Massachusetts Is Putting Starter Homes on the Ballot

The Strong Towns Podcast

Chuck Maron interviews Andrew Mikula regarding the 'Yes on Massachusetts Question 7' initiative, a ballot measure aimed at reforming housing

Key takeaways

• Question 7 specifically targets lots of 5,000 square feet with at least 50 feet of street frontage in areas with public infrastructure.
• The initiative utilizes a 'sandbox' framework, setting state-level baseline standards while allowing cities to regulate setbacks and design.

Main topics

• Massachusetts Question 7
• Housing Affordability

Notable quotes

The idea of we don't like the decisions that local people are making, so we're going to substitute state decisions.

Conclusion

The episode illustrates a strategic, incremental approach to housing r

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) Hey everybody, this is Chuck Maron. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. Boy, it was a few weeks back now I wrote an article contrasting an approach to getting housing built in Massachusetts, which I called a simple kind of bottom-up. I'm not even sure if I use the word participatory or not, but an approach that to me seemed very common sense and empowering. And I contrasted that with an approach out of California that had a lot of the opposite instincts. It was a lot leaning into state substitution is what I've started to call it. The idea of we don't like the decisions that local people are making, so we're going to substitute state decisions. After I wrote that article, I heard from one of the people involved in the what is called Yes on Massachusetts Question 7 effort out of Massachusetts, Andrew Mikula. And I hope, Andrew, I said your last name right. Mikula. It's Speaker 3 (1:06) Mikula. Speaker 1 (1:07) Mikula. I'm sorry, Chuck. Okay. No worries. So if you were from Minnesota, I probably would have figured that out. But Mikula is not a name I've run into before. Andrew Mikula. Is that because you're a cool dude? Or is there some other ancestral reason why? Your family must have been a bunch of cool people. Speaker 3 (1:26) I think the ancestral reason is it's Czech. Oh, it's Czech. All right. I've heard. I've heard it's kind of the Central European version of Nichols, the last name Nichols. Speaker 1 (1:37) Okay. Well, Andrew, who you've just heard, got a hold of me and said, hey, thanks for writing that. And I'm like, dude, I want to talk to you. Let's have a chat on the podcast. So we are just actually having a conversation here. Andrew doesn't have a book he's promoting. I don't have a long set of questions. We're just going to discover what's going on and talk a little bit. Andrew, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast. Speaker 3 (2:03) Thanks so much for having me, Chuck. Speaker 1 (2:05) It's really nice to chat with you. Where are we talking from today? I'm in Brainerd, Minnesota. Where are you at? I'm in my Speaker 3 (2:12) office in downtown Boston. Speaker 1 (2:14) Okay. Tell us what you do. You're in your office. What kind of work do you do? Speaker 3 (2:19) Right. My day job, I work for a think tank, a public policy research organization. We do a broad array of work from original database creation to policy research, publishing white papers and policy briefs to downstream, talking to lawmakers, talking to the media to communicate ideas about policy reform and evaluations of existing policies on the table. That is separate from the work I'm doing. That's Speaker 1 (2:50) your Speaker 3 (2:50) day job. Yeah. So, okay. Speaker 1 (2:54) So you're doing volunteer work for The yes on Massachusetts question seven. Is that part of a larger group? Like what's the what's the volunteer entity you're working with? Speaker 3 (3:06) Right. So the legalized charter homes ballot committee is the official name of the group. Yes on seven is shorthand because it's going to be question seven and we want people to know that. But before July, we didn't know that. This has been an effort I've spearheaded going back to. the previous summer, July 2025. And I'm very grateful to have a lot more help than I did back then. I went to some housing advocates I knew. I talked to some attorneys I knew about how to put together a petition language that reforms housing at a state level. And for a long time, several months, The main people working on this on a day-to-day basis were myself and someone from a different, relatively aligned think tank in Basin Boston as well. Speaker 1 (4:01) Okay. I would really like people to know how we got to this point, but I feel like it might be good, at least for a hook for people to hang on with us, because I feel like this is a very unique ballot question and the way you framed it is very unique. Talk about first, what is Massachusetts question seven? And what makes it maybe in your estimation different than other questions that would normally be on the ballot in Massachusetts? Speaker 3 (4:33) Yeah. So we're trying to make it legal to build single family homes on lots as small as 5,000 square feet and as narrow as 50 feet at the street. So that's street frontage in planners parlance. in areas with public sewer and water service statewide. So in some sense, it's a, you know, preemptive zoning law at the state level. But we're unlike pretty much every other, you know, state level zoning initiative I've heard of, we're asking for the explicit permission of voters statewide to do it. And importantly, we are targeting this initiative so that The result is not going to be, you know, 400 unit apartment buildings, but rather small scale single family subdivisions, vast majority of which we expect to be owner occupied, and many of which we expect to be initiated, the developments themselves to be initiated by people who are already owner occupants on larger tracts of land. Speaker 1 (5:39) We come from two vastly different cultures, Massachusetts and Minnesota. Actually, I feel like they're the same state in many ways. I've always said if I had to move out of Minnesota, I would get Massachusetts better than just about any other state. So this is sarcasm for all of you non-whatever Yankees that we are. One of the things that was astounding is how big this bill was. What is it, 300 pages you put together? Andrew, describe. the length of the ballot initiative, it's literally like 300 words or something. