Massachusetts needs more housing, but getting permission to build it can take years, even when the zoning allows it. Housing advocate and researcher Jonathan Berk examined six projects for his report, Delayed by Design, to understand why so many housing developments struggle to move forward. He found that lengthy permitting processes can saddle developers with costly requirements and years of uncertainty, making even modest projects difficult to pursue. Even if Massachusetts succeeds in reforming its zoning laws, Berk's findings suggest that the permitting system could prevent much of that housing from ever being built.
Hi, everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. When it comes to housing reform, which is a big topic for us at Strong Towns, updating and expanding our zoning codes to allow for various housing types and sizes to exist within our neighborhoods is one very important part of the conversation, part of the solution. But as we will learn from our guests today, that's not quite all we need to do. We need to take a holistic look at the entire process around allowing projects to be built. This includes updating and improving our zoning rules, but it also means looking at the permitting process.
Our guest is going to speak to this today and help us understand that if we don't take this holistic approach, there's a chance that projects that are technically legal still won't be able to move forward. Today's guest is working to fix that in his state and has put out some really interesting research that we are going to talk about today. Jonathan Berk is the founder of Remain, a planning and development advisory practice focused on unlocking housing production in walkable neighborhoods, with a very interesting background spanning land use law, community development, placemaking, and real estate feasibility. He works at the intersection of policy and implementation.
His research examines how zoning, permitting, and process shape what actually gets built. And his advisory work helps communities move from stated housing goals to permitted homes, and helps builders navigate the systems that too often stand in the way of actually achieving those goals. Jonathan is also co-founder and board chair of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, the state's leading pro-housing advocacy organization, which works to change the policies, politics, and public narrative around housing production across the Commonwealth. I've been chasing Jonathan down for an episode for a while. I feel like almost a year now until we're finally making this happen, and I'm really excited.
Jonathan, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
That was a great introduction. Thank you so much, Tiffany.
Now that I have you, I feel like I have a right to keep you for two hours and just ask you all my burning questions.
Ask me whatever you want. I am here. Sorry it was hard to schedule this.
No, you're good. You're good. I know you've been working on a lot of interesting things. We're barely. I feel like we're barely gonna touch the tip of the iceberg of all the interesting stuff that you work on and that you that you think about and that you research. Just reading your like, so we workshopped your bio a little bit and like reading that. I feel like your background kind of encapsulates part of what we want to talk about today. Really taking this holistic approach. I feel like your professional background is just so holistic. You've got law in there, you've got placemaking in there, you've got feasibility in there, but also the community side in there.
So, a, I feel like a massive underachiever now because now I'm questioning what I've done with my whole life. But b, I'm excited to start off this conversation by hopefully I would love it if you could just tell our audience tell me a little bit more about your story and maybe your background and how you got to this place of caring so much about housing and walkability take that wherever you'd like to go but yeah tell us a little bit about your background
Yeah it's a really indirect path and I think this story could take up half the podcast I will try to be keep this brief. It was about 12 years ago, I think, where I was practicing as an attorney. I was a litigation attorney, and I just was like, "This not what I want to do for the rest of my life. So I, at the time, I just finished law school. I was in Boston. I'd grown up in the suburbs, moved to the city, had my first experience living in the city, and became fascinated by why is the quality of life great in sort of these walkable neighborhoods and downtowns of Boston?
I grew up in a suburb where our downtown was a strip mall with a couple chain restaurants, so I just fell down a rabbit hole of reading Life and Death: The Great American City by Jane Jacobs, Walkable City. I was an early subscriber to Strong Towns and reading Chuck's blog posts back in 2014, 2015, and just became fascinated with learning how I can help improve the built environment and how it affects everyday life for so many of us, from quality of life and health to your economic outcomes and your opportunities in your life. And over the next 12 years, I've just kind of chased down different opportunities.
I worked in placemaking for seven years with a firm called Patronicity, which is based in Detroit that does a lot of community-driven placemaking work across the Midwest and Northeast. Had the really the honor to work with so many great local nonprofits, municipalities, planners, really working to help improve their communities from the ground up through these very small-dollar pinprick interventions on their main streets and downtowns, and through that process, kept hitting the same roadblock of we're revitalizing the community, we're bringing new energy and excitement and new public spaces now. Activating public spaces, and every single community had the same issue with housing.
And this back in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. And so the same way I kind of came to placemaking, I started trying to learn everything I could about housing, and quickly learned that some of the same factors that designed our communities to be the sort of soul sucking suburban shopping malls were some of the same things that were preventing us from building the housing types and across our communities across the country. Different reasons in the Midwest and Northeast, but I have since then really set out to try and figure out how we can solve some of our housing challenges.
