The former city manager of Worcester starts as the state’s brand new secretary of housing and livable communities Thursday, and advocates are pitching everything from universal housing to zoning reforms as early priorities.
Gov. Maura Healey tapped Ed Augustus, a former state senator and city administrator, to work as the head of a cabinet-level secretariat dedicated to housing, building homes, and lowering associated costs. The administration hailed the position as a one solution to the housing crisis plaguing Massachusetts.
Augustus should focus on setting metrics for housing production that include affordable and “deeply affordable” units, file a housing bond bill, and create an Office of Fair Housing within the secretariat, said Rachel Heller, CEO of Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association.
“Massachusetts has the fifth largest racial homeownership gap in the nation. And this needs to be a focus of the administration as well [as] the focus of Secretary Augustus’ work,” Heller said. “And in addition to homeownership, we also have racial wealth disparities, and so ensuring there are pathways for economic mobility and for people who are renting.”
Healey pitched the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities as the go-to source for struggling homeowners and renters in the state. The administration said the high-level official dedicated to finding answers to the high cost of housing will work with people from across the state.
Rep. Mike Connolly, a Cambridge Democrat who has focused much of his legislative work on housing, said Augustus should be a key player in creating a “universal housing” program in Massachusetts, or the idea that everyone in the state is guaranteed a place to live.
“I think that could look similar to what it looked like when Massachusetts decided we were going to pursue that goal of having universal health insurance coverage,” Connolly told the Herald on Wednesday.
When Healey announced Augustus as the new secretary, she pointed to his work distributing or committing tens of millions to develop or preserve more than 2,000 affordable housing units in Worcester.
In a statement to the Herald, Augustus said he is “honored” to assume the role and looks forward to building a “comprehensive housing and stabilization strategy while centering fairness and equity with every opportunity.”
“My immediate priorities include getting to know our hardworking staff to learn from them and how we can best support them, evaluating options for accommodating demand on our Emergency Assistance shelter system, and connecting with all stakeholders, including local officials, to strategize on how we can get everyone on board with ramping up production,” Augustus said.
Working with cities and towns is exactly what Symone Crawford, head of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, thinks Augustus needs to focus on, especially as it relates to zoning reforms and requirements around multi-family housing in communities served by the MBTA.
“I know [Augustus] has his work cut out for him but he has to make sure that each and every decision maker in the state as it relates to this homeownership crisis is accountable for what they need to do,” Crawford said.
With the new secretariat, the Healey administration spliced the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development into two. Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao will oversee the other half of the original office.
The Department of Housing and Community Development, one of the main state touchpoints for those unaccompanied adults experiencing homelessness, will fall under Augustus, the Healey administration said.
Keeping the issue of homelessness tied to housing and Augustus’s new secretariat is key, said Joe Finn, president of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance.
Among the many issues the new office needs to tackle is finding a way to “expedite the creation of various housing models” to meet the needs of homeless people and their differing circumstances, Finn said.
“We need some level of supportive housing that has to be developed. But we can’t do that by doing three or four, five projects a year, right, we have to come up with a plan around how to convert some resources in the direction of doing that type of supportive housing,” he told the Herald.
