Mayor’s housing plan is too little too late

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As political stunts go, it was a pretty good one.

Tiffany Ellis, a woman who says she sleeps most nights outside the downtown library, unfolded her sleeping pad outside Mayor Jon Mitchell’s office and laid herself down.

Ellis was one of about a dozen demonstrators from United Interfaith Action, who recently protested that the Mitchell administration has not done enough to address the affordable housing crisis in the city.

They were absolutely right.

Ellis, who says she has been homeless for two years, was not proud. She pleaded with a mayor who was not there.

“Just help us,’ she said. “You see us every day, doing the same thing.”

Ellis may have been referring to the fact that the mayor’s third-floor office at City Hall directly overlooks the front steps of the New Bedford Free Public Library, where some homeless spend much of their days, and all of their nights. And if you take a walk up to the front portico of this grandest building in the city, you will see that some folks also use that space as a bathroom.

Whatever is the solution to street folks taking over the steps of public buildings, it will probably be easier to fix than the problem of housing costs that have spiraled out of control in New Bedford these last few years.

Located 57 miles south of Boston, up until recently New Bedford had been lucky to escape the hyper-escalation of housing prices that has plagued both Boston and Providence for decades.

Not any more.

The quasi-government agency New Bedford Economic Development Council reports there was a 27% increase in rental prices in the city just last year. 

There are also an astonishing 6,888 people in New Bedford waiting for so-called Section 8 government housing vouchers to help them afford private rentals, and an additional 2,534 people waiting to get into a public housing apartment in the city.

That’s in a population of just 100,000 and probably doesn’t include some of the folks who are couch-surfing with friends and relatives, or who have just given up and left the city for more affordable digs in some other part of the country.

Grace Ferguson’s reporting on these numbers in recent New Bedford Light coverage makes it clear that the problem is out of control.

What was different about this latest housing protest is that the city’s progressive establishment seems to have given up on Mayor Mitchell.

The protesters from UIA, a well-respected and mainstream group concerned with issues of income inequality and racism, didn’t wait around after Mitchell didn’t attend a community meeting they held on Monday, June 24. The mayor had a good excuse for not attending as there was a School Committee subcommittee meeting taking place. The mayor chairs the School Committee in New Bedford. 

Even so, the UIA group went up to his office the following Thursday seeking to meet him, but this time Mitchell was out of town entirely — in Baltimore at a national mayor’s meeting.

The protesters, for their part, seem to have grown frustrated with the housing solutions put forward by Mitchell, pointing out that they don’t come close to addressing the needs of thousands of city residents. 

The mayor’s staff dutifully took some 70 letters from individual people collected by UIA that outlined people’s personal struggles finding affordable housing in New Bedford. An unnamed mayoral staff member says Mitchell then invited UIA to schedule a future meeting with him. He has met with the group in the past. An official with UIA responded that she is unaware of any such invitation to the mayor’s office, and the mayor did not send a representative to the community meeting, despite being invited to do so by UIA.

Jon Darling, Mitchell’s spokesman, didn’t directly answer my question asking why the mayor did not send someone to the community housing meeting. 

He said the city has “extensively” engaged with UIA this year and that the directors of both Housing and Community Development and Planning have met with them. In the case of the housing director, twice.

Well, that’s certainly generous of the mayor’s office on an issue that is arguably the most pressing one in the city.

Whatever the reasons for the breakdown in communications, the demonstrators were in no mood for more talk of long-term solutions to the problem from Mitchell. I suppose that’s because when you don’t have housing that you can afford, waiting for a solution, or for more meetings, doesn’t seem all that meaningful.

The mayor, in fact, has made somewhat of an effort to address the growing housing problem in the city. A year ago he unveiled the Building New Bedford plan in a highly-produced, marketing-type document, which looked better as a Power Point than it was effective. 

The 33-page, 22-point document has sought to attack the problem of spiraling New Bedford housing costs with a variety of strategies. The biggest effort, however, is aimed at encouraging the private sector to build more housing in the city. That may be a reasonable long-term approach, but like so much in early 21st century unregulated capitalism, it doesn’t address needs very quickly. Never mind the ever escalating inequity between those comfortably housed and those who are not. 

The plan simply doesn’t do enough for the people who have been caught up in what has become a New Bedford housing catastrophe right now.

In the opinion of Councilor-at-large Shane Burgo, who has made the affordable housing shortage a central focus of his leadership, the Building New Bedford plan is too slow.

