Conference on Housing Land Use and Building Reform

An engaged and, as it turned out, hungry crowd packed the Edgerley Center for Civic Leadership on Tuesday, September 15, for a three-hour session and lunch event hosted by Boston Indicators that explored several dimensions of the challenge of building affordable housing in Massachusetts. Several presentations, including the public release of a new report on local permitting reform, were followed by a robust panel discussion moderated by Indicators’ Executive Director Luc Schuster and featuring several questions from the in-house audience. 

The event, titled Housing, Land Use and Building Reform, opened with the new report. After a welcome from Luc Schuster, Jonathan Berk, an urbanist and founder of the firm re:MAIN, presented findings and thoughts from Delayed by Design: How Discretionary Permitting Stalls Development in Massachusetts. Berk’s report, produced in partnership with Boston Indicators, runs through several case studies as examples of the challenges facing builders who must navigate 351 distinct paths to home construction – a separate one for every city and town in the Commonwealth, with different policies, regulations and procedures. The resulting process makes building both more expensive and time-consuming, for the builder and, often, for the community as well. The biggest impact, Berk added, falls on so-called “middle housing” projects that are anywhere from two to 30 units and could provide the greatest impact to meeting housing needs in many communities.  

Berk’s talk highlighted the importance of consistency and discretion in planning and zoning, and laid out a number of recommendations in the full interactive report. 

Berk than handed the mic to Sam Naylor, AIA, Founding Partner at the firm Nominal and co-author of two recent reports in collaboration with Indicators: Unlocking Small Multifamily Housing Through Building Code Reform, released this summer, and the 2024 report Legalizing Mid-Rise Single-Stair Housing in Massachusetts. Naylor focused more of his talk on the most recent report, highlighting where building codes, overseen at the state level, make “middle housing” more difficult to build because they are designed for large apartment buildings with potentially dozens or hundreds of units, rather than smaller multi-unit buildings that could be more practical on smaller lots near transit. The Single-Stair Housing report offers one concrete example of this issue – fire codes that require two sets of exit stairs and don’t take into account both alternative building designs and improvements in fire safety that make the second staircase obsolete. 

The final presentation, by Boston Indicators Senior Fellow Amy Dain, provided a historical context for our current codes and zoning, and some of the places where city and town codes contradict with each other or make it exceptionally difficult for families and developers to navigate to project approval. Drawing from her report on the history of zoning in Massachusetts, Exclusionary by Design, and using examples drawn directly from city and town lot size, lost shape and other zoning requirements, Dain added a third dimension that can be problematic for affordable housing development in the state – the complex codes, regulations, processes, meeting requirements, unwritten rules and interpretations that differ in each and every community in the state. “I majored in Russian,” Dain noted, “and it turns out reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian is incredible training for reading land use regulations.” 

To Dain, a combined effort to standardize, revise and regionalize land use regulations and enforcement would hold great promise for making the processes easier for developers, and also for hundreds of communities lacking the capacity and expertise to manage complex local systems.  

After the presentations, Berk, Naylor and Dain were joined by Jonathan Lee Cozzens, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Lee Properties, and Abby McCabe, Planning Director for the Town of Lexington, for a wide-ranging panel discussion, followed by closing remarks from Lauren Jezienicki, the Founder & CEO of One Circle and Courtney Brunson, Director of Economic Equity Initiatives at The Boston Foundation. 

The four reports cited by the event presentations are all available on bostonindicators.org.