New housing secretary Edward Augustus promises more housing, offers few details

Massachusetts has a new housing boss, and in a crisis of unaffordability leading to housing insecurity for many and hurting the state's competitiveness, his mantra is "more, faster."

Former Worcester City Manager Ed Augustus was sworn in on Thursday morning as the state's first Cabinet-level housing secretary in three decades, saying he is focused on increasing housing production, but staying mum on specific policies that housing advocates say are necessary such as eviction protections, transfer fees and rent control.

"We need to bring that sense of urgency that the governor and lieutenant governor have talked about, and so my mantra will be 'more, faster,' because the need is immediate. The need is profound," Augustus said to reporters after his swearing-in ceremony in the governor's office.

The new housing secretary said the administration is putting together a group of state agencies to create an inventory of unused state land that could be quickly turned around into new housing.

"That land should be put to use for the needs of the people of the commonwealth. And there can't be a more severe, and significant and pressing need than creating housing. And so we will immediately pull a group together to look at that and try to identify ways to get that land into housing production as quickly as possible," he said.

It's the same idea Healey pitched back in January during her inaugural speech. At the time, she committed to having her administration and finance secretary "identify unused state-owned land that we can turn into rental housing or homes within one year."

When asked about specific solutions aside from building more units, such as long-discussed proposals for transfer fees and rent regulation, Augustus said he wanted to "get up to speed" on these ideas and said he was "open-minded."

"What I want to do is kind of get up to speed on all of those and make sure that we are looking at all those tools that are available to use, but we have to think outside of the box," he said. "I think we need to think creatively. The same old isn't going to get us where we want to go. And so we need to be creative and we need to be open-minded to a lot of different ideas that maybe previously, we weren't open minded to."

Housing advocates and stakeholders bent the Joint Committee on Housing's ears earlier this week on a host of policies they say would make the housing landscape more affordable and equitable for struggling Bay Staters.

They advocated for the state to move forward with the "HOMES Act," a bill filed for a third time this session to seal tenants' eviction records from prospective landlords, to keep previous evictions from becoming a permanent barrier to housing.

Activists also expressed their support for local approval of transfer taxes which would allow cities and towns to impose a fee on high-dollar housing transactions to pay for affordable housing investments.

Chief Justice of the Housing Court Diana Horan came before the committee with concerns of "unintended consequences" of a pandemic-era policy that stays evictions if tenants have a pending application for rental aid -- which both the House and Senate recently voted to make permanent in their fiscal year 2024 budgets.

Under the law, called Chapter 257, a tenant can file an application for rental assistance at any time, even when "the [moving] truck is backing down the driveway," Horan said, and the courts have to stop their proceedings until the application is processed -- which she said can sometimes take several months. As the application slowly moves through the process, renters can be unsure if they will get rental assistance, and if the assistance will cover their rent for the time they spend waiting to find out, Horan said.

Plus, the state-funded rental assistance, called Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT), is set to decrease from providing up to $10,000 per household in a year to providing $7,000, which both the House and Senate designated in their budgets.

Without the courts being able to enter judgment, landlords have been less willing to enter mediation -- where most housing disputes are usually resolved, Horan said. In 2019, 99 percent of cases were mediated and 90 percent of them were settled. In 2022, 79 percent of cases were mediated, and only 37 percent of those cases were settled, according to Horan. She linked this decline in settlements to the new law.

Members of the Housing Committee were eager to hear more about the issues she described, and asked lawyers from the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute to give their perspective from the other side of the bench.

MRLI Director of Community Driven Advocacy Andrea Park said she understood Horan's frustrations with the slow process, but that it is "crucial" for tenants to be able to file an application for rental assistance "when the truck is coming," because they often do not know until that point that they are being evicted.

Meanwhile on other housing policies, calls to allow cities and towns to decide if they want to pursue rent control have only gotten louder and more frequent, as rent prices around the state continue to skyrocket.

House and Senate Democrats have shown little interest in the idea in the 29 years since voters narrowly approved a ballot question prohibiting rent control across Massachusetts, but this year the Legislature is sitting on a home rule petition from its capital city, where Boston City Councilors overwhelmingly voted to adopt a "rent stabilization" plan if they can get approval on Beacon Hill.

"I was in this building 10 years ago, and if you mentioned rent control or rent stabilization, you were chased out of the building," Mike Leyba, co-executive director of housing organizing group City Life/Vida Urbana, told Housing Committee members on Wednesday. "To this day... It's still not the most popular idea in this building. It's very popular outside of this building. Eight out of 10 Latinos across Massachusetts support it, four out of five Boston voters. It's very popular with people."

Nearly a quarter of the way through the 2023-2024 session, the Legislature's Housing Committee has not held public hearings on any of the bills that were referred to it this year. The hearings held earlier this week were "oversight hearings," where committee members listened to stakeholders' who testified broadly on their legislative goals.

An aide to House Chair Rep. James Arciero told the News Service Friday that the committee is still working on hearing dates and is also working on plans to call Augustus before the committee to outline the administration's housing priorities.

Committee co-chair Sen. Lydia Edwards told the News Service that the committee is aiming to have hearings on all of the bills before it this year.

Meanwhile, Healey has avoided taking a stance on these measures, typically saying she will review any legislation that crosses her desk without making a clear commitment. In one appearance after another, she has pointed to the new secretariat as her primary response when asked about addressing the crisis.

Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, who ran point for the administration on the creation of the new secretariat, has identified a goal to "meet or hopefully close the gap on the 200,000 housing units that we are short in Massachusetts."

Augustus pointed Thursday to state laws approved during Gov. Charlie Baker's administration that lower the threshold for approval of local zoning changes and require housing density near MBTA stations.

"Certainly working on the MBTA communities and supporting them as they make the zoning changes that are going to be necessary to get more housing, more density of housing, in more communities," he said. "Helping them through that process, giving them the technical assistance and then working with them and the development community to put together those partnerships and those collaborations that turn the zoning changes into actual housing units -- that really is the work that we have in front of us."

Driscoll said Thursday that in addition to looking at public land and working with local officials, the creation of Augustus' new job will "expedite" housing creation because "every single day, there are going to be folks waking up thinking about, how are we driving the agenda? How are we making more units?"

Earlier this year, Healey secured $34 million in a supplemental budget for the Underutilized Properties program, which is used to redevelop abandoned or underutilized properties.

In her fiscal 2024 budget, Healey aimed to create 750 new housing vouchers in the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program, and implement changes to the program to provide more flexibility to voucher holders.

Her budget would reduce voucher-holders' share of the rent from 40 percent to 30 percent, and would help these renters pay initial security deposits, which are often a barrier to households leasing with MRVP vouchers. Vouchers are often underutilized, so Healey also proposed integrating the MRVP application into the Common Housing Application for Massachusetts Programs, seeking to make the program more accessible.

Healey's budget also proposed supplementing existing federal dollars with first-time operating funding to help young adults secure housing, such as through payments for first and last month's rent and security deposits. She recommended a $2 million pilot program to provide rental assistance to those who were previously incarcerated in coordination with the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.

The governor's budget also included a 48 percent increase over the fiscal 2023 budget to maintain homeless and refugee shelters, funding 4,755 shelter units for emergency family assistance with $324 million.

Augustus said Thursday that expanding the state's emergency shelter system is also high on his priority list. The shelter system is projected to serve 338 new families every month in fiscal 2024, according to Healey's budget.

"Those folks who are in the shelter system, those folks who may be in jeopardy of coming into the shelter system, they can't wait," he said.