GREENFIELD — Leadership from the Franklin Regional Council of Governments met with local legislators on Monday to ask Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll for a “Cornerstone Communities” designation that would help ensure state funding for housing production can be funneled to rural municipalities.
Driscoll and Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities Secretary Ed Augustus joined local and state leadership to discuss the unique challenges western Massachusetts faces while trying to grow its housing supply.
“To grow a strong economy, you need to have housing to support that ecosystem. Here in Greenfield and in Franklin County in general, we are seeing declining populations, so we want to have housing that can support the needs of this region,” Driscoll said. “We want to have a strong, healthy, vibrant economy, and those two are symbiotic relationships between housing and growing a strong economy.”
Rural Development Inc. (RDI) Housing Development Director Alyssa Larose and FRCOG Executive Director Linda Dunlavy explained that rural communities in western Massachusetts — unlike communities surrounding Boston and the cape — are not designated as Gateway Communities, nor Seasonal Communities, blocking them from significant state funding.
Since Franklin County workers earn some of the lowest annual incomes statewide, high construction costs and low returns on investments dissuade private developers from investing in rural communities, Dunlavy said.
“Our primary act today is the creation of a new community designation that recognizes our unique economic conditions that make housing production a particular challenge,” Dunlavy said, pitching the Cornerstone Communities. “What we would like to see acknowledged is the very real challenges in weak rural markets. We’ve suggested attributes to this program so that it is constrained and the attributes would include low population, limited or no sewer and water, low housing production, high cost burden, et cetera.”
In response, Driscoll noted that she “loved” the idea of a Cornerstone Communities program, or implementing alternative measures to ensure that state housing dollars reach rural municipalities. She explained that while the Gateway Communities program, which allows “long forgotten” urban areas to apply for state infrastructure and housing funds, has been the envy of other cities and towns in the state, more is needed to spur housing production and economic development in western Massachusetts.
Augustus added that the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities is preparing to launch, in concert with the Affordable Homes Act, an affordable housing tax credit to help promote affordable housing development in low-income communities.
“It’s the ability for folks to develop ownership opportunities to get a tax credit,” he said. “MassHousing is working on drafting regulations to the program and once they’re ready to be promulgated, there’ll be an opportunity for comment. That’s an opportunity to make sure, from the lens of more rural communities, that it makes sense and it works.”
Before the lieutenant governor was taken on a bus tour of Franklin County, state Sen. Jo Comerford compared the state’s housing funding programs to its Chapter 90 funding allocations for roadwork to argue that the rural communities of western Massachusetts rarely receive the state support that their eastern counterparts do, especially when a program’s funding formula factors in population.
“All of those funding assumptions have kept us down,” Comerford told Driscoll. “You came in, you promised you were going to change it, they’ve kept us down. They’ve kept us unfunded and threadbare.”
The “golden path,” Comerford continued, is to “ramp up our small economies, fill our housing, build our housing and fill it. That’s the path to salvation for us — more people.”
When asked in an interview how federal funding cuts might affect the state’s ability to fund local housing projects, Driscoll explained that regardless of the federal government’s financial support, or lack thereof, lowering the costs of housing in Massachusetts remains one of Gov. Maura Healey’s top priorities.
“We want to invest in housing, we want to invest in transportation. We obviously want a strong federal partner to do that; notwithstanding that, the cost of living is our biggest challenge in Massachusetts and much of that is tied to housing,” Driscoll said. “We’re working hard trying to have a robust housing plan that will grow housing units, rehab existing buildings and look to make sure that the state is a partner in growing the statewide housing that we need throughout Massachusetts.”