So founding a nonprofit in 2020 Abundant Housing Massachusetts, as you mentioned, and for the last few years, working as a consultant, doing research and policy on housing policy reform and implementation in communities.
So fascinating. Is there like a do you have like a favorite story or like anecdote you like to share? Maybe either like when you like going back to that difference between the suburb and the city, like when you move to the city, that you feel like it just started to click for you.
So I lived growing up. I lived like a mile from our town center, which is a couple strip malls, and I never dreamed of walking that as a kid. I would never like you had to cross a couple busy streets. It wasn't really a great walk. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't like wasn't unsafe. It just wasn't great. And in the city, I would never dream of doing anything but walking a mile. Right? It's an enjoyable walk. You have a good experience. I mean, I love sort of Jeff Speck's four theories of walkability, and I've always kind of tried to kind of pick that out when I'm walking around different places and different communities.
So it's always been interesting for me to kind of take that juxtaposition and say, okay, what was it about that suburban environment that just made it feel like I didn't want to walk anywhere there? But moving to the city, I walked everywhere, and that is kind of really what clicked for me, and kind of said, okay, what are what are all these what are all these sort of design things we could do, but also what are the what are the regulatory frameworks, the regulatory barriers to allowing ourselves to build those places again? And fast forward 10 years or so, and I look at Massachusetts now, and I look at all the great downtowns, main streets, commercial centers-the places we all love.
My city of Salem, Massachusetts-and I look at the zoning and I look at the permitting processes in place. And you could never rebuild any of these places today. We've put we put in place a regulatory system that completely precludes any of this development ever happening again, and it incentivizes that sort of sprawling large single-family or sprawling large multifamily on the outskirts of town development that is kind of not conducive to any of the quality of life things that I kind of got into this work for 10 years ago.
Do you have a theory about how and why that happened? Because I think it's easy, like in the Strong Towns or the urbanism world, to sort of make that make those people the bad people. Like decades and decades ago, I don't think there were a bunch of people sitting around a table being like, "We just hate walkable, cute main streets. We just can't stand how chic this. Or maybe they weren't using that word, kind of chic. Or we can't stand how you know. I don't think it was like an anti this. I think something else had grasped their imagination, and they were trying to actualize. I guess the this vision of like the progressive improvement, right?
How do you sort of tell that story, or kind of do you have like a theory about like what was it that was so captivating that now we're kind of living in the in the fallout from and realizing like oh well maybe a gracious way of putting this an unintended consequence is that you've made it illegal to build the spaces that people love.
So a lot of factors and I think there's a lot of good research in this space. A colleague of mine, Amy Dane, who's done research on this space in Massachusetts for decades? Amy's really gone back and looked back at the records of some of the meeting minutes and these meetings in the 60s and 70s in some Massachusetts suburbs, and really kind of been shocked at some of the comments that were made back then as to sort of why called the Great Downzoning, where a lot of communities made it really difficult to build anything, and a lot of it wasn't necessarily to utilize good planning philosophy.
It was to try and control and have more control over everything that was done in a community and prevent, in most places, what already existed from ever being built again. The other factor I think is looking at kind of what the time frame was in terms of the automobiles. The automobile had become this integral piece of everyone's life. It's the '50s and '60s, and in the '70s, shopping malls had sucked energy out of the downtown. I live, like I said, in Salem, Massachusetts, and our downtown was this vibrant commercial hub until the '60s, '70s, when a shopping mall was built, and we lost all of our retail environment, and downtown was kind of gutted of stores and shops.
And it's kind of funny, but we're we're talking before this podcast about Halloween tourism in Salem, and we leaned into that in the 70s because it was a way for us to try and bring people back into our downtown. After we lost our energy to that shopping mall, fast forward 30, 40, 50 years, and we have 120,000 people a day, and we can't handle it. But we also
And they're not going to the shopping mall. They're not going
To the shopping mall. No, and most people don't want to go to the shopping mall. I think it's a better experience. The tourists aren't going there, and frankly, a lot of locals aren't going to the shopping mall anymore either. But you look at the zoning that was put in place in that time frame when were losing all the energy from downtown, and it was all car-centric, car-oriented development patterns. It was parking minimums that made all of historic Salem impossible to rebuild today. It was setback requirements. It was street grids and street widths that had to accommodate these larger and larger vehicles. All of it was redesigned with the car in mind, not the human in mind.
