Can You Force the Suburbs to Build Apartments? Massachusetts Is Trying.

January 21, 2022 11:24 AM

Build up or pay up. That is the message Massachusetts is sending to 175 cities and suburbs in the Boston area, as a bill to boost housing production begins to take effect. Almost every jurisdiction in eastern Massachusetts will have to do its part zoning for 344,000 new units of as-of-right multifamily housing—or lose access to some state grant programs. That means allowing apartments in many tony subdivisions currently reserved for single-family homes. (SLSlate)
posted by DirtyOldTown (61 comments total)

For the record, yes I RTFA -

Since we're looking at creative ways to create housing in bigger cities, how about we also try to hike up the nonoccupancy tax on the people who buy up apartments as second or third homes and then just let them sit there?

Yes, I know the link I have goes to a discussion of this issue in New York and we're talking about Massachusetts, but I am reasonably confident this is not a situation unique to New York.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:33 AM on January 21, 2022 [40 favorites]

Won't the suburbs just move further out?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:37 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

So true, EmpressCallipygos. In Cambridge MA, the big movie theater next to Harvard University has been a vacant shell for +5 years. The owner (Chan, google him) is supposedly doing this on purpose so that all the restaurants etc. who relied on the movie traffic will go out of business and sell the buildings to him cheap. It's working, so far. Cambridge made a big splash a few years ago threatening to take the movie theater by eminent domain unless he told them what he was going to do with it. So he did. He told them he was going to develop it. And there it stands.
posted by Melismata at 11:45 AM on January 21, 2022 [21 favorites]

Won't the suburbs just move further out?

I don't think so. This won't stop the development of farmland into suburbs, but a lot of that is driven by the lack of affordability of housing near where people really want to be. Thirty years ago we were talking about empty cities, but that really isn't the problem anymore. We've replaced it with gentrification which is it's own pickle.
posted by meinvt at 11:46 AM on January 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Won't the suburbs just move further out?

No. There's physically not enough land. There is literally no unincorporated land in Massachusetts and even if there were land available, there's not enough in the way of transport to get people places and services to easily function.

Bring it on I say. My town won't let me do any sort of multi-family thing despite living on 1.7 acres a half mile from the town center with 250 feet of frontage. I have a carriage house doing nothing that I could conceivably convert into a studio apartment and rent to someone but zoning says we have to "KEeP The cHArACTer Of The neIghboUrhooD" which, let's face it, is just code for no poor or black people.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:47 AM on January 21, 2022 [65 favorites]

Almost every week, I get a letter or note from some developer who "represents a group of investors" that wants to buy my suburban house. I assume they want to rent it out or, as I've seen elsewhere in my neighborhood, build out "granny flats" to rent. Without rent controls, building apartments instead of houses means extracting ever-increasing amounts of money from the poor and middle class just for a place to exist.
posted by SPrintF at 11:54 AM on January 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

There is literally no unincorporated land in Massachusetts

That's not the same as there being no available land. Massachusetts, like all the other New England states, has the New England Town as it's most local government structure. Not having any unincorporated land is by definition. Even the most rural, undeveloped parts of Maine still have incorporated municipalities--they may be known by grid numbers and exist mostly on paper, but they exist.

(Sorry, explaining the lack of unincorporated territory has been a thing for me since this Ask Metafilter post way back in 2012)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:56 AM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

Thanks for the clarifying replies!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:58 AM on January 21, 2022

This is great. I probably could make a front page post of YIMBY vs NIMBY issues, but the the bottom line on housing is we need way more of it in our most productive areas like Boston, Seattle and SF.

Ther are some more regulations on landlords and developers needed, but we can’t mix the problem just by reducing vacancies
posted by CostcoCultist at 12:13 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Take Newton, where the median home sells for $1.4 million. It’s a large suburb of 88,000 souls 7 miles from Boston Common. It has 10 stations of light rail and commuter rail.

For comparison, we live in Somerville - the most densely populated city in New England - and have a grand total of two subway station. Something like 75% of the city is classified as underserved by public transit. We're about to get several more stops added as part of the Green Line Extension this year, but man has it been a long time coming.

The Boston suburb of Essex, for example, requires a four-bedroom apartment include six parking spots!

This is such a huge problem even here in the city, and part of it is this paradoxical effect of proximity to transit drawing wealthy people who want to buy homes... and then buying a bunch of cars and driving everywhere. Being close to a train station is desirable to the folks who will shell out $1mil+ on a condo, but then they won't actually use it. The city has been trying to relax parking requirements for multi-unit buildings, but it's been a challenge, especially as they're simultaneously trying to remove some on-street parking to build out bus-priority lanes and bike lanes.
posted by backseatpilot at 12:14 PM on January 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

Whenever you leave it in the hands of local government, you get bullshit like this (from the Chicago suburbs). See, they weren't against "affordable" housing, they just uh, had concerns about parking and stuff.

