Voters weigh housing affordability plan in November

Voters in four states will decide housing-related ballot measures in November, providing testing grounds for different strategies to boost affordable homes. The six measures across California, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the highest number in a single election year in at least two decades, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan election research organisation. The ballot issues include approving billions of dollars in bonds for new housing and to help finance home purchases, loosening minimum lot-size rules, speeding environmental reviews and funding infrastructure needed for new development.

“Voters are being asked to choose among very different theories of how you make housing more affordable,” said Caroline Welles, executive director of The First Ask, an organisation that works to elect first-time, female Democratic candidates for state legislatures across the country. “None of those approaches is interchangeable with another, and they affect different people on different timelines.” A Massachusetts ballot measure would allow single-family homes to be built on lots of 5,000 square feet or more in certain residential areas, if they have at least 50 feet of street frontage and access to public water and sewer services.

Zoning policies for single-family homes currently are set by local governments, not the state, and many require lot sizes of 40,000 square feet or more. Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director at Boston-based nonprofit advocacy group Abundant Housing Massachusetts, told Stateline the “incredibly large” minimum lot sizes in Massachusetts have effectively stunted the amount of single-family homes that could be built in the state. “So it’s basically taking the average minimum size in Massachusetts, which is much more comparable to an NFL field to build a single-family home on, much more to the size of an NBA basketball court,” Kanson-Benanav said.

The Massachusetts Municipal Association, a statewide organization advocating on the behalf of local governments, opposes the measure, arguing that land use decisions should be a local decision made by cities and towns. The group also argues that access to water and sewer does not necessarily mean those systems have capacity for added development and that there’s no guarantee that future projects will result in houses being more affordable or priced below market rate.

Analysis from Tufts University estimated that if the ballot measure passes, it would generate roughly 750 new homes per year, with modeling suggesting a range from 350 to 1,200 per year. That “would have a real but modest impact on overall production,” it said. A 2025 Maine law similarly stipulates that municipalities cannot require a minimum lot larger than 5,000 square feet in residential areas served by public or centrally managed water and sewer.

California’s Proposition 45 would shorten and streamline the permitting for housing projects — but it also extends to other types of projects, including water system, clean energy, medical, fire and law enforcement, broadband, education and certain transportation projects. Supporters of Proposition 45 argue that permitting delays add $75,000 to the cost of a new home. According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, the measure would tighten deadlines for environmental reviews and court challenges, and change agency and court review processes under the state’s California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA.

Robert Rivinius, president of the Family Business Association of California, an organisation that represents the interests of family-owned businesses, called CEQA a “tremendous inhibitor” to new housing in a state where it’s sorely needed. “It takes, you know, eight or 10 years to develop a project here and this initiative would give some certainty to the process and some timelines which we don’t currently have,” Rivinius told Stateline. “(Proposition 45) does not eliminate CEQA. It does not eliminate environmental review, but what it does is creates a more certain process, so projects don’t take nearly as long.”

The proposal has drawn pushback from environmental groups and pro-housing groups that have pointed out that a 2025 state law was passed with the intention of speeding up construction by exempting certain urban infill projects from CEQA. Woody Little, an organiser for the Vote for No campaign, told Stateline that he thinks Prop 45 could be a loophole for developers to push ahead with unpopular data center projects and to streamline sprawl projects. According to Democratic state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, since 2002, California legislature has passed 36 laws updating CEQA to streamline the review of housing projects, and that “nearly all” infill housing projects are already exempt.

“One of the reasons that we have provided CEQA exemptions for infill housing is that we are trying to incentivize infill housing,” she said in a call involving legislators opposed to the ballot measures. “If we give these exemptions for sprawl housing in the wildland urban interface and we make those projects more affordable, essentially incentivizing them, then we are going to have more of that type of development.”