Thursday, January 18, 2024

Chair Edwards, Chair Arciero, and Members of the Joint Committee on Housing:

My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the policy director at Progressive Massachusetts. We are a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots membership organization focused on fighting for policy that would make our Commonwealth more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic. 

Massachusetts faces a growing affordable housing crisis. To rent the average 2-bedroom apartment in Massachusetts requires an income equal to $37.97 per hour, more than twice the minimum wage. Home ownership has become increasingly out of reach, as the state’s median home price has passed $600,000. The high cost of housing has led to displacement, and in a growing number of municipalities, the local workforce can no longer afford to live there.

We are glad to see that Governor Healey recognizes the need to use a variety of tools to address our housing crisis and strongly support the comprehensive approach in the Affordable Homes Act, H.4138.

We were delighted to see the inclusion of key provisions like the following:

• Creating a five-year housing plan (which should focus not only on supply but also on affordability to different income levels)
• Enabling cities and towns to pass inclusionary zoning ordinances by simple majority—a vital tool for increasing affordable housing supply and diversifying communities
• Making it easier to use public land for housing development
• Establishing an Office of Fair Housing
• Launching a Social Housing pilot program
• Authorizing $150M for public housing decarbonization and $115 million for sustainable and climate-resilient affordable housing
• Permitting Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) of <900 SF to be built by-right in single-family zoning districts in all communities and prohibiting the parking mandates and owner-occupancy requirements many municipalities use to make ADUs harder to build
• Enabling cities and towns to pass real estate transfer fees as a tool to raise money for affordable housing production and preservation
• Creating a process to enable individuals to seal eviction records

All of these are essential to a three-pronged approach to the housing crisis: protecting tenants, increasing housing production, and investing more in affordable housing. We can do all three, and this bill does.

However, we would like to outline how to make some of these provisions more accessible and effective as well as some additional measures to consider including.

Real Estate Transfer Fee Local Option

Cities and towns across Massachusetts want to take action to address the housing crisis, but they are often unable to do so without state approval. Seventeen communities have now requested the ability to use this tool, beginning with Provincetown in 2010. In the years since this initial request, circumstances have only become more dire, and more cities and towns have passed such home rule petitions or are actively considering doing so.

Our housing crisis is simply too great to leave funding and financing tools on the table. All communities must be able to use this tool that will allow us to generate additional resources for desperately needed local affordable housing.

To ensure that the transfer fee language in the bill can best meet the needs of diverse cities and towns, we urge the following:

• Setting the Right Threshold: Home sale prices vary greatly across Massachusetts, with rural communities and Gateway cities often having property values well below $1 million. They should still be able to benefit from this tool. Similarly, communities should be able to set higher thresholds if that is best for local needs and market conditions.
• Maintaining Flexibility: Communities should be able to determine whether buyers or sellers of a property bear fees and should be able to create local exemptions that best apply to their community.
• Applying Fees to the Full Transaction: Allowing municipalities to apply fees to the full amount of transactions, rather than only the amount in excess of a threshold, will allow communities with higher needs and sales prices to generate more desperately needed revenue.

Sealing Eviction Records

Having an eviction record is creating a devastating barrier for tenants looking for housing. Records are created as soon as a case is filed and are publicly available forever–– regardless of the outcome. These records impact people’s ability to obtain housing, credit, and employment, harming many and disproportionately impacting women and people of color.

Regardless of whether one does anything wrong or is actually evicted, being party to an eviction or housing case is being unfairly held against tenants when they try to rent a new place. Even winning in court hurts tenants.

We are delighted to see eviction sealing language in this bill, but we would recommend several steps to ensure that tenants can best be protected:

1. Ensuring that dismissals, cases that tenants win, and no-fault evictions be automatically sealed by the court as opposed to a petition process which involves extra steps for the court and all parties.
   
   
2. Ensuring that in non-payment cases, tenants can seal after 14 days of paying a judgment and after 4 years if they were unable to pay because of an economic hardship or other good cause reasons.

3. Ensuring that in a fault eviction, where one must wait 7 years to seal, that an intervening eviction which prevents one from sealing can only be a fault eviction and not just any type of eviction case, such as a no-fault eviction.
   
   
4. Clarifying that the court has the direction to consider disability and domestic violence issues in fault cases and to adjust the sealing process accordingly.

