we've estimated that about this bill would create or preserve about 65,000 units of housing. Some of it is preserving, like I mentioned, some of our existing housing, particularly our public housing. There are many local housing authorities here in Berkshire County. I'll be visiting the Lee Public Housing Authority tomorrow. Many of them have deferred repairs and capital maintenance, and so this bill has about $2 billion that's particularly targeted to our public housing infrastructure to improve, make it more green, make it more sustainable, make it healthier. And my dream is to see folks who think ADUs make sense for them – we estimate about 8,000 to 10,000 new ADUs can be built in the next five years – that they start springing up all across Massachusetts, providing options for some folks that's at no cost to the state, that we preserve some of our existing housing stock, and that we're able to subsidize the creation of additional affordable housing across the state, or in the cases of Gateway Cities, which Pittsfield is one of the Gateway Cities, they've taken advantage of the [Housing Development Incentive Program] program, which is building market rate housing in their downtown. And we've provided, I think, in the last few years, over $5 million of grants specifically to the city of Pittsfield for that purpose. So, there are multiple tools in the toolbox, both dollars and policies, that we think over the next five years, which is the kind of authorization of this bill, are going to have a big impact on housing production in Massachusetts.
I've heard from community leaders in North Adams that that community in Northern Berkshire County would also like to be part of the Gateway Cities designation that Pittsfield is a part of. That's another Berkshire community, of course, North Adams, that's facing a major housing crunch as well. Any thoughts on that and what it might mean to include a smaller city like North Adams in that number?
Yeah, that's the designation the legislature provides. So, there's about 26 cities that are given the Gateway Cities designation. I know there are a number of – Gardner, Greenfield, North Adams, Marlborough – that are not in that designation. That would be something for the legislature to look at and see if they wanted to expand some of the programs to impact the next tier, population wise, of cities in Massachusetts. But we know that the Gateway Cities designation has been a big help in creating some unique tools. So, I defer to the legislature on that.
And lastly, what do you feel like is the most underdiscussed issue around housing in Massachusetts? There's a lot of big headlines about housing- Is there anything about the field that you think is sort of going under the radar that you want to draw attention to?
Well, I would say, a lot of the action is really at the local level. ADUs as of right in our bill was really necessary because many communities had restrictions that didn't make the building of ADUs possible. Sometimes they required it to be a family member, sometimes they required it to be owner occupied, all of those things sometimes make it harder to access financing to build those. It doesn't apply to Western Mass, but we're having a big conversation within the MBTA communities about what are the zoning rules that have prohibited the building of multifamily housing near transit nodes. We have a commission that's working right now called the Unlocking Housing Production Commission that is really looking at, what are those other barriers? So, I guess I would say a lot of this is at the local level. What policies, what zoning practices, what other incentives does a community put on the table? Or the opposite? What obstacles, what barriers, what prohibitions does a local community put in the way of building housing? So, we can do a lot from the state. We're trying to do a lot with this historic bill, $5.2 billion, 49 new policy initiatives. But at the end of the day, a lot of this action, the permit actually gets pulled at the local level, the local planning board, a zoning board of appeals has an awful lot of say about these projects, and quite honestly, just the conversations the abutters, the neighbors who come out to a meeting and oppose or support a project can often determine the fate of that project. So, I think the local discussions and local communities feeling empowered about embracing the need to build more housing of all types is maybe as not as focused on as it could or should be.