So I don't think it was necessarily intentional. I think cities and folks who were sitting, I sit on my planning board today. Folks who were sitting in my seat 50 years ago were thinking, "What do we do to save our downtown? And I think that was probably their mindset: was it's going to be car, car, car, car, car. And that the side effect of hurting the human was not necessarily thought of in that time. I don't think.
Well, and I think if you go, if you think about, like you said, the historical context of that time. Urbanization was pretty terrifying. Like it was, it was, it was, it probably felt chaotic. It felt unpredictable. It felt highly energetic, and I think there may have been a genuine fear of like we don't know what to do with all of this, and then you combine that with the car and the fascination around the car, and I think when you combine sort of the fear over the unpredictability of the city, and then and the you look at the mark the demand for the automobile, it makes sense how you get to a place where on one side you're saying we need to control, control, control all of this energy.
Otherwise, it's just going to be a disaster. And we need to make sure all these people and cars are happy. Kind of makes sense how you got where we are with the zoning codes that are governing our cities now.
Yeah, that's a great way. I couldn't have said it better myself. That was a great way to define it.
What would you say is unique in particular about Boston or maybe Massachusetts as a whole? Let's talk about Massachusetts in general. When we're talking about housing, what is unique about the housing conversation in your state?
Yeah, it's a really good question. It's very different, I think, than in a lot of states. Housing, to bring politics into it for a second, is bipartisan in a lot of states. I think, and there's a lot of bipartisan agreement in some of the changes that need to be made to unlock housing production in a lot of states. That doesn't necessarily exist in Massachusetts, where I think there's still a partisan battle where Democrats have been unwilling to address housing challenges in Massachusetts for a long time. They've always, for the most part, aside from governor, had control of the House and Senate.
And then conservatives, who especially in recent times, have tried to kind of claw back the limited progress we've made with Democrats. And it's been largely in this mindset of local control, where it's a it's a concept in every state across this country. Massachusetts is a home rule state, so this idea that your city or town, and we have 351 cities and towns, and some of them are extremely small, have almost total control over their zoning. Everyone is just thinking about their within their borders, right? And you'll hear public comments.
I've shared one recently from a town meeting where they said you heard a public comment a couple years ago where if Marblehead has a housing crisis, Marblehead will take care of its housing crisis. Marblehead does have a housing crisis because nobody who works in public schools or in public works in those communities can actually afford to live there anymore. So set that aside for a second. But there is this mindset in a lot of parts of Massachusetts where we know best, we can fix everything for our town, and there's no kind of sense of commonwealth, right? There's no sense of what's best for the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Couple that with a system that is sort of this most direct democracy that we have in America of town meeting, where zoning changes and zoning reform conversations are done at the town meeting level. So, 351 cities and towns. We have about 300 that have town meeting, and of those, 220 or so towns have open town meeting, which means that. Anyone on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, however many nights it goes for, can show up.
Assuming you don't work, assuming you don't have childcare responsibilities, assuming you don't have a night shift, can show up at their local gymnasium and be able to vote on zoning changes or budget items, or I mean, or new ordinances like leaf blower ordinances, and that is the process to change zoning in Massachusetts. So we saw that play out with MBTA communities a few years ago, and over the last few years, where it was a very controversial state mandate.
Comparing that to other states that passed state level zoning reform, it actually gave much more deference to the municipalities than in places like Texas or Colorado or California or Montana, and there were massive fights and battles and personal fights in these communities that really drove some towns crazy fighting over these changes, and it never really got into the discourse of what the zoning would or would not actually be able to build, or what it would actually unlock. It was just the state telling us what to do was the fight. It was this very sort of revolutionary 250 year ago fighting. The I mean, and I'm joking.
You think I'm joking, but the King of England was mentioned, and the fighting of the King of England 250 years ago was mentioned in public comments around some of these zoning debates.
Wow, that's really interesting. What would you? What can you paint a picture for us in terms of like the crisis, the housing crisis in Massachusetts? If you have any numbers you can share off the top of your head.
Yeah, so the median home price in Greater Boston has just surpassed a million dollars. That's almost doubled in the last decade. On supply, we are permitting less housing in Massachusetts than the Greater Austin, Texas, metropolitan area. we are essentially landlocked in Boston, where the ocean to the east, and then zoning locked with really restrictive, low density suburbs, very close to the city of Boston. So, Brookline, which is within a probably half hour walk of downtown Boston. A third of that this National Zoning Atlas data. A third of Brookline has zoning that requires an acre or more of land to build a single family home. That's basically within Boston. There is Concord, right?