Additional Measures to Include

We join with over 240 organizations to call for the inclusion of Access to Counsel in the Affordable Homes Act. 9 out of 10 tenants are unrepresented in eviction court, leading to higher rates of displacement and community instability. Evictions negatively affect people’s physical and mental health, and result in job loss and decreased school attainment for children. Guaranteeing legal representation to all tenants facing evictions would have a major positive impact.

We also urge you to use this opportunity to repeal the ban on rent control and enable municipalities to enact local rent control ordinances to stabilize housing costs and prevent no-cause evictions. We have been seeing a growing interest in rent control across the Commonwealth, with multiple municipalities filing home rule petitions to be able to take action. Rent control is an essential tool to combat displacement, and cities and towns should be able to pass such policies as fit their local housing situation.

Cities and towns that want to take action should be able to do so, and we urge you to include a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase local option (along the lines of S.880/H.1350), which would enable cities and towns to pass laws allowing tenants to join together to match a third-party offer when their homes are being sold.

We also urge you to use this bill to establish a statewide Foreclosure Prevention Program to require servicers to participate in pre-foreclosure mediation with homeowners to explore alternatives to foreclosures, an idea put forth in S.653 and H.942.

We also urge you to take additional steps to increase our supply of affordable housing, such as by funding and writing into statute the Small Properties State Acquisition Fund, which would provide subsidies for nonprofit acquisition of homes from the market, and by including funding for the production of affordable homeownership units that can be kept affordable in perpetuity. We also urge you to add an affordability requirement to the Housing Development Incentive Program (HDIP) so that public subsidies to development address the need for affordable housing stock.

Lastly, A Technical Correction

We stand with the Massachusetts AFL-CIO in asking you to address a major concern about Section 35 of the bill. As written, this section would remove the application of prevailing wage laws to certain private development projects on public land. We hope that this was a drafting error and such language can be removed. The state should be using public land to both advance housing goals and create good-paying jobs, and these are not in conflict.

Thank you for all your work on this important bill and vital topic.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Chair Edwards, Chair Arciero, and Members of the Joint Committee on Housing:

My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director of Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group committed to fighting for an equitable, just, democratic, and sustainable Commonwealth.

We urge a favorable report for S.1299 / H.2103: An Act enabling cities and towns to stabilize rents and protect tenants, S.872 / H.1304: An Act enabling local options for tenant protections, and S.880 / H.1350: An Act to guarantee a tenant’s first right of refusal.

Massachusetts has a lot to offer, but that does little if people can’t afford to live here. The US News & World Report’s annual state rankings put Massachusetts at #45 in affordability. [1] A worker earning minimum wage in Massachusetts would have to work 91 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home at market rate. [2] 

Clearly, Massachusetts has an affordable housing crisis. This is unsustainable. It has led to expanding economic inequality, increased homelessness, and damage to our economy, as talented workers often leave the state for less expensive regions.

Solving this affordable housing crisis will require us to use every tool in the toolbox. That requires zoning reform that encourages the creation of walkable, sustainable, and inclusive communities. It requires public investment. And it requires strengthening tenant protections that ensure that communities can remain affordable, inclusive, and stable.

However, municipalities across Massachusetts are blocked from taking the necessary steps to address the housing crisis. The misguided statewide ban on rent stabilization policies and a stringent home rule system that prevents municipalities from passing their own laws to govern the basic aspects of civil affairs hamstring municipalities.

By enabling our cities and towns to pass rent control ordinances tailored to their local needs, we can stem the displacement that is hitting so many communities.

We cannot build our way out of the crisis alone because the people at the highest risk for displacement will already be pushed out before they can benefit from any medium to long-term reduction in rents.

There is a lot of fear-mongering around rent control, but I want to make a simple point. If you don’t think a landlord should be able to double or triple someone’s rent in a year after doing no work on the property, you believe in rent control, and the question is just a matter of percentages and exemptions.

On too many issues, Massachusetts is haunted by the ghosts of ill-advised ballot initiatives past. It’s 2023, and we need to act like it.

Empowering cities and towns to respond to our housing crisis also requires passing the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). The TOPA bill, which is similarly an enabling bill, recognizes that we need to preserve our affordable housing stock. Too often, when large landlords sell a building, a mass eviction or rent hike follows for the tenants. TOPA shows that there is another way: as has been a proven success in DC for decades, we could enable tenants to come together to purchase the building—and be granted the right of first refusal in doing so. It’s a common-sense policy for community stability and affordable housing at no cost to the state.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director

Progressive Massachusetts 

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability

[2] https://nlihc.org/oor/state/ma