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The The Better Not Bigger Alliance Housing Platform

The implementation of a sustainable development plan for Massachusetts is perhaps the most important action that we, as a state, can take in the near future. We need more truly affordable housing, less high-density, multi-story new construction and we need to start focusing on redevelopment. Virtually every housing study concludes that new residential construction costs more than it collects in fees and taxes over 10 years. Concurrently, studies prove that redevelopment costs an average of 50% less than new construction. This means we can create the same number of new units at half the cost, if we simply redevelop existing structures. We must break away from the age-old practice of using new housing construction as an economic indicator and realize that we can grow better, instead of bigger. According to Forbes magazine, our economy, aside from housing and related services, actually grew by 2.5% in 2008. The only reason we consider that year to be a recession is because new home construction was down and home prices, over-inflated because of predatory lenders, finally came down. These predatory lenders knew there was too little affordable housing and allowed people to get into mortgages they could not afford. In order to create sustainable development policies, we must preserve our open space and our surrounding environment, and there must be appropriate levels of truly affordable housing

Currently, we rank just 49th in national housing affordability, and our main driver of affordable housing is a law that creates 75%-80% non-affordable projects and does not allow any redevelopment. This plan, created by developers and used by no other state in the country is perhaps the single largest barrier to overall sustainability. It does not create any real affordable housing (meaning housing affordable to those that need it most), it ignores urban neighborhoods that have no room for new development by requiring all projects to be new construction, it allows the so-called affordable units to revert back to market rate after just 20 years, ensuring a constant need for more new construction and it gives local towns ZERO control over their own growth, making local planning literally impossible and destabilizing both local and state budgets.

Massachusetts has been unable to retain young professionals and working families because of unsustainable housing policies that cause deteriorating quality of life while increasing our cost of living. A decrease in working professionals leads directly to a decrease in business and industry and to a degradation of the economy.

The Better Not Bigger Alliance is proud of Massachusetts history, institutions of higher education, businesses and hard-working residents, and as such, promotes policies that will help our state move beyond unsustainable growth and inadequate affordable housing production. We take pride in collaboration among diverse professionals and affordable-housing advocates, and we provide viable solutions for our state's working families and policy makers. Several of these solutions can be found in our white paper on the topic of affordable housing: "Failed Strategies & New Directions: A Comprehensive Assessment for Improving Affordable Housing." Together we will work toward a sustainable development policy that improves the quality of life for all Massachusetts residents!