(TL;DR: a totally reasonable affordable housing proposal was modified because of complaints by neighbors, then declared unsafe because of those modifications. And of course, they said, totally innocently,, “We want to maintain the character in the neighborhood. We don’t want it to be made into something that doesn’t fit.”)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:21 PM on January 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Without rent controls, building apartments instead of houses means extracting ever-increasing amounts of money from the poor and middle class just for a place to exist.

Compare this to the current situation, where neither apartments nor single family homes are being built in enough numbers, and money is being extracted from the middle and rich class to landowners, whose sole contribution here is that they bought land a long time ago.

I'm not singling you out but one of the ways that housing is blocked in California, which has worse housing problems, is that any new housing is subject to higher and higher levels of below-market rate subsidization, minimum parking requirements, environmental review boards, and "neighborhood character" requirements that make it really hard to build anything and hikes up the rate of "market rate" (eg: normal) housing. The NIMBYs don't want anything to be built period.

Those dastardly investors you speak up are going to buy either the home and the apartment building regardless. I'm not sure how a single family paying $5,000 in rent for a home is better for the poor and middle class than four families paying $3,000 in rent each for a smaller apartment.
posted by meowzilla at 12:25 PM on January 21, 2022 [20 favorites]

It's great that the state is focusing on transit-oriented development, but they need to remember to fund the "transit" part.

With any luck the Green Line extension should open this year, but it represents the first time the subway system has been expanded in over thirty years. During that time the state went nuts expanding the Commuter Rail network which runs sporadically and mostly serves high-income people living in exurbs who drive to the parking lots.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:31 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

(The owner (Chan, google him) is supposedly doing this on purpose so that all the restaurants etc. who relied on the movie traffic will go out of business and sell the buildings to him cheap.

Side note: it's been ten years, actually, but he doesn't need to use this strategy because most of the buildings weren't owned by the businesses but by commercial landlords, and they've all sold to him. It's a fucking tragedy.)
posted by praemunire at 12:43 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

The NIMBY contingent in my Seattle suburb is apoplectic about the WA state legislature's attempt to lift zoning restrictions state-wide to create missing-middle housing , so I figure the legislature must be doing something right.

The NIMBYs: No more apartment buildings downtown!
Also the NIMBYs: No more buses near downtown because they bring undesirables! [narrator: the buses were full of office commuters ]
And further, the NIMBYs: How can we get more people to shop downtown? Why is downtown empty?

posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:48 PM on January 21, 2022 [14 favorites]

building apartments instead of houses means extracting ever-increasing amounts of money from the poor and middle class just for a place to exist.

How so? Surely apartments would be rented or sold for less than houses would?

Being opposed to building more apartments is not a pro-working class stance.

We need a LOT more apartments in this country. The fact that there is a whole bunch of private capital interested in building them is, for the most part, a good thing. Let them build! Let them build so much that there is a glut, and prices crash!
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:54 PM on January 21, 2022 [11 favorites]

>he doesn't need to use this strategy

so it'd be like Monopoly having a black hotel you could buy and put one somebody else's space that just nukes the rents on that entire side of the board LOL/sigh/cry
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:55 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

woo! Excellent news! adding more units *at any price* will help relax the demand for housing, and allow more affordable units to stay affordable. That's only half of it, though.

However, even when cities allow it, many affordable housing projects don't have a balanced budget without significant capital subsidies. We can't make cheaper housing. Building smaller units doesn't seem to be the answer, because there are so many fixed costs.
posted by rebent at 12:58 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

building apartments instead of houses means extracting ever-increasing amounts of money from the poor and middle class just for a place to exist.


You can build affordable apartments for the working class, and make a nice profit, if (IF!) you don't have to pay for armies of lawyers and political operatives just to get the goddamn permits to break ground.

In the meantime, while the housing crunch continues, you can rake in huge amounts of money renting apartments to new professionals in the upper class, apartments that could and would just as easily be rented to the working class at lower rates if enough housing stock existed. Meanwhile the working poor live in their cars.

I know which bunch of greedy real estate speculators I want constrained and which ones I want set loose to do their thing.
posted by ocschwar at 1:03 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

(Not wanting to super-derail, but this theater is, as mentioned, right across from Harvard Yard, which is a busy place indeed. Losing foot traffic from a five-screen theater isn't great, but it was never the major draw of the area. I think Chan is in the realm of short-sighted landlords in lots of major cities who can use creative accounting to ease losses while holding out for some major chain to move in. He's been a blight on Harvard Square, but it's a recognizable form of blight.)

