Last month I wrote a column about transportation issues facing us; this month I want to explore how housing - what kinds of houses and dwelling units are being built and what aren't, their cost, etc. - and how the housing patterns interact with transportation problems.
I read real estate adds the way some people read obituaries; my morbid fascination with prices began during my term on the Planning Board, which ended in the early 80s as that boom was taking off. It's clear that the price of housing any kind of housing in the Amherst area is escalating steadily. For those of us who own a place to live, this may feel like accumulated wealth. But for someone who is looking, itıs horrible. In the paper, no house in Amherst is pictures for less than $240,000 (a duplex); I see a 3 bedroom ranch with 1-car garage in Sunderland for $189,900 - and the banner across it, "deposit taken." There are a couple of two bedroom condos, one for $99,000, the other for $249,000!
A couple of years ago I was shocked to learn that house lots in my neighborhood, with stunning views but right below the old sanitary landfill, were going for $85,000; now I see lots advertised for $160,000. With land that expensive, no wonder the house prices are sky-high.
What do people do? Renting is not an option; one of my colleagues at work, no longer willing to put up with the noise and loud music that have recently taken over a formerly well-managed apartment complex where she has lived for a decade, wants to move. She reports that rents for one-bedroom apartments are $700 a month, plus utilities, all the way up to Greenfield.
If we read the newspapers we know there is a housing crisis for low income people throughout most of the country, and that it is especially acute in cities and the northeast. No one has been building low-income housing in anything approaching the need; it doesnıt pay for private developers, and both the federal and state governments quit adding to the supply of housing more than a decade ago.
Less obvious, so far, is the increasingly intense shortage of moderately priced housing. The supply of buildable lots, in towns where people most want to live, is not only very limited, it's also often controlled by only a few people. There is no competition to drive down the price of land. If someone pays $100,000 for the lot, it doesnıt make sense to build a small house on it.
Prohibitively expensive new construction drives up the price of existing housing, too. In the more affluent suburbs of Boston, "tear downs" - someone buys a house and tears it down to build a bigger one on the prized lot - are not at all uncommon. Amherst hasn't had any actual tear downs that I can think of, but we've certainly had plenty of build-ons which practically doubled the size of the house; look at McClellan Street for examples. Historic renovation of a deteriorating house is a wonderful thing, but when the result is on the market for $649,900 it does take your breath away.
But let's face it: the price of buildable land isn't the only obstacle to moderately-priced housing. Our laws, our regulations and our prejudices push up the price, too.
In Massachusetts, a landowner with enough frontage on a town road is entitled to sell one or more building lots for individual houses; the town can only regulate, to some extent, the amount of required frontage and the size of the lot. It can't say "no." Similarly, the subdivision laws make it relatively easy to develop a subdivision of regular single family houses on standard sized lots. Doing anything else is hard, even in towns like Amherst which have attempted to encourage clustered housing, denser development in "village centers," etc. What we say, as a town, that we want (denser centers with open space or less development in between, affordable housing, clusters that save open space near residents) we find very difficult to implement. The laws prevent us from mandating it, and neighborhood opposition makes cajoling developers well nigh impossible. Among the results: almost no new multi-family housing has been built.
I do not want to dismiss concerns about anti-social behavior, noise, etc. These are real issues that can occur in any neighborhood, and they are terrible to deal with. I empathize with the distress many people feel at seeing any open area dug up; I hate bulldozers and the havoc they wreak. I also understand the attractions of space, control and privacy in suburban-style houses on lots. But it is also true that there are many adults and small families in this region who know how to behave and need a place to live in that they can afford without having to double up.
Multi-family doesnıt have to be ugly. The smaller units in the Amherst Fields condos where I live generally sell very quickly because they are among the few nice places that a single person or couple with few assets can afford. Amherst needs more of this kind of housing small clusters of multi- family housing that doesnıt look or feel institutional, in a variety of sizes for people with different needs.
Most of the privately owned land in Amherst and neighboring towns is going to be developed (unless we buy the development rights). As things stand now, we're getting McMansions but what we need are more variations on Orchard Valley and Amherst Fields. How can we make this happen?