First-term Democratic Governor Maura Healey unveiled a housing program Thursday that calls for 222,000 housing units to be built across Massachusetts by 2035.
“We're very, very serious about building more housing, and this kind of plan and report is absolutely central to us being able to build," she said. "We also made a lot of progress over the last two years on funding, on policy, through the Affordable Homes Act, and much more. We had experts digging into the landscape and documenting needs around our state, across all regions, and then setting out strategies to meet them, because every region in our state may be a little bit different in terms of their housing needs.”
For longtime regional housing advocates, Healey’s announcement was a once in a lifetime moment.
“What we're looking at here is the state's first housing plan in at least my professional lifetime, and possibly ever," said Brad Gordon, the executive director and staff attorney for UpSide413, the Pittsfield-based organization formerly known as the Berkshire County Regional Housing Authority. “I was selected to serve on the governor's Housing Advisory Council, and the governor and the Secretary of [Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities], as well as other members of HLC, worked in consultation with the Housing Advisory Council to develop the plan, and it was truly an iterative process where we would get components of the plan, mark it up, give them our input, let them know from a regionally specific perspective or lens what we thought of the plan, and what tweaks needed to be made."
Gordon has been working on housing in the Berkshires since the late 80s, and says the new comprehensive plan offers a much-needed holistic approach to the problems Massachusetts faces.
On some levels, the housing crisis shares many commonalities in how it presents across Massachusetts.
“We just, frankly, don't have enough rental units or homes for sale," Gordon explained. "So, the inventory that we have across the commonwealth doesn't match the demand for housing. And if you just looked at that from a simple market economics perspective, what that has done is it's driven up the cost of housing beyond the means of many households across a broad economic spectrum.”
Berkshire County has its own share of specific barriers to solving its housing issues.
“We have an older and substandard housing stock, and that that's something that we're going to need to invest in to keep that housing stock online," Gordon told WAMC. "Because even if we- We’re proposing a growth level in the state plan of, I think, about 2.5% over 10 years. That's probably about 1,400 housing units. But if you're developing 1,400 new housing units, but at the same time, you're having your older units go offline, that's probably not the direction you want to go in. So, we need to be able to invest in those units here in Berkshire County. We have one of the whole oldest housing stocks, and also one of the housing stocks that probably needs the most investment, because there just has not been enough investment in it.”
The largely rural county’s demographic trends also play a role in its experience with the housing crisis. Gordon says that while Berkshire County has been losing population, demand for single-family homes is up.
“Our housing stock, much of it is really for larger families, and so there's an incongruence there," he said. "And we're also in Berkshire County, one of the older populations, and we are aging, and so again, those are folks that typically will be couples or individual person households, and those are folks that will need smaller dwelling units, and we need to create some of that fluidity in housing so that folks can move from larger units as they age or as they're a smaller household, and that would open it up for larger households that may still be in the community.”
While wages have stagnated nationwide in recent decades, Gordon says the inability for working people to keep up with housing costs is felt particularly sharply in the Berkshires.
“We have one of the most significant mismatches between household income and the cost of housing in the region, so it's one of the highest gaps in the commonwealth,” he told WAMC.
State Senator Paul Mark of the Berkshire, Hampden, Franklin and Hampshire District says he looks forward to seeing how Healey’s plan can best serve Western Massachusetts.
“We don't, in every, community have sewer systems and public water- We have a lot of wells and septics," said Mark. "And I remember the lieutenant governor came to the town of Goshen, and she said, wow, there's so much land here, we could build so much. And A, there's land that's protected and preserved, and we like that, we care about that. And then B, nobody wants a skyscraper thrown into one of the one of the towns in the Berkshires. We have to make sure it fits with the character of community.”
The Healey administration says it will release the full comprehensive housing plan with accompanying data this spring.
