Breaking News/11.12.2024
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NIMBY madness: Suburban towns spend tens of millions to buy up land and block the development of new housing, new report finds
More than a dozen towns have shelled out a total of more than $50 million to buy up dilapidated buildings and other properties in order to head off plans for new housing development, a new report by the Boston Foundation finds.
The towns making the purchases are some of the most expensive in the Boston area, including Hingham, Wellesley, Sudbury, Dover, and Marblehead, where median home prices now easily top $1 million, according to the foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2024, just released today.
“Public opposition to housing is so extreme in some communities that public land has become weaponized as a tool to stop housing development, rather than an opportunity to subsidize affordable housing,’ the report states.
Still, it wasn’t just the priciest communities that bought land and buildings to block new housing, as Quincy, Peabody, Ashland, and Norwood, all got into the act as well, the report finds.
The deals, which have ranged from acquiring old buildings to defunct farms, have taken place since 2010 at a time when home prices and rents have gone through the roof amid a shortage of new housing of all types.
All told, at least 1,000 units have been blocked, with that likely being a conservative estimate because, in some cases, local officials acquired properties before any full-scale proposal had been made, the report notes.
Roughly half the communities used Community Preservation Act money to pay for these deals, despite the fact that one of the purposes of the CPA is to encourage the building of affordable housing.
Overall, housing starts across the Boston area have fallen over the past year or two, after ticking up modestly in the 2010s, the report finds.
And even then, the construction of new housing in the previous decade was far below the levels seen back in the 1970s and 80s.
“Research findings demonstrate that all too frequently, public owned land has been leveraged for the opposite purpose—to stop new development,” writes Lee Pelton, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation. “While disappointing, this finding is extremely useful, setting us up to make recommendations for improving our housing development ecosystem.”