Housing Affordability Initiative (HAI)
Research Highlights
Reviewing Chapter 40B: What Gets Proposed, What Gets Approved, What Gets Appealed, and What Gets Built? a Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston - 101 Series Talk presented by Professor Lynn Fisher
Professor Lynn Fisher has completed a new report for the Rappaport Institute, examining the results of the State's Chapter 40B law, which allows affordable housing projects to be granted an exemption from local land use regulations in communities that fail to meet state affordability targets. The report is based on a survey of 144 Boston-area cities and towns to assess what kinds of projects are built with little controversy, which are substantially delayed, and which never get built. This event was co-sponsored by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. To read the full report, visit:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/rappaport/downloads/policybriefs/40B_final.pdf
"A New Approach to Assessing Housing Affordability," RICS Foundation Best Paper Award, by Lynn Fisher, Henry Pollakowski and Jeffrey Zabel.
For an area of a town or city to be regarded as affordable, it needs to be more than just relatively cheap. An area might be cheap compared to other areas because it is in a deprived neighborhood, with no local amenities and few job opportunities. To label such areas ‘affordable’ may be a mistaken approach and lead to sub-optimal policy decisions.
This seemingly simple statement forms the basis of work by researchers at the Housing Affordability Initiative at the Center for Real Estate at MIT to explore alternative and richer approaches to developing measures of housing affordability.
The index that they have developed is based on a new concept of area affordability. Based on the Greater Boston area in the USA, the key innovation of this work is to account for locational amenities when comparing house prices across towns in a metropolitan area, and to come up with a measure of affordability that more accurately and usefully reflects the quality of an area.
A key implication of this work is the possibility of developing a menu of policy options to increase affordability depending on the nature of the affordability problem.
To read the paper, visit: "A New Approach to Assessing Housing Affordability"
The HAI Affordable Housing Index
The Housing Affordability Index is a multipurpose, multi-faceted tool that is designed to be used by banks and other lenders, affordable housing developers, employers, and economic development agencies. At its core, the index measures a community’s affordable housing stock relative to other communities in an area for a specified segment of the population.
Boston Area Housing Approaches An Acre Per Home: Land Use Research Findings
January 31, 2006
New single-family home construction in the greater Boston metropolitan area is consuming about twice as much land as existing single-family housing, and half of the region’s 30,387 recent new single-family homes were built on lots of nearly an acre or larger, according to a new study by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership (MHP) and the MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE).
- Land Use Research Findings
- Press Release: "Boston Area Housing Approaches An Acre Per Home: Analysis shows widespread rise in land used for new housing”
40B Report: Effects of Mixed-Income, Multi-Family Rental Housing Developments on Single-Family Housing Values
April 27, 2005
Chapter 40B is a Massachusetts statute that states: If less than ten percent of a municipality’s housing stock is defined as affordable, then developers with comprehensive permits can build developments that override local zoning regulations. The ability to circumvent zoning regulations has given rise to fears that the values of homes surrounding these mixed-income, multi-family developments will decline, and to resident opposition to 40B developments. The Housing Affordability Initiative (HAI) investigated whether these fears are actually justified by the facts, issued a 40B report, and held an event to present and discuss their findings.