I'm excited to see MA adopt this strategy, and interested to know how it plays out. Unfortunately, without readopting rent control, I'm not sure what the impact will be. But it's a bold step.
posted by praemunire at 1:09 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think changing the planning laws to permit/mandate more units/square mile is a good thing. But it should be paired with a limit on how many units a landowner may build. IMO, the ideal at this point would be to permit single home owners to build up to four or five units on their land, perhaps including a commercial space. This leads to a diversity of housing and commercial spaces and spatial and esthetic variation that is characteristic for all great urban and semi-urban neighborhoods I have ever visited. If it gets too interesting municipalities can add on height restrictions, a palet of allowed construction materials, ceiling heights... whatever is appropriate. After twenty years, a revision can add more units/square mile, so the area develops slowly and in a human pace. Scale this to whatever makes sense where you are. I mean, I find most contemporary skyscapers in midtown Manhattan ridiculous, but they don't make me hate the world.
Back in the day when West Berlin was in the middle of the east block and they needed a lot of incentives to get people to build and also to live there, a small landowner could build "temporary social housing" (I don't think that was the term), where they got subsidies for construction if they committed to rent out the apartments at rent-controlled prices for 20 years. Then they could return (only unoccupied) apartments to the market. This is actually a very good pension plan for a small business owner, even if the occupants stayed on with rent control beyond the 20 years, so it was quite popular.
posted by mumimor at 1:27 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

In St. Paul, MN, there's a little neighborhood called Merriam Park. Some developers bought several house lots on Marshall Ave., west of the beloved library, and are putting up a couple of apartment buildings that are four stories high. (Going by memory here, so please correct me if I am wrong.)

When I saw them, I said to my brother, "hey, that's great!" Because we want density. But he said, "No, they're higher-cost than the neighborhood supports, and so will just be rented by Tommies [college students at nearby UST]. Which is what the developers want." For example, they have a gym but no parking, so local residents have to fight the renters for parking.

It's like they figured out the most externalities they could dump on the community in order to raise their profits, and went for that.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:29 PM on January 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

I was going to say something about the fascinating city of Houston, TX, which has no zoning laws but that might be a myth.
posted by meowzilla at 1:40 PM on January 21, 2022

How so? Surely apartments would be rented or sold for less than houses would?

Hard to say. I know apartment rents in my area are quite often equal to, or higher than, what a mortgage payment can be.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:55 PM on January 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah, the problem we have up here in Milwaukee (and I assume elsewhere) is that the cost differential between building luxury and standard units is a small fraction of the total cost of the structure, but the return on that investment can be significant, so a lot of 2 bedroom apartments are being built that end up with $2000-$3000+ rents in an area where a normal multitenant apartment complex might otherwise get $1000/month rents. And shooting from the hip that's a $300-500k mortgage, which gets you a hell of a lot more than 2 bedrooms. (ok and more maintenance costs and etc etc etc - it's not 1:1 mortgage:rent, I understand.)

You'd think there wasn't an endless supply of people with that much money to sink into their apartment and yet the landlords haven't gone wanting yet. It's depressing.
posted by Kyol at 2:19 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I know apartment rents in my area are quite often equal to, or higher than, what a mortgage payment can be.

If apartments rent for rates equal to your area's current mortgage rates, you have an absolutely terrible housing market and need to build thousands of new units of all kinds. Or you have an amazingly constrained mortgage market (as in too many people who don't have good enough credit ratings to get housing). Or possibly an extremely mobile population that eschews ownership due to short living duration in your area. All of those at the population level would be really weird.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:23 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I didn't see any mention of mixed-use development in the article. Anybody know if that's part of the plan, or are they just going to build apartment buildings for poor people that are miles from all the services they need?
posted by clawsoon at 2:24 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

The US really can’t figure out a systematic solution to this. Build new state-sponsored housing? Never! Allow “the market to figure it out?” Well we tried that, and it’s not going great. So we’re stuck with attempting to guide development through increasingly arcane rules and then being unhappy when our (market driven) housing system doesn’t come up with an exact match to what we want. I used to be much more optimistic about this, but I have trouble these days. It feels like the only solution is to build true public housing where it needs to be to serve the people it needs to serve. That will piss off both the neighbors and the developers equally, but as neither of them seem to be able to see more than an inch from their faces or a week into the future, I’m out of compassion.
posted by q*ben at 2:27 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

… except for one thing that has worked, which is increasing density by fiat and allowing homeowners to self-build additional units in their backyards, attics and basements. Which is good for a little bit of density but won’t solve the problem in most communities. It’s currently the only working strategy in my neck of the woods.
posted by q*ben at 2:29 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

It feels like the only solution is to build true public housing where it needs to be to serve the people it needs to serve.