That's famous for the battles of Lexington and Concord. That has 80,000 square foot minimum lot sizes. That is within a 20-minute drive without traffic from Boston. Like this our sort of existential crisis that we have these local control battles where we have communities that just have kind of frozen themselves for decades, and then we have Boston, which needs to be doing more, but is also hamstrung by a very small geography in the ocean to the east and communities north, south, and west that are just fighting every inch of development.
Wow, one of the triggers for this conversation was a report you recently put out. It's called "Delayed by Design: How Discretionary Permitting Stalls Housing in Massachusetts. This seems like a great time to start talking about that report. First thing, can you tell us a bit of the backstory? Maybe some of the context behind how you got the idea for this report, and then we can talk about some of the main takeaways.
Yeah. So the idea for the report, I'll actually have to give credit to Luke Schuster at the Boston Indicators. We were having a conversation about a year ago now. Actually, I think exactly a year ago, looking at the MBTA community's success and some of the zoning reform efforts that had come from that, the further zoning conversations around the further conversations around zoning reform that were happening during that current legislative session, which is just ending now, in really understanding that weren't talking about anything but zoning change in Massachusetts. We really had just kind of scratched the surface of, well, zoning is only part of the battle here.
We have really archaic permitting processes in Massachusetts that were layered on top of a zoning framework that was also archaic and exclusionary and sort of preventing any of the production that we needed to see. So about a year ago, we kind of made the decision to start digging into what does the permitting process look like, what's involved? How do we tell the story to the general public of what permitting in Massachusetts for housing is, and how it takes the housing that many folks in Massachusetts say they want to see-that middle housing, modest density infill development within our main streets and downtowns.
And makes it so it can take 12347, years to get through a permitting process with millions of dollars potentially in contingencies added, and really no guardrails. So we have a system in a lot of towns in Massachusetts where it's similar to a lot of states. We have site plan review, and that's a pre-discretionary review process. You can't technically deny a project. Typically, it's by a planning board, and some towns it's actually city council. That was one of the things I called out in Newton, Massachusetts, was that city council shouldn't be the special permit granting authority or the site plan review authority.
But we have this process that brings a volunteer board or multiple volunteer boards together to opine on what this development could do to the community, what changes they want to see, and as somebody who sits on one of those boards, I have seen it in action. I've seen really great folks in my city and other cities, well intentioned, just drag this process out and add contingency after contingency after contingency, and I think losing sight of the budget for the project. We have to work in a realistic world where there are budgets, and this a market rate development or even affordable development, and the numbers have to work to be able to build this.
And I think lose sight of the fact that actually getting housing is a benefit to these communities, to our communities, and we some of these boards will just end up spending months, if not years, going back and forth with the developer, with peer reviewers, and turn this process into just a complete, in some cases, a mess and a real uncertain mess at that. And I think that's probably the biggest piece that I hope folks take from this. Right is that the uncertainty is the biggest killer for current projects, but also that chilling effect on potential other developers who see another colleague go through the gauntlet and don't think they can stomach doing that themselves.
Any other main takeaways or insights you'd like to highlight, or maybe you can tell us a little bit about how the report came together. So maybe you can share a little bit about what was your research process, and yeah, how did how did you bring this together, and maybe one or two more insights you'd like our audience to take away from this conversation.
The process started with essentially a call for projects. We I did my own research. The team at Boston Indicators pulled a few projects. I asked friends, colleagues, folks, just if you have an example of a middle housing development in Eastern Massachusetts in the last five years. Send it my way, and I'll take a look at it. It doesn't have to be necessarily like the worst case scenario or the best case scenario. I wanted to kind of get a broad spectrum of middle housing development projects, and I found six that ranged from a five family in Arlington up to an 87 unit, which is stretching the middle housing definition.
I understand an 87 unit senior housing assisted living development in a Massachusetts suburb, and went the Reach Project, and really initially I just set out to kind of tell the story, right, in a way that both elected officials, but also just the general public, could understand. Like, here's the picture. Here's the before and after of an empty parking lot that was turned into, or proposed to be turned into, 22 unit mixed use development. But this the process that project had to go through from start to finish, and we told that story for six different projects in six different communities, each with an extremely different permitting process.
And at the end of the day, only some of those projects have actually been built after that lengthy delay. And I think the biggest thing that I hope folks will take from this report is there's multiple layers to it, right? One is we need to stop vilifying people. I put up a slide during my presentation, and I kept using this term when I was talking to folks during the process. Don't hate the player, hate the game. And the game is broken. Our systems in Massachusetts to permit housing are broken. It's the developer, it's the planner, it's the board members, it's the neighbor. Everyone is behaving rationally within a system that is broken.
