No single policy tool will solve our housing crisis. We need them all.
I’m a professor. My wife is a lawyer. We’re both successful professionals in the middle of our careers, and we can’t afford to buy a home in Brookline.
This puts us in a Brookline rental market with the second-highest rents in the state. State-level bans on tenant protections mean that any year could come with a major rent hike or a no-fault eviction, and the regional housing shortage means that if that happens, we’ll struggle to find available housing in the town where Christina grew up and where I am an elected official.
This crisis touches every generation in town. Christina and I can make it work in the middle of our careers in good-paying jobs, but many young people who grew up here can’t see a path back into Brookline because of the high cost of housing. Older adults looking to age in place find a market with far too few accessible smaller homes, and often cannot rely on family-based care because relatives cannot afford to live in Brookline.
It also touches both public and private housing. Growing up in public housing, I saw that public institutions can help create safe and stable neighborhoods. But our state government has not adequately resourced Massachusetts’ public housing system or housing vouchers. I co-created a working group to support the Brookline Housing Authority and its residents in the face of underfunding from the state for basic maintenance and programming, but local resources can only go so far in a state system with structural funding gaps. The long wait times for public housing trap many underpaid residents in severe rent burden in the private market — far too many families become unhoused as a result.
From the cost of homeownership to the rental market to the fraying of our housing safety-net, Massachusetts has a housing crisis. I’m running for State Rep because the state has the tools to solve it: housing supply, tenant protections, funding for affordable housing production, maintenance, and programming, and stronger state anti-discrimination protections.
My Housing Plan
Housing Supply
Many of the problems in our housing system stem from a simple structural flaw: we don’t have enough housing in Massachusetts. Call me biased, but I think more neighborhoods in Massachusetts should look like the 15th Norfolk district. If every MBTA station area in Massachusetts modestly increased density to 10 homes per acre — slightly less dense than Brookline Village — we’d have 253,000 new homes. The regional housing shortage is a big part of why living in Brookline is so expensive, and I’ll be a proud ambassador for our dense housing, walkable neighborhoods, and vibrant small business and nonprofit communities on Beacon Hill.
I’ve been inspired by what even a few housing champions can do at the State House, and I’m committed to taking on our housing crisis head-on. That’s why I’m the only candidate in this race to support Rep. Andy Vargas’s bill H. 1448, which establishes production goals for affordable and market-rate housing and requires many more municipalities to allow some multi-family housing. I will also use the House’s oversight powers to keep a close eye on implementation for the new MBTA zoning law to ensure that we are maximizing its potential. When I talk to constituents, the housing crisis and the climate emergency are two of the biggest challenges I hear. If we’re serious about addressing either, we need more dense, walkable neighborhoods near transit across Massachusetts. The 15th Norfolk is what it looks like to get this right — we can show towns across the state the potential of dense neighborhoods, and the representative from this seat should be one of the premier housing champions in the legislature.
Tenant Protections
Tenant protections — including rent control — are about stability. We need public funding and housing abundance to get housing costs under control, but without robust tenant protections, renters will still be at risk of displacement from excessive rent increases and arbitrary evictions. That’s why I support rent stabilization and a universal state-funded right to counsel for tenants facing eviction. I would model this program off of successful laws in DC, California, and Oregon — rents in Massachusetts should not increase by more than 5% above the cost of inflation each year. Modest annual rent increases may be necessary to fund property maintenance as costs rise, but the double-digit increases we regularly see in Massachusetts are not. A big part of the stability of homeownership comes from cost predictability, and our state government can grant similar stability to renters.
Unfortunately, many of these protections have been off the table since landlords targeted Brookline, Cambridge, and Boston with a statewide ban on rent control in 1994; Brookline decisively rejected this ballot question, but it passed 51%-49% statewide. In summer 2020, two members of the Brookline delegation — Rep. Mike Moran and Rep. Nika Elugardo — voted for an amendment to enable municipalities to pass certain local tenant protections, but this amendment did not pass. As a renter, I know what it is like to worry that a rent increase will make your home unaffordable, and I will fight for tenant protections at the State House.
Public Funding
Regulatory changes can make a major dent in our housing crisis, but housing access for all relies on public funding. Housing is a human right, and underpaid workers need housing even when their wages don’t support the cost of providing it — that’s why the government plays an essential role in the housing system. At the State House, I’ll fight for more public funding for maintaining existing public housing, building new affordable homes, and funding the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program.
I founded and currently chair a working group dedicated to supporting the Brookline Housing Authority and its residents, and I have seen that state operating subsidies for public housing are sorely inadequate to fund basic maintenance, let alone comprehensive programming. As someone who grew up in public homes, this issue is personal to me. We need to substantially increase operating subsidies to keep our public homes safe and accessible in communities across the state for the long haul.
I support increasing direct state funding for housing production, and I also support giving municipalities the tools they need to secure additional funding. I fought for Brookline’s real estate transfer fee home rule petition, which passed in Town Meeting but died without a vote in the legislature. If it had passed, we would have secured an additional $37 million for affordable housing already. Our cities and towns leave vital money for housing on the table because the legislature deprives us of the tools that we need.
Finally, I support fully funding the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program, and I define full funding to include increasing payment standards to match those of federal Housing Choice Vouchers. In high-cost communities like Brookline, the gap between federal and state voucher payment standards is the difference between staying in your community and network of support and being pushed out. I also support a permanent funding increase for RAFT, a key program for preventing homelessness among families.
Anti-Discrimination
Even when people do gain access to programs like MRVP and RAFT, source-of-income discrimination against voucher holders still lock many residents out of safe and stable housing. I know too many residents who have run out of time to use their voucher because no landlords were willing to rent to them. These transparent violations of state statute are exacerbating the housing crisis, and it is the state’s responsibility to secure the civil rights of tenants with state and federal housing vouchers. That’s why I support state funding for audit studies to identify source-of-income discrimination against voucher holders. Many renters, both with and without vouchers, also face discrimination based on past evictions, and I support state-level eviction-sealing. State anti-discrimination laws need teeth, and I’ll fight for them.
Conclusion
I know that housing can sometimes be a contentious issue in town, but we can’t solve any of the biggest crises facing the state if we shy away from hard conversations — on this and every policy conversation, you’ll always know what I believe and how I’m voting, and I want to know what you think too. That’s why I’m hosting a community policy conversation on Monday, April 25th at 6pm via Zoom Webinar. I hope that this letter gives you a sense of how I’ll approach housing in the legislature. I feel the urgency of this crisis in my bones, and I’ll use every tool in the toolbox to address it in partnership and conversation with you.
