06.16.2024

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The Bay Complacent State: New $6 billion housing bill is decades overdue and won’t do the trick, but don’t expect an honest assessment from state leaders

Maybe in July, as the clock winds down on the two-year legislative session, Beacon Hill will finally get around to passing a long-awaited, multibillion-dollar response to the housing crisis.

House Speaker Ron Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka and Gov. Maura Healey will congratulate each other on passing an “historic” bill aimed at reining in prices and rents so high that all but the old and very young are fleeing the state in droves.

However, amid all the mutual back patting and political happy talk, some highly inconvenient truths will go unsaid.

First off, the $6 billion-plus bill should have been passed decades ago. The housing crisis started making headlines in the late 1990s, when the Greater Boston Interfaith Coalition took up affordable housing as its first major cause.

Even now, the big housing bill and other, similar measures, like the MBTA Communities Act, do not go nearly far enough in dealing with onerous local zoning rules.

In fact, it is this dense overlay of NIMBY rules and regulations in cities and towns across the state that have made it near impossible for the market - and, in particular, developers and builders - to meet the overwhelming demand for new homes, apartments and condos.

Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

Yet you won’t find much in the way of harsh - and honest - criticism emanating from their colleagues at the State House when it comes to the performance of the state’s top political leaders, on housing or any other issue, for that matter.

We effectively live in a one-party state in blue Massachusetts. The state’s Republican Party has shrunk to miniscule proportions and is confused about exactly what it stands for in the Age of Trump.

Meanwhile, House and Senate leaders, all Dems, keep their own members in check through the doling out of lucrative committee chairmanships and other tactics.

Nonprofit chiefs, developers, business leaders and others are often too muted in their criticism of the Legislature, the governor, and powerful local officials like the mayor of Boston.

Some of this is clearly due to fear of retaliation, with state funding, potential contracts, and approvals for new projects often at stake.

That said, it also reflects another inconvenient truth: Greater Boston, despite its outward image as one of the nation’s great cosmopolitan hubs, remains a highly parochial place.

The need to tiptoe around outsized and easily bruised political egos makes it difficult to have a real debate over the issues of the day, including vigorous, unsparing criticism of the powers that be.

In fact, it’s this insider political culture of ours that is one reason we are in such a bind right now, and not just with the obscenely overpriced housing market, but with runaway health care costs and soaring electric bills, among other issues.

Special treatment? If the Massachusetts State Police trooper whose sick comments on Karen Read stirred outrage had been a judge, he would have already been suspended, former member of the bench contends

That would be Michael Proctor, the state police trooper whose grotesque text messages and rants about Read have triggered a wave of public outrage.

Proctor is a lead investigator in the case against Read. The 44-year-old financial analyst and former college professor is on trial in state court in Dedham for allegedly backing her SUV into John O’Keefe, her Boston police officer boyfriend, late on a snowy night in early 2022, leaving him for dead.

Read had downed nine drinks that evening and had quarreled with O’Keefe, who had recently told her the relationship was over, prosecutors have argued.

However, Proctor now finds himself at the center of a political and media firestorm over comments he made about Read in text messages to friends and family.

Proctor called Read a “wack job c**t,” hoped that she would kill herself, and even joked about her Crohn’s disease, saying she “leaks poo,” according to Boston.com.

If a state court judge had made similar remarks, he or she “would be taken off criminal cases for a period of time or much worse,” Jack Lu, a retired Massachusetts Superior Court associate justice, told Contrarian Boston.