WORCESTER— Former Worcester City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. returned to Central Mass on Tuesday, seizing the opportunity to tour a city development and visit the Shrewsbury Housing Authority. In his capacity as the secretary of the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities—a position he has held since May 2023—. Tuesday’s visit marked the 23rd housing authority Augustus has toured since he took office.
He said he plans to visit them all “to see [them] firsthand, talk to tenants, talk to folks who run the facilities, the commissioners, and really just try to educate myself on some of the challenges they face.”
The state is in the midst of a housing crisis, and while the secretary is looking at how the state can build more units, he said he’s also focused on how the state preserves the units it has, especially when it comes to public housing.
“We’ve got 43,000 state owned public housing units, which is by far more than any other state than the country, but they’ve not been invested in as we should have as a state, so there’s a lot of catch up,” Augustus told the Worcester Guardian Tuesday.
Last month, there was a hearing on Gov. Maura Healey’s Affordable Homes Act in the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing.
Maura Healey filed the housing bond bill, a package that includes $4.1 billion in capital funding authorizations and 28 substantive policy changes, in October.
Augustus has spent his time in office touting the act and was present at the hearing which he said included over 11 hours of testimony. While some testifying wanted to change aspects of the act, he said it was “by and large very supportive.”
“I think the consensus is that the bill has a lot of the ingredients that (at) this moment in Massachusetts’s housing crisis we need in order to move the needle,” Augustus said.
Augustus expects the committee will mark up the bill, make some amendments and then send it to the Joint Committee on Bonding, Capital Expenditures, and State Assets, he said, “because a big chunk of it is borrowing so they have to authorize that part of the bill.”
“Hopefully before the legislature goes out of formal session – the end of July – we’ll see the Affordable Homes Act passed and signed into law by the governor,” he said.
Last month, Healey announced budget cuts on the state’s operating budget to account for an expected $1 billion in revenue shortfall. When asked if this would affect the amount of money in the housing bond package, Augustus said he didn’t think so because the funding is coming from capital borrowing versus the operating budget and the $4.1 billion is being spent over five years.
The Healey administration also estimates the policy proposals in the act would create between 8,000 and 10,000 units of affordable housing that would not cost the state a cent, according to Augustus.
If the act passes as is, Worcester County could see 4,150 jobs with $414 million value added over the next five years, according to a report conducted by the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute.
Worcester has already enacted some of the policies that the act proposes, including allowing residents to build accessory dwelling units by right within certain parameters and adopting inclusionary zoning.
Augustus doesn’t think some of Worcester’s policies go far enough. Worcester’s accessory dwelling unit ordinance requires owners to live in the property, which Augustus said can be a barrier to the creation of units.
“We think the best way to do it is to not have any restrictions about owner occupancy or some places put on restrictions relative to family members,” Augustus said.
As for inclusionary zoning, the housing act proposes a policy that would allow municipalities to pass inclusionary zoning ordinances and bylaws by a simple majority rather than a 2/3rds majority.
In April 2023, the Worcester City Council passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance that requires developments with 12 or more units to reserve 15% of their habitable square footage for renters/buyers who earn 80% of the area median income (AMI) for the city or 10% for those who earn 60% AMI. Augustus said he proposed inclusionary zoning before he left the city manager’s office and it was carried through by his successor Eric Batista.
For inclusionary zoning ordinances to be successful, Augustus said it has to be calibrated in such a way that it doesn’t end up costing a municipality overall units.
“There’s a percentage at which it just no longer is economically feasible to just require those units because the cost of subsidizing those units is just not going to be able to be handled by the rents…and so you want that sweet spot where you’re getting affordable housing units that you otherwise wouldn’t get but not overdoing it in a way that prevents projects from moving forward in the first place,” Augustus said.
When asked if Worcester found that sweet spot, Augustus said, “We’ll have to see how the market plays out, every market is different, I think we’ve seen a number of communities in that 10% range that have been successful.”
Worcester is also facing a shelter bed shortage. The state provided the city with $1 million to help address that shortage with the creation of an emergency winter shelter in the former RMV shelter on Main Street. The best way to keep people off the streets is with permanent supportive housing using a housing first model, according to Augustus.
Augustus said the Affordable Housing Act has a new pot of money for supportive housing where the effort will be to make sure services are tied to a unit rather than an individual.
“We want to see the unit have the services so when that person leaves to go someplace else, that unit with the supportive services is ready for the next person who needs it, so that we’re not kind of recreating the wheel every single time,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Worcester City Council voted down an ordinance to let people set up encampments in public spaces in the city.
When asked if this was a feasible solution, Augustus said he didn’t want to weigh in on something he doesn’t have jurisdiction over, but thinks it’s a challenge because public spaces need to be shared by the community and you want to make sure the spaces can be used for what they were intended for.
“To me, the goal shouldn’t be to leave people unhoused, the goal should be to get people housed,” Augustus said. “Shelter should be ideally short and temporary, just as a kind of a place to stabilize triage people and then get them to the kind of housing that’s appropriate to them, and that’s what we’re all trying to work toward.”
In addition to the discussion of shelter space in the city, recent business closures have turned people’s attention to the city’s Canal District with accusations that Polar Park, a project Augustus spearheaded, didn’t fulfill the economic boon that was promised.
Augustus said you hate to see any business not be successful and that there’s not an easy answer why one business fails and a business next door succeeds.
“What I would say is I drive by Polar Park and I see housing being built on every side of it,” Augustus said. “That was all abandoned, contaminated land for 30 years. I still think it was a net positive for the city of Worcester. It brings 1000s and 1000s of people to the city, who maybe their impression, hadn’t been to Worcester for years, their impression of Worcester was one thing and they get here and then they discover, hey this is a place that’s got a lot of great stuff going on and that’s good buzz.”
Kiernan Dunlop is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past five years reporting in Worcester, New Bedford, and Antigua and Barbuda. Her work has been published in Bloomberg, USA Today, Canary Media, MassLive, and the New Bedford Standard Times, among other outlets. She can be contacted at kdunlop@theworcesterguardian.org