That's not going to happen anytime soon due to the Faircloth Amendment, which requires that no net new public housing be built in the US with Federal Funds. They can only destroy and rebuild, and some cities have some slack they can build up to, but again little federal funding and the slack isn't enough to really make a difference.

So you are reliant on state or local funding for public housing.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:30 PM on January 21, 2022

"Allow “the market to figure it out?” Well we tried that"

Yeah, but what exactly were we asking the market to figure out?

Currently in my neighborhood it's illegal to add more than X units per acre, and we did that years ago. So, the problem we gave the market was basically: "twice as many people want to live here now, but we don't want them. What should we do?", and it gave the predictable (ugly) answer. But we were OK with this because we liked the way our neighborhood looked, and because the answer the market gave was good for our pocketbooks.

We want the market to give answers that aren't garbage, we've got to be willing to ask better questions.
posted by bfields at 2:42 PM on January 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

That's not the same as there being no available land. Massachusetts, like all the other New England states, has the New England Town as it's most local government structure. Not having any unincorporated land is by definition. Even the most rural, undeveloped parts of Maine still have incorporated municipalities--they may be known by grid numbers and exist mostly on paper, but they exist.

While you are correct on the technical point that "lack of unincorporated land" is not strictly the same thing as "lack of available space", I will point out that Massachusetts has the second-highest population density of any state, at 883.68 people per square mile (second only to New Jersey), compared to a national average of 93.29 people per square mile. And a lot of that is, indeed, because the eastern half of Massachusetts (the part being targeted by this measure) is basically a solid blanket of suburbia already, only broken up by the occasional actual city.

If apartments rent for rates equal to your area's current mortgage rates, you have an absolutely terrible housing market and need to build thousands of new units of all kinds. Or you have an amazingly constrained mortgage market (as in too many people who don't have good enough credit ratings to get housing). Or possibly an extremely mobile population that eschews ownership due to short living duration in your area. All of those at the population level would be really weird.

I can't speak to where Thorzdad lives, but all of these things, at the population level, are basically true for Boston and its immediate surroundings, which is important for folks to understand, because yes, the Boston-area housing market is really weird.

Most important to understanding the ways the Boston/Cambridge housing market is its own unique animal: most cities don't have Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Boston University, UMass, Boston College, and 38 other colleges and universities all clustered together in a single greater metropolitan area. Boston and Cambridge have long struggled to get the universities to build more housing to reduce the number of students that live off-campus, but typically when the universities do get around to building new housing, it's as a belated response to increased enrollment. (It's not been uncommon, in the past, for the universities to enroll a ton of kids, then realize they don't have enough housing, and either buy and convert hotels to dorms, or just straight-up put the students up in hotels while they figure out a long-term solution. (I haven't seen any research about it, but I would bet the universities doing this drives up hotel prices, in a microcosm of their effect on housing prices generally.) Anyways, the sheer number of students creates constant, subtantial shortages in the rental market and also is the large "temporary" population that has no interest in ownership. The people for whom renting in Boston would otherwise make sense have mostly already been long-since driven out into (increasingly far-off) suburbs.

That's why the commuter rail enters into this - those farther-off suburbs that are popular with the working-class folks who work in Boston are typically on the commuter rail (which gets a lot of flak from residents but honestly is pretty serviceable). Those suburbs, however, tend to have pretty typical-for-New-England population densities, which just...isn't enough to absorb the number of working-class renters pushed ever-outwards by their inability to compete with Harvard and MIT students on rental prices.

The state's initiative here, unlike the many many failed attempts by Boston and Cambridge to drive rents down in the city by attempting to coerce the universities into building more housing, seems to me to be kind of accepting that the density needed to get working-class folks back into Boston and Cambridge proper just isn't feasible, and that it's better to turn attention to the towns further out. I dunno if it will work, but at least it's a new approach to something that is, at this point, a very old problem in the area, so my feeling is: it can't hurt to try it!
posted by mstokes650 at 3:08 PM on January 21, 2022 [11 favorites]

Don't these rules exist in part because the other market solution (crowded substandard tenement housing) was also ugly?
posted by Selena777 at 3:09 PM on January 21, 2022

We're not "allowing the market to figure it out" when the market only exists within a status quo of most land in most cities having it be illegal to build anything other than a single family home (with massive setbacks from other single family homes and with multiple parking spots mandated).