“We haven’t been moving as quickly as we should be,” said Burgo, who chairs the council’s 3-year-old housing committee. It’s worth noting that the councilor’s proposal to put a rent stabilization plan before the voters was successfully vetoed by Mitchell last year.

Central to the mayor’s housing plan is an effort to spur more development by coordinating everything through a more active Office of Housing and Community Development.

With a little bit of luck, it has had some early success.

There are presently some 700-plus new housing units in various stages of development in New Bedford. That’s compared to only 275 new units that were built in the city between 2011 and 2021. Mitchell was mayor for nine of those years, although the problem didn’t really get to crisis levels until a few years ago.

The problem, as the NBEDC points out, is that approximately 8,700 new homes will be needed by the end of the decade to address the shortage of affordable units in New Bedford. Even if the city’s population stayed the same as it is today and housing costs didn’t escalate any further, it would take New Bedford 11 years to address the problem at the current building rate.

So yes, the city had a good year last year — when there was still lots of federal and state pandemic and COVID-relief money around. And there are some innovative state programs that still have funding. But that money is far too little and is soon going to run out. And when it does, one has to wonder whether the federal and state subsidies that the city has used over the last year will continue to be consistently available.

The problem of housing inflation is massive, and some of the solutions are almost a pittance.

The city last week launched a first-time homebuyer program. But even at its most successful, Josh Amaral, who heads up the Office of Housing and Community Development, acknowledges the program will only result in 20 to 30 new units a year. Up until now, the much-touted program has only resulted in helping a couple of new households a year. That’s in all of New Bedford!

Other programs also seem like progress will be incremental, even as the crisis continues. There are currently 403 vacant properties in the city and several months after starting, the city’s new vacant property manager has yet to announce any of them being moved onto the tax rolls. 

There is also an additional $600,000 in federal pandemic relief money for rental subsidies but, again, there are thousands of residents in need. That amount of money will only help a small portion of those. 

Clearly, more needs to be done. And quickly.

UIA wants the city to pass a zoning policy that would require 10% of all units in new housing developments to be affordable to people making 30% to 60% of the area’s median income. 

Separately, the city, as part of Building New Bedford, has been working on a new zoning ordinance designed to make it easier to obtain permits to construct multi-family homes. But Councilor Burgo justifiably wants to know what is taking so long. He doubts the mayor is taking the problem seriously enough.

“He issued this plan to shut us up,” Burgo said, at a UIA event the week of protest. The second-term councilor called out the mayor in a way that was much in step with the feelings of the protesters. It’s clear that Burgo, far and away the most progressive voice on the City Council, has had enough of Mitchell’s approach to housing. For years, officials around town have said the mayor thinks the city needs more high-end housing and that will eventually free-up the lower-end units. I understand what Mitchell is trying to do with that, in terms of diversifying the city’s population, but we are in a crisis right now for the people who presently live here.

Burgo and the protesters are right that more needs to be done.

If the housing crisis continues at its current clip, New Bedford may indeed have to reconsider whether some form of rent stabilization, with protections for small landlords, makes sense.

The UIA group is also asking for New Bedford to adopt a local option for a tax on high-end real estate, such as million dollar sales. That money would be used to subsidize affordable housing. State Rep. Tony Cabral, however,  is right when he points out that a better plan might be for the Legislature to pass a statewide tax on high-end properties. There are few, if any, million dollar properties in the city.

The Massachusetts Legislature as usual seems to have no idea how to address the problem. State Sen. Mark Montigny seems to be mostly invisible when it comes to the housing crisis in New Bedford. State Rep. Chris Hendricks, who represents many of the lowest-income neighborhoods of the city, says more needs to be done, but he doesn’t see it getting through the Legislature.

The protesters who set up outside Mayor Mitchell’s office may be just the beginning.

As the affordable housing shortage continues, we may see more young people doubling up and tripling up in apartments just to stay above water. This kind of an unmet need is going to have to be addressed sooner rather than later. And not by government-assisted programs that help, at most, a few hundred people a year instead of a few thousand.

Andrea Sheppard Lomba, the executive director of UIA, made it clear the Mitchell administration isn’t nearly there in devising an effective solution to the problem.

“He hasn’t completely ignored it,” Sheppard Lomba said. “But given the level of the prices, there’s a lot more that could be done.”

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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