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's a good point. Speaker 3 (6:14) So yeah, 300 might be about it. I mean, the entire official ballot language on the AG's website, the messages attorney general and the first 10 signers. So individual lines to sign it fits on one page. Speaker 1 (6:30) Yeah. I think the thing that jumped out at me. And again, I'll go back to this, you know, we have preemption language. You've got state substitution, which is basically the state is going to substitute judgment for local judgment versus what I've categorized in other places as getting people unstuck. It feels to me like what you did is took the most inarguably like smallest step. Like, hey, can we all agree? that if you've got a 5,000 square foot lot, which is a decent sized lot, that's 50 feet wide and you've already paid for sewer to that site, which is like kind of like if you're going to go bigger than 50 feet with a sewered lot, you really can't afford to do it as a government. Like, can we all agree that you should be able to have a home here? I almost feel like you're saying like, Hey, If everything's normal, like, why not? Am I over-interpreting what you're trying to do? Speaker 3 (7:32) That's totally fair. I mean, 5,000 square feet is a very common lot size in most of suburban America. The problem is Massachusetts was built out, a lot of the inner suburbs at least, were built out between the 20s and 50s when you not only had much lower land costs than you do now. But there were often places that weren't really fully sewered, and so they needed to make room for leach fields. But since then, it's changed a lot. And as places have developed, I mean, we have serving most of greater Boston, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which sends all of our wastewater out to Deer Island and Boston Harbor. And so it really is a place where there's been a lot of existing infrastructure. Speaker 3 (8:22) making good on that investment requires a change to the status quo in my mind. Because, I mean, not to get too personal, but I grew up on three quarters of an acre, 12 miles from downtown Boston, fully sewered, full water pipe service, all centralized. And it would be illegal to subdivide that house, my parents' house. Speaker 1 (8:49) Yeah. Which is crazy, really. I mean, I'll speak as an engineer. If you've got 50 feet of pipe in front of your house, you've got a very expensive lot. I mean, that's an expensive lot to develop. As soon as you put water, sewer, roadway, sidewalk in front of a house at 50 feet wide, you're talking about a rather exclusive kind of subdivision. You said three-quarter of acre. That is going to be about 30,000 square foot lot. Under your provision, you could actually fit a number of additional... Of course, the width is going to get you. I don't know how wide that lot was. But here in Minnesota, if you're on lakeshore property, which is generally our densest... non-urban form of development. It's very common to have 100-foot wide, 40,000-square-foot lots. These are big, big lots designed to have their own on-site sewer system and their own that. When you go and provide sewer to those places, it's financially almost impossible to do that without massive ongoing state subsidy at that level of density. I looked at your provisions and thought, from a Just from a sewer standpoint, because you really have three provisions. It's the 5,000 square foot, it's a 50 foot width, and it is sewer. As a municipality, I don't know how you would not want every lot that size developed if you're already providing sewer to it. I don't know financially how you could otherwise do it. Speaker 3 (10:22) Right. It's a financial issue on the municipal side, but it's also an affordability issue on the buyer side. I mean, we have decades of academic literature and lived experience showing that when you require large lot sizes in these places where land is already pretty expensive, you're just going to get million dollar homes, right? Because land directly costs money. And you're also placing an essential cap on the number of homes you can build in a given area. And buyer competition just pushes up the prices on the relatively few remaining homes. So undoing that is, or at least, you know, at a baseline, allowing it, allowing some development on these parcels is really important. And the way we've written the language and the way that municipal planning law kind of works in Massachusetts, we also expect this to result in a number of what are called A &R or approval not required subdivisions, which essentially means. As long as you have the frontage and the land area and other dimensional requirements to support new development under the zoning code, and it's not resulting in a new road or otherwise tripping up subdivision control laws, you can do this subdivision along the street and along the Zixing Street without going to the planning board for some discretionary approval. So it's going to result in these kind of small-scale new single-family subdivisions in some areas that haven't really seen a traditional single-family subdivision since the Great Recession. Speaker 1 (12:11) There's two directions I want to take this. The first one maybe is to just talk about this as being a