One doesn't have to be a believer in a magical invisible hand that will solve all economic problems to think that we should legalize construction at the traditional moderate density level of up to ~5-7 stories of buildings touching each other, which allowed enough density for people to live in walking distance of whatever stores and workplaces they needed to get to.

Even better if we follow the lead of cities like Vienna that build that density of housing in buildings owned by public, available to people at all income levels, so that the rich subsidize the poor and everyone has access to high quality housing.
posted by lewedswiver at 3:13 PM on January 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

which is important for folks to understand, because yes, the Boston-area housing market is really weird.

Boston is not weird, it's just relatively popular, regularly fights San Francisco for the #1 most expensive rents and purchase prices in the US, and has a new construction growth rate even lower than San Francisco.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:16 PM on January 21, 2022

Most important to understanding the ways the Boston/Cambridge housing market is its own unique animal: most cities don't have Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Boston University, UMass, Boston College, and 38 other colleges and universities all clustered together in a single greater metropolitan area. Boston and Cambridge have long struggled to get the universities to build more housing to reduce the number of students that live off-campus, but typically when the universities do get around to building new housing, it's as a belated response to increased enrollment.

Which points to another thing that Boston should be doing, which is change the licenses for dorms and fraternity houses so none of them are necessarily tied to any particular school. If all the dorms are in a pool for all the schools, you won't have a dearth in one school and a glut in another.
posted by ocschwar at 3:18 PM on January 21, 2022

If apartments rent for rates equal to your area's current mortgage rates, you have an absolutely terrible housing market

...yes, and? We have quite a few of those at the moment.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:18 PM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

If apartments rent for rates equal to your area's current mortgage rates, you have an absolutely terrible housing market and need to build thousands of new units of all kinds.

Welcome to America. New in town?
posted by Thorzdad at 3:32 PM on January 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

Welcome to America. New in town?

I was speaking within the scope of this thread. I'm aware of bad housing markets, and I just gave the reason for Boston MA specifically up above. Boston is not unique in that they don't build anything, but they are unique in that the state is trying to do something about it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:49 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

one of the ways that housing is blocked in California, which has worse housing problems, is that any new housing is subject to higher and higher levels of below-market rate subsidization, minimum parking requirements, environmental review boards, and "neighborhood character" requirements that make it really hard to build anything

If I can broaden the focus beyond Massachusetts, the new Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (H.O.M.E) Act may shake things up in the Golden State. It will make it easier for homeowners to sub-divide their lots and build more 'granny units' in backyards. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of resistance to this.
posted by Rash at 3:56 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hard to say. I know apartment rents in my area are quite often equal to, or higher than, what a mortgage payment can be.

This is precisely the argument in favor of more multi family units.

I get the feeling spitting out this notion tends to be in the cause of favoring the status quo, or favoring a solution that will clearly be impossible.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:01 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have a carriage house doing nothing that I could conceivably convert into a studio apartment and rent to someone but zoning says we have to "KEeP The cHArACTer Of The neIghboUrhooD" which, let's face it, is just code for no poor or black people.

This is exactly correct.

Resident of an affluent Boston suburb here. 6 years ago, before my town upgraded to a proper commuter rail station, all commuters had to stand in a giant crowd on ground level, leading to all sorts of intriguing eavesdropping situations.

One day, right in front of me, I overheard one of the town's selectpeople explaining to a friend how the owners of a house on his dead-end street had passed away. The son who inherited the property was looking to sell it to a developer who had submitted plans to build a series of mixed housing units, including one for affordable housing.

My blood began to boil as he explained exactly how he had stymied the development efforts, framing it in terms of "protecting the character of the street", "ensuring the safety of our children", all sorts of bullshit that was the literal definition of NIMBY. The truth was that he was flat out scared that folks who perhaps didn't look or talk like him were going to be neighbors.

The frustrating part is there is a pattern in our town (which has a good school system) of people selling their houses as soon the kids graduate high school. Which means another crop of parents move in and perpetuate the roadblocking of affordable housing, for no other reason except the idea of a truly diverse community scares the shit out of them when it affects them directly.

So yeah, as a taxpayer in Massachusetts, I am fully onboard with anything that forces these uber-privileged people out of their comfort zones.
posted by jeremias at 5:37 PM on January 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

now do tiny houses
posted by j_curiouser at 5:41 PM on January 21, 2022

people who buy up apartments as second or third homes and then just let them sit there

I want to push back on this directly, because the notion that we need to fill 100% of vacant housing before building any new housing is one of the most toxic pieces of left-leaning discourse today.

