Swampscott Housing Explained. Part 1: The Housing Crisis
Transcript:
Hey, Swampscott. We’ve been hearing a lot about 40B projects lately and now we’re starting to hear about new state legislation that will require new multi-family zoning around our commuter rail station. What’s going on? Why is the state telling communities like ours that we need more housing density than we already have?
First, the entire Boston-Metro area is currently in a housing crisis meaning there is more demand for housing than there is supply. When this happens, it becomes more and more difficult for people to find housing. If someone can’t find housing in Swampscott because they can’t afford it, they have to look in a community that is less affluent. Like a much less fun game of musical chairs or one of those “which bucket will fill first?” thought exercises, this pushes people that would have otherwise lived in those communities to even less affluent communities and so on until some people just simply can’t find anywhere to live. In other words, homelessness.
Second, we live in racially and economically segregated communities. This is a result of explicitly racist laws throughout our country’s history which have barred people of color and specifically African Americans from home ownership and the opportunity to build generational wealth through real estate. While explicitly racist laws are no longer allowed to exist, barriers like affordability and access to mortgages still remain to home ownership for many and people of color are still disproportionately burdened with those barriers. In Swampscott, our percent of African American and Latino populations are lower than what is found in the Boston-metro area. However, the average income for our African American and Latino residents is higher than both the averages for those populations in the Boston-metro area and the average income for people in Swampscott.
40B and the new MBTA upzoning regulation, known as Section 3A, around transit stations are aiming to correct these disparities and push towns to contribute more to the huge housing demand we have in the region.
40B, which has been around since 1969 aims to generate subsidized housing units in communities that make multi-family developments illegal or at least extremely difficult to build through zoning bylaws. Many communities have yet to reach the modest and somewhat arbitrary 10% threshold of subsidized units that 40B set out to meet, including Swampscott. Those communities that aren’t meeting the goal typically have a much higher percentage of single-family than multi-family homes and their zoning bylaws are written to maintain this. By limiting the housing that is produced to only be the kind that is the most expensive and takes up the most land per person, housing costs in a community will become artificially inflated. 40B allows developers to skirt around exclusionary zoning bylaws as long as they make at least a quarter of their units available below market rate and their plan gets approved by the state.
Section 3A will require communities to allow multi-family housing by right that is suitable to families with children, in an area within a half-mile of a transit station. “By right” means that a developer would not need to apply for a special permit or need a site plan review to get their project approved by the town. Many communities like Swampscott have implemented lengthy review processes and layers of red tape for anyone that wants to build anything other than a single-family home. Removing the red tape and the veto power of current residents not only reduces barriers for developers to build multi-family housing, but it encourages smaller developers to build triplexes and fourplexes and not just large developers with lots of money who want to build housing with 100 or more units.
Neither of these laws are perfect, but 40B has pushed communities to build more multi-family housing that is more affordable than they otherwise would. Section 3A will also push communities to build more housing and even though it doesn’t have a subsidized housing component to it, basic economics dictates that if we meet the demand for housing in the region with an appropriate amount of supply, the prices will start to level out. This is especially true in communities like Swampscott that have restricted the types of housing that can be built which artificially inflates housing prices. So yes, these laws do push communities to be more dense than perhaps they want to be, but that’s because we have spent a lot of our history not contributing to the region’s need for housing.
Swampscott is a small town by geography, but Swampscott is part of a larger community, which most immediately includes the neighboring regional urban centers of Lynn and Salem and is within only a few miles of Boston’s inner core city suburbs, which includes Revere and Chelsea. Swampscott will continue to be a beautiful, desirable place to live, but embracing the changing landscape of our region and world’s needs is essential. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 in this series to hear about that history and how we could take a more proactive approach to meeting housing demand in the future that will make us more racially and economically diverse in line with our region, reduce our carbon output per person, and make us more resilient as a community.
