Group seeks to repeal housing law
Says developers unfairly profit
Hoping to harness the simmering outrage over the state's affordable housing law, a group of activists opposed to the law has launched the first-ever statewide effort to repeal it.
State and local politicians are also advocating various changes to the law, first enacted in 1969 to encourage developers to build affordable housing by offering them a smoother path through local building regulations.
Critics say that the law has encouraged huge profits and other abuses by some developers. The state inspector general's office has investigated several projects and found that developers exceeded the maximum profit allowed under the law.
On Monday, John Belskis, founder of the Coalition for the Reform of 40B, went to the office of the attorney general to begin the process of getting an initiative to repeal the law on the November 2008 ballot.
If it is approved by the attorney general's office, Belskis plans to begin collecting the necessary 66,593 signatures of registered voters in September. The petition would be presented to the Legislature in January 2008.
"I think we can do it," said Belskis, who has battled the law for four years. Belskis, a retired telephone worker who lives in Arlington, plans to tap coalition members, who represent 132 towns in the Commonwealth, to help him out.
"It's a developers' welfare program that doesn't really create affordable housing," he said yesterday. "It just doesn't work."
But 40B supporters, -- a group that includes politically connected real estate developers, lawyers, and bankers -- say the law encourages the building of critically needed lower-cost housing in a state where housing costs are out of reach of working-class people.
"Without 40B, there would be a lot less affordable housing," said Paul Wilson, a lawyer who has represented dozens of 40B developments.
Repealing 40B, he said, would be a bad idea.
Phil Hailer -- spokesman for the state Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees the law -- declined to comment on the petition, because he had not seen a copy of it.
Chapter 40B allows developers to bypass local building regulations, as long as one quarter of the housing units are sold at below-market rates to qualified buyers.
According to the state's Department of Housing and Community Development, 31 percent of all new housing units built in Massachusetts in 2005 were built under the law.
Local officials and residents in many towns around Boston resent the developments because they have no say in projects that, they say, are generally too big.
Between 1999 and 2004, more than 70 bills designed to amend or abolish Chapter 40B were filed at the State House.
Senator James Timilty, for example, has called for a three-year moratorium on all 40B developments.
"A lot of people believe 40B isn't working," said Tim O'Neill, Timilty's chief of staff. "The senator wants to take some time to investigate it and see what to do about it."
When the law was enacted in 1969, middle-class families were abandoning cities for the suburbs. Urban legislators, concerned that cities would become warehouses for the poor, crafted the law as a way to counter that trend.
For its 30 years, 40B was not much of a community concern; only a few developers knew how to navigate the governmental agencies that subsidized the projects.
But in 1999, the state's Housing Appeals Committee decided that private banks could finance the developments, and developers began to take advantage of the law.
Traditional homebuilders and national real estate investment trusts started using the law to convert land that had long been undeveloped into apartment complexes, and local officials began begging legislators for relief.
Last week, the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the Housing Appeals Committee's 1999 decision that private banks can subsidize the developments.
Some municipal advocates have long argued that private banks should not be financing the projects, because with the finances comes an obligation to ensure that other parts of the law, such as the profit limitations, are enforced. Critics say they don't trust private banks to serve as project overseers.
The day after the housing decision, critics of 40B decided to launch the repeal effort.
McConville can be reached at cmcconville@globe.com. 