I constantly hear arguments like “Why build new housing when there’s an abandoned hotel on the outskirts of town?” or “Lots of wealthy people own third homes in New York and London,” or “There’s plenty of vacant housing in America to house everyone”

Firstly, there’s always going to be a percentage of vacant housing created from the churn of people moving from place to place. 100% occupancy should never be a goal, because it means that we are supply-constrained, and unable to accommodate freedom of movement.

Secondly, there’s an awful lot of land/housing classified as “vacant” for valid reasons. A lot of it is in places where nobody wants to live, or is just fundamentally unsuitable to build on. Derelict famrhouses, abandoned factory towns, etc. People need to live in places where there are jobs and communities where they are welcome. The poor (and not-so-poor) don’t deserve table scraps.

[The US also has an issue where we don’t have a good framework for revitalizing distressed metropolitan areas, nor do we have a good framework for establishing new greenfield cities. Both are difficult problems to solve, but the folks who oppose new development never seem to be particularly concerned about actually solving either of these problems]

Finally, the issue of wealthy folks buying up second and third homes seems to be massively overstated. We have a massive housing shortage in all 50 states, across every kind of property. The fact that there are a handful of supertall skyscrapers in Manhattan owned by the ultra-wealthy does not explain why an 800 sq ft, 2 bedroom house more than an hour from the city costs $750,000. The billionaire class is not competing with normal folks for these homes. We. just. don’t. have. enough. housing.

Sure. The billionaires have driven the cost of an UWS brownstone from $2,000,000 up to $3,000,000. That’s not the main problem, and even if we solve it, it’s not going to help the other 99% of us. The population is growing, and our housing supply is not.
posted by schmod at 5:51 PM on January 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

or are they just going to build apartment buildings for poor people that are miles from all the services they need

This.

This right here is part of the problem.

Nobody said these apartments were for poor people. You added that.

There’s absolutely no reason why multifamily housing should be reserved for the ultra-poor or the ultra-wealthy. That’s a decision we somehow made as a society, and is one that isn’t really reflected anyplace else in the world.

There’s no reason why single-family homes need to be “the default,” or somehow the marker of success, or the only option that’s “family friendly” (do apartment-dwellers not have families?).
posted by schmod at 5:54 PM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

[FWIW, I am very strongly in favor of nonoccupancy taxes. But they’re not going to solve the entire problem. DC has the nation’s most punitive vacant-property taxes, and it still hasn’t stopped our real-estate market from being an absolute hellscape]
posted by schmod at 5:59 PM on January 21, 2022

What have you read that's sold you on nonoccupancy taxes?

Just curious. I'm skeptical (because I'm skeptical that empty housing is a big part of the problem, for the reasons you give). But, what the hell, we should try everything.

It's when someone pushes that as the highest priority issue, or, worse, a reason not to do other stuff (like, I dunno, stop banning apartments in their neighborhood)--that's when I start to doubt they're really out to help.
posted by bfields at 6:13 PM on January 21, 2022

Schmod those arguments tend to strike me as arguments against big and small time landlords and holding of property by financial entities - very radical, but an acknowledgment that we’re not just taking about summer homes of the rich.
posted by Selena777 at 6:46 PM on January 21, 2022

So yeah, as a taxpayer in Massachusetts, I am fully onboard with anything that forces these uber-privileged people out of their comfort zones.


MA homeowner here.

I bought at the bottom of the market. On my block today, there's a house that was sold for $1.2M 3 years ago. The buyer, well, he's a good guy. A yuppie's yuppie, but not at all a snob. Three days ago I sent my daughter on her first ever solo errand to the city library. To do this she had to walk past his house, and then down 3 more blocks, passing right by an apartment building that's like 30% section 8.

The section 8 building has done absolutely nothing to prevent home prices in our area from skyrocketing. So that NIMBY snobbery doesn't actually protect the people who pull that shit. It's just needless cruelty. (Which all too often is well, the point.)
posted by ocschwar at 7:25 PM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

"how about we also try to hike up the nonoccupancy tax on the people who buy up apartments as second or third homes and then just let them sit there?"

Amen. A few years ago I had dinner with a friend in downtown Vancouver. Afterwards we took a walk and he pointed at some of the new condo towers, completed a few years earlier yet almost entirely dark. He explained that Chinese millionaires had bought many of the units as investments and hardly anyone lived in the buildings.
posted by LarryC at 7:27 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Everyone understands pretty intuitively how supply and demand impacts the labor market and worker power. When the number of available jobs is high and the number of workers to fill them low, as is the case right now, workers gain tremendous power over bosses: to get better pay and working conditions, to find new jobs where they can get those things, to unionize, etc... And when unemployment is sky high and job openings scarce, workers have comparatively little power to get better terms for themselves and are more vulnerable to abusive employment practices.

