House Speaker Ronald Mariano (D-Quincy) at an April 2021 media briefing. Mariano has stopped efforts to make Gov. Charlie Baker testify before a legislative committee on COVID-19 deaths at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home. Photo by Sam Doran | State House News Service/File

It’s rather rich, the outrage among state lawmakers over Gov. Charlie Baker’s handling of the disaster at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, where 76 veterans tragically succumbed to COVID-19. 

The denizens of Beacon Hill have been eager for the chance to grill Baker over the tragedy. Certainly, his fairly obvious patronage appointment of Bennett Walsh, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel with no health care experience, to run the home raises serious questions. 

Tellingly, though, House Speaker Ron Mariano has put the kibosh on efforts to drag Baker before a committee hearing, saying last week he sees no need “to go over and regurgitate the same facts.”  

After all, life on Beacon Hill is about nothing if not patronage and inside politics. If you live in a glass house, as they say, don’t start throwing stones. 

At least Mariano showed far more sense than he did at a recent at a campaign event in the now-gold-plated South End, where he basically wrecked his endorsement of mayoral candidate and loyal House foot soldier Rep. Jon Santiago, when he joked about how his car had been stolen in the neighborhood decades ago. 

It’s pretty transparent what is going on here. Sure, accountability is important, and the state’s Republican governor shouldn’t be shielded from the fallout from a patronage hire that turned out to be a complete disaster. 

But let’s be honest. With jockeying having started for next year’s gubernatorial race, Democrats from rank-and-file state lawmakers to stars like Attorney General Maura Healey are desperate to find a way to put a dent in Baker’s stubbornly high public approval ratings. 

Unfortunately, it’s the kind of small-bore politics and insider political jockeying that have dominated the Massachusetts political scene for decades now. 

And it has come at the expense of any real effort to tackle one of our state’s most serious challenges, insane home prices and rents that priced out all but upper middle-class home buyers and renters. 

A Breeding Ground for Patronage 

In some ways, party affiliation is irrelevant when it comes to understanding the Bay State’s stagnant political culture and its obsession with insider baseball. 

Democrats have such a lock on power at the state level – with Republican’s holding just a sliver of seats in the legislature – that we are effectively a one-party state pretty much immune to outside challenges. 

It’s a breeding ground for corrupt, out-of-touch political bosses. 

Three of the last four speakers in the last few decades have been convicted or pled guilty to felonies, with the one outlier, Robert DeLeo, named by federal prosecutors in 2014 as an unindicted co-conspirator in massive patronage scheme centered on the state probation department. 

A federal appeals court struck down the conviction of the former state probation chief, and cleared DeLeo of any criminal wrongdoing, but it did not dispute the existence of a “patronage hiring system” at the department that saw hires with little if any experience running amok. 

DeLeo’s top deputy for years, Mariano is the product of the same political culture, with his ascension to speaker marked by typical, behind-the-scenes maneuverings. 

Cynical, Hypocritical Democrats 

But in another way, party affiliation does mean a lot, or at least it should when it comes to dealing with our state’s biggest challenges. 

The state’s delegation in Washington features progressive luminaries like Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey and Ayanna Pressley who champion efforts to help ordinary people and fix the nation’s thorniest problems. 

But the Massachusetts Democratic Party is a much different animal. 

Its leaders’ and luminaries’ deep cynicism was on full display at a series of dispiriting January state party committee meetings described in The New Republic by freelance journalist Daniel Boguslaw.   

“[W]izened Harvard alumni and outer-ring suburbanites,” he wrote, were caught “hurling insults at the young, progressive, and racially diverse members bold enough to question the most basic tenets of their long-held rule.” 

This obsession with power in place of actually fixing our state’s problems has meant the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature to has failed to do much of anything significant to address the state’s housing crisis despite dismal levels of access to affordable shelter for people across the commonwealth. 

Don’t Hold Your Breath 

There is widespread agreement across the political spectrum that local zoning barriers are the biggest hindrance to the construction of affordable housing, with suburbs and towns across Massachusetts having deliberately erected barriers to keep out rental housing and affordably-priced, family-friendly condominiums. 

Yet inexplicably, legislative leaders have left it to Baker, the state’s Republican governor, to take the lead on trying to roll back these old and arguably racist barriers, while also delaying his modest and narrowly tailored Housing Choice zoning reform bill for years. 

Baker’s new law – it lowers from a two-thirds to a simple majority the votes need on a local level to change zoning laws in order to make way for new housing – is a step in the right direction. 

Scott Van Voorhis

But it is also a Republican solution, effectively relying on individual cities and towns to take advantage of this tweak in the rules to push forward with new housing, when most remain adamantly opposed. 

What’s missing here is a progressive, aggressive and Democratic approach to tearing down these local barriers to new housing. That would involve a much more sweeping, statewide approach that limit the ability of local officials to block more modestly-sized and -priced housing, from subsidized rentals to lower-cost townhomes and condos with two or three bedrooms. 

Will our legislative leaders step up to the tasks? As long as leading Massachusetts Democrats remained focused on unseating Baker at the expense of tacking our state’s housing crisis, not to mention a host of other major issues, probably not. 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.   

Blame Cronyism, Not Just Zoning for Our Housing Woes

by Scott Van Voorhis time to read: 4 min
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