So, if we can get ourselves to that point, I think then it allows us to have a respectful conversation about what comes next. Right there, there should always be an opportunity for input where that comes in is a question, right? Does it come in more of a broader master planning process? Is a little bit more permissive? Should it come in at the individual project basis when you have a four-unit townhome development? Should it require a developer to go to the kitchen table of every neighbor on the block and let them take a pen, redesign? The project, how they want to see it, and we laugh. But those things happen, and it's
I'm I'm laughing out of like almost horror from like the you know just thinking about the times I've tried to design someone's newsletter and send it back, and the nightmare that can be, let alone a development. Like that sounds like I am experiencing the chilling effect, and I'm not even a developer, but yes,
Yeah, and that's like I think at the end of the day, like I we I hope the takeaway is how difficult the process was. That was the original intent, and we also came out with a number of recommendations of reforms that I think are necessary for Massachusetts to look at. There is a bill pending on the legislature right now, it's the Mass Winds Act that would finally put some guardrails on site plan review, which is great. I don't think it's enough because if you're if you're a community that does not want to see any housing development, you still have a path to block production by 1000 paper cuts, and I think that needs to continue to kind of be refined.
And we're not saying you need to allow a 500 unit development by right on any lot anywhere in Massachusetts, right? This was looking at that middle housing, that 2345, unit developments. That if we're going to allow our communities, and I know as Chuck loves to say, allow them to scale up to the next version of themselves. I think we really need to be able to allow our communities to do that, or we freeze out the small development cohort that would be able to build those housing that housing type in the first place.
Is your hope when you say reform? Do you think that's going to happen more on a national on a on a statewide level, or more on like city, like municipality by municipality? It's
A great question. And the report has some recommendations at the end. Some of them spell out specific changes that towns or cities can make today that are more sort of procedural. Anything that involves changing your site plan review process is typically tied into zoning, and then that is tied into if you're in a town, town government, town meeting, which were talking about a little bit before. But there's a lot of PTSD in the planning community in Massachusetts from the EBTA community's fights, and I think there's it's a lot to ask each individual community to broach the education and advocacy to get a reform to their permitting process through town meeting again.
It's a really technical process, and I think there needs to be some level of reform passed at the state level, along with some local reform. But I think to ask each individual city and town to go through that town meeting process to reform site plan review would be incredibly onerous and difficult for very short-staffed, overworked, and frankly burned out planning community in Massachusetts right now, and it's hard to blame them after what they went through with NBCA communities.
Yeah, could you maybe share an example of one of the recommendations that you had, or maybe one or two examples of something that the state could be doing to help solve this?
Sure.
Solve this problem.
So there's a lot of great things in the Mass Winds Act, and a lot of those I also recommended. Some of them were just finally putting guardrails around what types of things a planning board can or cannot say, or can or cannot require a developer to do. What it has to be tied to, if it's in sort of public safety versus just an esthetics thing, like where do you draw the line there?
Some of the other things are really requiring communities, especially in the historic preservation space and historic reviews in Massachusetts are notorious for being very onerous in some cases and difficult and lengthy processes, encouraging and requiring historic preservation and historic commissions to actually take into account the public need for housing and historic preservation. We just did that with change to our variance standards in Massachusetts, requiring that process to take into account the public need for housing, in addition to the other standards to prove a variance. So that something that is something that could be transferred over to the historic reviews. An ability.
This one of the bigger things that I think I don't really know if any state's gotten this right yet, but the ability for an applicant to cleanly. appeal a decision. So, if you most developers, if you talk to them, and I talk to a lot, and it felt like therapy for a lot of them when I was talking to them about their permitting processes.
Hey, maybe there's like a new addition to your professional like
Development,
Your resume at this point. Development therapy might be a thing.
I don't know if you need a certification for that, but maybe I can offer. But yeah, there were a lot of them who just said, "Look, we go through this process, and at the end of the day, these boards add 35 different conditions that we have to meet, and I can fight them on that, or I can just accept the fact that I finally got my approval and I can move forward. And a lot of times, those conditions may be kind of beyond what they're allowed to do, but the only option is to sue.
And one developer had a quote that's like, "Well, it's basically akin to suing your business partner and then essentially having to go back to work with them the next day after you kind of spoil that relationship, you spoil that working dynamic, and for a lot of these smaller developers, they tend to work in the same community because they know the process. So you ruin that relationship, not just for that project, but for future projects. So having some kind of, and we have this for affordable housing for 40B projects, but a housing appeals committee or housing appeals board that can very quickly just rule technically yes or no whether or not these conditions are appropriate for a project.