Yet somehow many people refuse to acknowledge the same applies for housing. When a landlord gets 60 applicants for one apartment, as just occurred in one instance I saw recently, that gives landlords enormous power and tenants comparatively little. Wouldn't it be better for tenants, combined with robust tenant protection laws of course, if there were lots of homes to choose from and landlords had to compete for tenants, just as it's better for labor if there are lots of jobs to choose from and employers have to compete for workers?

If your answer is that the market isn't good enough, I agree and do firmly believe we should be building publicly-owned mixed income social housing, and I genuinely wish we had a path forward to doing that right now at the massive scale commensurate with the size of the present housing crisis, but the legal and political obstacles to that are such that we need a real path forward to building much more housing today even in the absence of a large-scale non-market solution.

people who buy up apartments as second or third homes and then just let them sit there

I also want to point out that vacancy applies to land just as much as it does to homes. If you're offended that some small proportion of the apartments available are sitting empty as second homes (and sure, taxing that behavior is a good idea but unlikely to make that much of a difference based on experience in places that have done it), why are you not offended by entire neighborhoods where, by law, 80% of the lot must be vacant and even duplexes are illegal? One person owning a vacant home is bad, but thousands of communities where the vast majority of the land must be kept vacant by law isn't the problem? And of course the empty space above a building where apartments could be is vacant space too, and it's not possible to affirmatively further fair housing and fight housing discrimination in neighborhoods with minimum half acre lots where it's illegal to build anything new.

I don't understand why one person with a vacant apartment is the problem and not 100,000 people in a neighborhood with access to good jobs and transit where the law says they all have to be housed in the most space inefficient format imaginable.

People need homes, far more homes than we have vacant ones (and most of the country's vacant homes are vacant not because of obnoxious rich people but mundane reasons like being for sale or under renovation or the owner just moved into a nursing home). We can either make room in our existing high-opportunity communities, close to lots of jobs, public transit, good services, and parks, or we can do it in sprawling exurban greenfield car-dependent cul-de-sac suburbs that are utterly destructive to the climate and environment.

Am I bothered that the super-rich have too many penthouses? Sure, tax them. But I'm way more bothered by a mass transit station where, by law, only a small number of people are legally allowed to live in close proximity and the nearby residents start saying thinly-veiled (or openly) racist things the minute anyone suggests more neighbors would be a good thing.
posted by zachlipton at 7:46 PM on January 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

Vancouver has a vacancy tax and one targeting foreign owners. It's raised some money for more affordable housing, which is great and worthwhile, but hasn't materially done much to increase the vacancy rate or lower rents. Vacancy taxes are fine, but they're just not solutions to the fundamental problem, which is a shortage of housing caused by decades of not building enough of it to match population and job growth.
posted by zachlipton at 7:58 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

IMO, vacancy taxes help most on land and SFHs, because it discourages speculation and encourages development to actually happen.

Even in Manhattan, there are un/underdeveloped lots, because the owners are waiting for the land to become even more valuable before selling or building on it.

It doesn't help areas that are already sky-high expensive, but it does help to kickstart brownfield development or upzoning efforts. If you've got a vacant lot, you need to shit or get off the can. IMO, these policies helped spur an awful lot of infill development in DC over the past decade.

It is absolutely not the sole answer to solving housing problems, but it does solve a very specific problem that some cities have.

Vacancy taxes prevent the most cynical instances of land/housing being used/withheld as an investment, and they're a good idea just for that.
posted by schmod at 8:17 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd add that Wall Street is really, really explicit in their legally required investment disclosures that the problem is lack of supply and that preserving the lack of housing supply is important to their businesses.

For example:

Invitation Homes, the country’s largest provider of single-family rentals, explicitly wrote that it “invest[s] in markets that we expect will exhibit lower new supply, stronger job and household formation growth” and in places with “multiple demand drivers, such as proximity to major employment centers, desirable schools, and transportation corridors.” Essentially, it is looking to invest in job-rich areas where it expects local governments to continue blocking the supply of new housing even as more people try to move there.

Or this from The Blackstone Group:

We could also be adversely affected by overbuilding or high vacancy rates of homes in our markets, which could reduce occupancy and rental rates. Continuing development of apartments buildings and condominium units in many of our markets will increase the supply of housing and exacerbate competition for residents

The communities fighting against new neighbors because "neighborhood character" are doing exactly what these big investors want, because they've made it clear that anything that increases the supply of new housing is a threat to their businesses.

