Scott Van Voorhis

Gov. Charlie Baker’s recent push to spur construction of 135,000 new homes over the next eight years certainly sounds great in a market starved of available listings. But to stop NIMBY suburbs from blocking new homes and apartments, sweet talk alone won’t cut it.

The governor’s proposal would provide some modest financial incentives to communities that get serious about housing while allowing them to change a problematic zoning rule that has blocked any number of proposals for new homes over the years.

The problem is that it’s a small carrot/no stick approach when something closer to dynamite is needed to dislodge suburbs from their stubbornly anti-housing-development ways.

In fact, we’ve already been there and done that here in Massachusetts when it comes to using modest financial sweeteners to convince skeptical suburban leaders to do the right thing on housing. It’s called Chapter 40R.

Faced with the same mess of rising prices and stalled development more than a decade ago, then-Gov. Deval Patrick rolled out his own incentive program in 2004 to boost the construction of new apartments near commuter rail stations and other transit hubs.

Communities that created special zoning districts for new apartments and condominiums near train stations under 40R would in turn be eligible for a modest subsidy, typically a million here, another million there.

But there’s not exactly been a stampede by suburbs and small towns across the Boston area to cash in on the new law and gut old zoning laws that effectively blocked the construction of rental housing. In fact, it’s been just a trickle, with 33 communities to date creating new, apartment-friendly zoning districts, or about three a year since 40R went into effect in 2004.

That’s only a few thousand new apartments when hundreds of thousands of new rental units, homes and condos will be needed in Greater Boston in the coming decades.

And most of the communities embracing 40R have been the usual suspects, old industrial towns looking for a reboot and a handful of more progressive suburbs that see new housing as a plus amid sky-high rents and prices.

Participants include Brockton, Boston, Chelsea, Lowell and Fitchburg, as well as Norwood, Natick, Belmont, Sharon and Reading, though the amounts in the suburbs are typically small, a few dozen here, 150 or 160 there.

All told, there’s room in all these new zoning districts for more than 9,000 new apartments and condos, though to date, there has been far from a full build out.

When the demand is for as many as 20,000 new homes and apartments each year – or 435,000 through 2040, according to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council – such numbers just aren’t going to cut it.

Same Old Soft Sell

Fast forward to 2017 and we have a new proposal by a new governor that appears to have repackaged the same old, soft-sell approach.

On the surface, Baker’s new “Housing Choice Initiative” sounds great. Communities would no longer be required to get a two-thirds majority vote when changing zoning rules, a major impediment to new housing and other development. And state government will pay out the equivalent of bonuses to towns, cities and suburbs which jump on the housing bandwagon and meet certain production targets.

But on closer inspection, there’s not much to brag about.

The change from a two-thirds vote to a simple majority wouldn’t be a statewide rule but would be left up to individual communities to decide whether to make that shift. And while there would be a bonus pool, it would total $10 million, an amount that makes the old 40R incentive program seem like a king’s ransom.

Basically, it’s the same old failed game plan dressed up in new language, using very modest incentives in hopes towns and suburbs that bicker over any conceivable development proposal will see the light and dramatically change their ways.

Here’s a newsflash for you – it isn’t going to happen, today, tomorrow, or anytime in the future.

Boston’s suburbs haven’t resisted new housing because they were holding out for a few extra dollars from Beacon Hill. Local selectmen and town councils are playing to the very vocal NIMBY chorus in suburbs from Newton out to Marlborough.

People say they don’t want new housing because they are worried about traffic or more children driving up school costs, even though the old school complaint has by now being pretty much debunked in a number of academic studies.

Scratch the surface and you’ll hear rants that reek of subtle and sometimes not so subtle racism and economic snobbery. If I had a dime for every time I’ve covered a housing dispute where opponents characterized proposals for market-rate apartments as Trojan horses for low-income people from urban neighborhoods on Section 8, I’d have a lot of dimes.

No suburb should be allowed to effectively wall itself off as in independent fief, effectively restricting who moves in to the select few who can afford to shell out $800,000, $900,000, $1 million – or more – to gain entry.

Enough with trying to sweet-talk suburban NIMBYies into making zoning changes.

It’s time to revamp the zoning code for the whole state so that reasonable proposals for badly needed new housing can have a fair shot in every suburb, town and city across Massachusetts, not just for the few that decide they can make a few bucks off the deal.

Decency and fair play – core American values – demand it.