It doesn't require an application or appeal to lay in court and then to enter the delays and the legal process of a court that doesn't necessarily have a technical expertise to be deciding on engineering requirements and that kind of thing, but an actual committee that has some technical expertise to say yes or no, or these are appropriate or those aren't appropriate, and then still leave the avenue of litigation in court open, but at least have something that's a little bit less adversarial, a little bit more streamlined, and hopefully more appropriate for the small scale development, especially.
So, tell me about the traction around the report since it's come out. What have conversations been like? What are you hearing? What are you hoping for in terms of how this affects the conversation and perhaps the regulatory environment, yeah, around housing.
It's it's interesting timing. Our legislative session ended in well, technically ended in July. It's in conference committee potentially through the end of this year. We have two year legislative sessions. So while this session is finishing up. We're hoping that like Mass Winds, which would have site plan review reform included in it, will move forward. So I hope this gives some wind into the sails of the Mass Winds Act. I know a lot of senators and representatives were either in the room at this presentation or had sent staff to hear the report presentation. So I was encouraged by that. We're also gearing up for our next legislative session, so I hope that we can pull some items.
I mean, I think we are going to pull some items from this to file in a hopeful housing package in the next legislative session to advance permitting reform even further. Beyond that, a number of communities have reached out and asked me to come in to speak to their planning departments and planning staff, and I think that's really encouraging. I'm not necessarily the expert in this, right? I think there's a lot more for me to learn, but I'm encouraged that a lot of folks are interested in discussing this and continuing the discussion, and are willing to really take a look back at some of the local permitting processes in their communities.
Candidly, I'll say a lot of folks in a lot of communities, a lot of planners have said thank you for writing this. I've been trying to advocate for this reform for a long time, and nobody's listened. I've had folks who have been in this world for a lot longer than I have, who said that this finally put a picture on a really opaque process that is not easy to change, but is necessary if Massachusetts is actually going to see the housing production at scale that we actually need in all of our communities, not just concentrated in the few communities within the Boston core.
It almost seems like Massachusetts. I mean, the bigger the bigger heart level conversation that has to have is a question is a conversation about like vision almost. Like I think it's easy for older states like Rhode Island, Massachusetts to perhaps be a bit stuck in a vintage identity, perhaps, and like were talking about at the beginning, those that impulse of fear and control can be really powerful. To say, we don't know who we are if we're not like this way, right?
And so maybe thinking of, well, let's think about who we could be, and it doesn't mean giving up everything that we love about what it means what it means to be an older state, Massachusetts, what it means to be Rhode Island, but starting to shape a new a new future and start to shape a new vision because then in my head debates about land use, parking, housing they're all debates. It's about identity and values, right? And I and that's kind of the conversation under the conversation of what's like. Well, who are we? What are we known for? What do we stand for? And maybe if you start therapy for developers, I could start developing therapy just for like you know
Town meeting members, city staff
Members. Be like, let's get to the conversation beneath the conversation.
It's a great question. I think it was. I think I saw this a couple years ago. Just to kind of follow up on that, it was the mayor of I want to say Milwaukee put to put I don't know where this ever went, but he put together a platform that said we're going to be Milwaukee 1 million 1 million people, and which basically meant at least doubling the city's population from where it is today, and then what does it take to get there? Right, where how do we attract the companies and the employers to keep those folks employed? How do we move those people? Where do they live? How are we moving them around? And how are we building the housing and office space, lab space?
See, but for a place like Massachusetts, I think that would be absolutely terrifying because I think part of like my impression of a place because I lived in Rhode Island I've been to Boston and I enjoy my impression of those places from the time I've spent there is that there's legitimate fear over you know of losing their sense of who they are, and so I think the idea of being like hey let's let's let's welcome a million new people. That's going to trigger those like that fear of like we're just going to get diluted or we're just going to change in ways that we can't. And there's like fear, and we don't know what to do with that.
We're not trying to say we don't want new people, but we don't. I think you know bringing in a million new people would be would change the place. So I almost wonder if like reframing it as like let's share what's so great about Massachusetts with more people you know let's let's make Boston let's welcome I don't know more people into the club I think but they kind of have that like private club vibe up there you know oh we do
I know I know and it's gonna and I wasn't necessarily advocating for that policy to be. I
Know, I know, but I mean, just being honest about like, what's the place that we're talking about? I think I think that's part of the battle. It's figuring out how can you, how can Boston, how can Massachusetts say all these towns, and how can they cast a vision for who they are that's not based in fear, but that's more that's more generous and more creative in the sense that you know we're constantly we can evolve in a way that allows us to maintain our values right and what makes us unique and we can share more of like a narrative of hospitality like let's share what makes us great with more people let's make more people Bostonites or whatever.