Anyway, this is the best thing you'll read on vacancies and the housing crisis.
posted by zachlipton at 8:33 PM on January 21, 2022 [13 favorites]

Vacancy taxes are fine, but they're just not solutions to the fundamental problem, which is a shortage of housing caused by decades of not building enough of it to match population and job growth.

Using minor tweaks to the tax code to try to get people to do things instead of just having government do the things it wants done is such a "Nudge (2008)" mood.
posted by clawsoon at 8:38 PM on January 21, 2022

There's physically not enough land. There is literally no unincorporated land in Massachusetts.

I don't know what incorporated or unincorporated has to do with it and by "Massachusetts", do you mean "within 495"? Because Western and Central Massachusetts is plenty rural. Try looking up Athol, Shelburne or Florida, Massachusetts - to name a few of the many, many, many towns that are not developed.
posted by Toddles at 9:30 PM on January 21, 2022

I live in a small city across the river from Boston, but which only has bus service (no trains or subway) on 4 routes, so am not sure if the new law applies to us. I am all for it in general, but: 1. what rebut said about lack of services applies; 2. my city *has* been approving new development on former light industry sites, but all of it seems to be “luxury” condos or rentals not especially family-oriented; 3. due to restrictive planning bylaws we are relatively low-density - for example, I live in a 3-unit condo in a large 1890 house on a biggish lot which is not uncommon, and I have to admit that low density in town seemed to be a huge advantage during the pandemic- our case numbers were substantially lower than in higher density cities - so that’s an aspect I wonder about in terms of looking ahead at public health. It’s going to be interesting!
posted by mollymillions at 10:10 PM on January 21, 2022

"Luxury" at this point just means new construction, it's an advertising term totally disconnected from actual build quality or amenities. Building a bunch of studio and 1-bedrooms seems like a good way to prevent people able to pay $3000 a month for such a unit from outbidding existing, long-term tenants in older units and displacing them?
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 4:13 AM on January 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I've always thought luxury was a marketing term more than anything. I lived in a "luxury" new build apartment once - aside from the wholly unnecessary stone counters, it was a bog-standard beige box in a bog-standard four-over-one, and the primary appeal was that a) I could walk to most of what I needed, sometimes just by going out the front door, and b) it was new enough that it was unlikely to have the vermin issues from the previous apartment. Like, there was a pool and an exercise room but those aren't that unusual in the shitty cheap buildings I've lived in either.

But also, I love this. I live in a DC suburb and our county is just tearing itself in knots over adding sensible upzoning to our long-term plan. I bought a single family house, which I did not want, because it was all I could afford near the metro line once rising condo fees were factored in over time. It's absurd and offensive that there aren't more apartment buildings of all sizes, duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes around here. Density would make my neighborhood safer for walking and biking, and bring in more human-scale business and retail. I'm so fed up with the people who want to keep this area preserved in amber in the 1950s. It's shitty cheap postwar mass construction; this is not some kind of cultural treasure we're losing if someone converts some of the derelict tract houses that ought to be condemned into a nice cluster of townhomes or duplexes or small apartments.

(And my house SUCKS SO MUCH, you guys. I realize it isn't necessarily great for the environment but I really envy the Japanese approach to new construction sometimes while shivering in my shitty insulationless box that will cost an absolute fortune to retrofit, and then we'll still be stuck with the stupid yard.)
posted by bowtiesarecool at 8:08 AM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

For anyone local who wants more details, this slide deck has plenty, including decent maps. It's often still bafflingly (and I think intentionally) unclear from the presentation exactly what is being required and of whom, but there's more to dig into anyway.
posted by chortly at 6:57 PM on January 22, 2022

So yeah, as a taxpayer in Massachusetts, I am fully onboard with anything that forces these uber-privileged people out of their comfort zones.

Same. I mean, I live in Vermont but inherited my mom's house in what was rural farmland and then 495 went through there and presto, tony suburb in one of the MBTA communities on that slide deck that chortly shared! We're preparing the house for sale (looking to buy? here it is) and it's a weird property because it's a legal two-family, grandfathered in before the town made multi-unit dwellings disallowed in that part of town. It could easily be a triplex with a little work but I think those aren't allowed. And it's historical so you can't easily tear it down. I mean you can but it's a hassle. So not high-density but certainly higher-density than most of the McMansions on the 2 acre lots.

There are apartments in other parts of town and, honestly, I'd look forward to more of that if I lived there with the stupid exception of the roads being all narrow and bendy and it's tough for traffic but that's a different issue and not one that should keep more people from moving in.
posted by jessamyn at 9:52 AM on January 23, 2022 [3 favorites]