2022 Call to Action
It’s a critically important time to be fighting for affordable housing in Massachusetts.
Our housing crisis – arguably one of the most severe in the U.S. – did not materialize overnight. The problems run deep. Income disparities and local resistance to new housing development have been growing in Massachusetts for decades. Yet things have changed lately in a fundamentally positive way:
The shortage and high cost of housing has become front-page news every week if not every day
There is almost universal recognition that our failure to build enough housing is the root cause of runaway rents and home prices
The business community consistently ranks housing and transit as the most critical issues facing the Commonwealth
Enactment and implementation of the MBTA Communities law has shown that our system is capable of major reforms that our Governor, Attorney General and legislative leaders are willing to stand strongly behind
Thousands of local citizens are already engaged in the process of identifying locations where new multifamily housing will be allowed under the new law.
MHP deserves some credit for these milestones. More importantly, MHP is poised to build on this momentum. We are providing technical assistance to more than a hundred cities and towns to help them comply with the state’s new multifamily zoning law. We have entered into multi-year Complete Neighborhood Partnerships with another 11 cities and towns, from urban Chelsea to rural Deerfield, to help them design innovative local strategies to promote new housing served by public transportation. We are designing and building visioning and data tools like Residensity that will help communities plan and accommodate new housing growth. And we are actively developing and pursuing additional state policy changes that will promote the kind of smart, climate-friendly, transportation-oriented housing production that our Commonwealth desperately needs.
It will take many more years for these changes to bear fruit, and in the meantime MHP is deeply engaged in helping the thousands of individuals and families who are priced out of the current housing market. Through our relationships with Massachusetts banks and credit unions, MHP has delivered $6.7 billion in below-market capital to finance more than 30,000 affordable rental housing units and to finance 24,700 first-time home purchases by low and moderate income buyers. These financing programs have achieved superb loan performance while also aligning squarely with the state’s most critical housing needs.
MHP’s customer-friendly approach has made us the lender of choice for new affordable rental housing development in Massachusetts regardless of whether we’re lending to a premier for-profit developer or to a small community-based nonprofit. Our ONE Mortgage program was developed in collaboration with community and banking leaders to promote racial equity in mortgage lending and that’s exactly what we’ve achieved: more than two-thirds of our homebuyers are now households of color. Through our administration of the Homeowner Assistance Fund MHP has also deployed $119 million in federal funds to reinstate more than 5,400 home mortgages and protect those families from foreclosure.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the housing situation in Massachusetts is a generational challenge and we still have a long, long way to go. That’s why the strong housing leadership we’ve seen from the Healey-Driscoll and Baker-Polito administrations matters so much. All of us at MHP look forward to working with Governor Healey, Lieutenant Governor Driscoll, Secretary Augustus, legislative leaders and our other public agency and private sector partners to keep confronting that challenge and to make major headway in 2023 and beyond.
Clark Ziegler
Executive Director