I don't know what do people Massachusetts call yourself, right? So it's more like let's share what you are with more people rather than because I think when you flip it the other way around, makes it sound like well, all these people are going to shape who you are, right? I think that's maybe the subconscious fear.
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, every went through this with MBTA communities in 177 cities and towns that were forced to have that housing conversation around what would growth look like, and I mean, I watched two dozen or three dozen town meetings over the last four or five years, and town meeting discourse on housing, and it ran the gamut. And I like there's there were 80-year-old women that stood up and said, "Look, I grew up in this town. I've lived here my whole life. I wanted to stay here, and I was lucky enough to find an option to downsize into. I can't drive anymore, so I could find a place in town that I could live in and walk to things that I needed at the doctor or the bakery.
But most of my friends don't have that option because there aren't enough places here. So they're either stuck in this big single-family home that they can't afford to maintain, and they're getting to the point where they can't go up the stairs anymore, and there's no place for them to go. So they're going to either have to stay there and stick it out, or leave the community that they've known for their whole lives. I think that is a big part of the conversation too. Is a lot of times the conversation around new housing is othering and it's for other people.
But I think the new housing content in a lot of places, especially if it's a smaller housing type, a lot of times will serve folks who grew up in that town who are leaving their parents' places, seniors who are downsizing, and then you begin to open up that housing system again for folks. There will be some new folks that come in and fill units, and that's great. And we should be encouraging that. But a lot of the conversation is that we're not serving our existing population well, and we're forcing people into very uncomfortable housing situations and uncertain housing situations, let alone expensive housing situations by not being willing to kind of adopt a new housing framework.
I'll I'll give some numbers for a second too. So, and this more national trend than local, but I'll it applies to Massachusetts. So if you look at so the average household. Size in the 1950s was I think was like 3.4 people per home in the U. S. It's dropped to 2.5 people today. So basically, we need 40% more housing to house the exact same population that we had in the 1950s. So we haven't even gotten there. We haven't hit that 40% yet. But our population in Massachusetts is at least a million people more than it was, probably 2 million more than it was in the 1950s. We've built some housing.
We built more in the last decade than we did in the previous two or three, but we've never caught up to the pace of growth even close. That were permitting 50,000 units a year in the 50s and 60s. I think we permitted 12,000 homes last year, and that was like a peak for the last 20 years. So we're still digging ourselves out of a sort of demographic shift hole, and then we can start talking about the actual population increase hole that we're we're in, and we will continue to be in. I was talking to somebody about this morning in a conversation too. We're losing our workforce, and there's a lot of ample data that shows who's leaving Massachusetts is the 25 to 44 year old demographic.
That's our young professionals. That's folks who would form families and start families who are delaying that because they can't find a home to start a family in Massachusetts, that should be chilling to anybody who owns a house today. Who's going to buy your house in 20 years when you go to sell? But also for our economy and our state's economy is employers are now kind of begging people to support housing initiatives.
We for years, were trying to get the large employers in Massachusetts to support housing reform and housing advocacy, and they never really got behind it until now, where they're really getting behind a ballot question, question seven that we're supporting this session that would allow small starter homes again in Massachusetts.
They hear the stories all the time from their employees or from people they offer jobs to. That look, it's great. I love to work for the company, but I can't move my family to Massachusetts. It's just not tenable for us. So we're going to stay where we are. Even forget about how much they're offering in salary. It's just we can't find a home anywhere close to what we can afford that fits our needs.
Yeah, it sounds like what you're getting at, and this what the report gets at, what as well as just the human side, right? It's like let's not even talk about growth because I know that can be a scary word or you know like a million new people, but let's just talk about giving like homes for our friends, homes for our children, homes for our neighbors, homes for our teachers, right? Like the people that, because that's the flip side to places like Rhode Island Massachusetts. Like they are tight with their community, right?
You've got that town culture, so I think like framing the housing conversation from the perspective of like, hey, we are a community, we look out for each other, and this part of what that means. Like, embracing this, these reforms and these improvements is part of what we do. If as a town that takes care of each other, whose members take care of each other, but you know, from what I saw in the report, like I think it's really interesting. You have these visuals that show you know the housing that could be existing, right? That's not there yet, and it's just a really human way to go about it, especially when you layer on the narrative of like who this housing is for. It's for your neighbor.
