Mayors Cite Need For More Housing
Full article appeared in this mornings Salem News.
PEABODY — More housing.
Those two words pretty much sum up the message delivered by North Shore municipal leaders Thursday morning at the annual North Shore Chamber of Commerce State of the Region Breakfast.
The mayors of Salem, Beverly, Peabody, Gloucester, Newburyport and Lynn, and the town manager of Danvers, all stated the need for more housing in their remarks to an audience of more than 200 at the Boston Marriott Peabody.
Danvers Town Manager Steve Bartha, in fact, issued a “call to arms,” asking the business leaders to support local officials in their quest to allow for more housing in their communities, including by following new state housing requirements.
“My call to arms to people in this room is to engage in those local processes so that the mayors and managers who are getting yelled at for complying with state law have some reasonable support,” said Bartha, who will be leaving Danvers to become the town manager in Lexington.
A couple of the mayors noted how they often face opposition to new housing in their communities, despite what they said is a dire need. Newburyport Mayor Sean Reardon described a “pretty contentious” housing forum in his city, while Gloucester Mayor Greg Varga joked that he was happy to have missed a meeting on the MBTA Communities Act in his city Wednesday night.
“Luckily I was at a School Committee meeting,” he said.
Even with all of the new apartment buildings going up in various communities, Bartha noted that those efforts have only chipped away at about 3% of the housing shortage in eastern Massachusetts.
“It’s a sobering statistic,” he said.
Despite recent construction in Salem, including a 250-unit project on Canal Street that broke ground last month, Mayor Dominick Pangallo said Salem would rank 49th in housing production if it were a state.
“In Salem, we’re having a tough conversation about whether we’ll be able to add just 20 beds to our homeless shelter,” he said. “Projects that rely on new units, whether they’re affordable or market rate, face very stiff opposition.”
The mayors said the lack of housing is causing people, especially younger people, to leave the state, causing a shortage of workers for businesses.
“Housing, without question, is the central challenge facing all of our communities right now,” Pangallo said.
Beverly Mayor Mike Cahill, like most of the other mayors, tied the need for more housing to equally necessary improvements in transportation. Cahill called the state’s train system “horrible,” but noted that the state has taken initial steps to electrify the commuter rail, which he said would lead to faster and more frequent trips.
“It’s projected that Beverly Depot, which has about a 37-minute ride into North Station, would be down to 22 minutes with electrification,” he said.
Peabody Mayor Ted Bettencourt highlighted a major project in his city that is now underway, the reconstruction of the Central Street corridor.
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of that connection to our downtown,” he said.
In Lynn, Mayor Jared Nicholson said a proposal for a $450 million residential complex with 815 new units along the waterfront represents “the largest private investment in the history of the city of Lynn.
“Housing is the top issue of the region, and the main way we’re going to solve it in the long run is supply and building units that our residents and our employers need,” he said.