It's for your kids' teacher. It's for you know the business owner that you whose shop you love to visit. So hopefully, I mean, I hope that human side can really push through and help. Yeah, help your state embrace a new, new chapter of its growth and identity. We're going to wrap things up here, Jonathan. You live in Salem. We were talking before I hit record about some interesting realities of life in Salem at this time of year.
You can touch on that if you want, but in general, I always love to give my guests a chance to talk about their town, their neighborhood, what they love about it, and to share a couple of local businesses they like to recommend people check out if they come to visit.
Yeah, it's great timing. I'm actually looking out my window right now at a throng of tourists walking down the street in costume. So it's 1p.m. on a Tuesday. That's awesome. No, it's a great. I mean, I didn't. I wasn't a Halloween guy before I moved here. I moved here four years ago from Boston. It's a great little city, right? It's a compact, walkable downtown, 35 minutes by train to Boston. We were really lucky to have our now Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll as mayor for 17 years, who did some incredible work on setting a course for this city into its 400th year. We're currently celebrating our 400th anniversary as a city. There's obviously I mentioned the transit. Accessibility.
We have a really strong, tight-knit community of folks, and folks from a lot of different places and different backgrounds. Immigrants, folks who just moved to Massachusetts from California and New York, Florida, Ohio, folks who were born and raised in Salem and have been here their entire lives. It's it's nice to have that sort of that mix of folks that you run into all the time, and different ages and different demographics. I mean, my apartment building is a mix of young couples and empty nesters, seniors who are who are downsizing and needed a place near downtown, and we all kind of look out for each other.
I help my neighbor who's a little bit older change light bulbs or carry groceries when she needs it, and we have this robust small business community, which I think we're losing in a lot of main streets and downtowns. It's propped up by tourism, and I think it would struggle, especially in today's economy, if it wasn't for I mentioned this before, 1.4 million tourists coming in the month of October. It's the same as the Magic Kingdom will welcome this month in Disney. But those folks patronizing our businesses, the bakeries, cafes, bars, breweries, restaurants.
I'll name a few specific ones that I love: AJ King Bakery, which is one of my favorite coffee shops and bakeries; Couch Dog Brewing, which is a sort of microbrewery that opened a couple years ago downtown, that is also now hosting a coffee and matcha pop-up part of the week in the mornings. Husband wife team brewing some incredible beers and really unique flavors. Notch Brewing just down the street. Lulu's Bakery, which has great pastries, coffee time bakery, Maitland Farm and Kitchen. The owner, Andy Maitland, and his wife Holly own a farm across town. Andy is a city councilor, and he's also the head chef and owner of the small farm-to-table restaurant.
I don't know how he does all that, but Andy, I need to interview—
—him and get his secrets to the ultimate life hack. Being a farmer, a chef, and a city councilor. That sounds—
—like 40-hour days, I think.
A very interesting combination, to say the least. Yeah.
But yeah, pumping out some incredible food, and really, it's it's it's great to get to know some of these local entrepreneurs too. And I think like when business owners tell the community they're having trouble with certain things in the city, people tend to rally behind them in a lot of cases. And understand, I think we kind of learned this a lot during the pandemic when we didn't have access to small businesses for so long. What small business meant to our lives beyond just the product, beyond just the food, it's the familiar face, it's the flavors, it's just the respite in your day, and I think more folks need to.
But I think a lot of folks in our city took that to heart, understand a how difficult it is to sustain a small business, but b how important they are to our daily lives too.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jonathan, this by no means an exhaustive conversation because I'm sure we could talk about so many other interesting things. Given how much time you've invested in understanding these issues and the ways that your community is struggling, and the work that you've done to present some solutions, it's really inspiring.
Well, Tiffany, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. It's been incredible to get to finally have this have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on this report. I spent a lot of time working in Massachusetts communities, and I know this work in housing crisis can feel daunting. But I really am optimistic for the future of Massachusetts and our communities and communities across the country because there are some incredible folks like you that are really doing monumental work to push the conversation, push the dialogue, and push sort of the changes that are necessary to realize the future sustainability of our communities and viability of our communities. So thank you.
Well, to our listeners, if you're in the Massachusetts area, be sure to click on the links in the show notes, and if you know someone who would appreciate hearing more about Jonathan's work and the report, be sure to send it to them. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, a let me know if someone who you think I should have on the show using our suggested yes form, and b as I always say at the end of the episodes, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.