In this State, 600,000 households spend over 30 percent of their income on rents and mortgages. A quarter of a million spend more than half their income on housing. Twice as many families are living doubled-up as twenty years ago. Nearly half of Framingham's tenants spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

Today we differ from the rest of the U.S. only in degree. One-seventh of American households now pay at least half their income to keep a roof over their heads.

Academic economists see housing affordability as a question of supply and demand for abstract housing units. The U.S. political duopoly seeks the answer in real estate development. The diffrrence is that Democrats like to give the developers our tax money, Republicans like to hand them our labor, zoning, and environmental laws. On good days, they get together and do a little of both.

But for Greens, the housing crisis is even more a crisis of our just relationship with non-human nature and with one another in human communities. We live on the land, and the land is not a commodity. We live in homes, and homes are not abstract units but places in communities.

Real estate development effects not only forests and wetlands, but also farmland. By the late 1980s, new construction was eating up 600 acres a week of Massachusetts farm land. In 30 years, we have lost 3000 farms—that’s 400,000 acres of agricultural land. The impact of current housing policies is devastating working-class communities and the non-human world.

The Commonwealth has put laws on the books to protect wetlands, forests and farms. But enforcement has been spotty. It is local residents who must fight the development interests.

Massachusetts has a unique law to encourage the construction of affordable housing in cities and towns throughout the state: Chapter 40B. Passed in 1969, at the high tide of the civil rights and community organizing movements., it works essentially by allowing developers to set aside local zoning laws in places that have not met a state-mandated target for subsidized housing units.

Chapter 40B is commonly given credit for the production of 30,000 units of housing over three decades. Put under the state formula, though all units in 40B projects are designated affordable, only 25 percent need actually be sold or rented below at market prices.

In practice, developers have often used the threat of larger 40B developments to pressure towns into accepting developments which have no affordable component at all. The towns give in and get projects that may be 100 percent luxury, but smaller than the 40B developments would have been.

The struggle over 40B has become furious. Today the law is being used much more than before because of the high demand for housing in all income brackets.

A current example is the Guttierez project on the Melrose-Stoneham line. Residents see this development as a big threat to the ecology of the Middlesex Fells and the Mystic River watershed.

The Guttierez project would include perhaps a hundred affordable apartments, but far more have already been lost. Most of Melrose’s apartment buildings were converted to condos in the past decade.

In development struggles like these, local residents confront a coalition of liberal housing advocates and conservative real estate interests. Sometimes they are joined by construction trades unions whose sole concern is the jobs the projects can generate.

Perhaps the largest grass-roots affordable housing effort in recent years was mounted by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO). Five years ago, 500 volunteers collected 100,000 signatures and got the Democrat-dominated Legislature to grant $20 million per year to an Affordable Housing Trust Fund. But in the same year they appropriated $12 million for the demolition of 284 units of public housing in Lowell.

GBIO has never taken a position on rent control because it makes all decisions by consensus. By definition, there is never a consensus for strong measures. And rent control, though quick, effective, and ecologically friendly, is a strong measure.

On the other hand, rent control is built into the Green-Rainbow Party platform. Greens have backed rent control throughout the US, including recent campaigns in Cambridge and Boston.

This contrasts sharply with the position of the state’s Democrats, even leading liberals.

Barney Frank has said, “You cannot prevent gentrification, nor should you. What you can do is to offset its consequences.… Set aside some money, slow things down, yes, but not anti gentrification.”

Robert Reich’s strong anti-rent control position gained him the endorsement of the Boston Herald in the 2002 Democrat gubernatorial primary.

Behind the daily grind of meeting the mortgage and rent payments lies a potential for a different kind of crisis. The London-based Economist has been warning for several years of an international bubble in housing prices. Since real estate assets are far more widely held than any other kind, they think the bursting of this bubble will have much broader consequences than any stock market crash.

Real estate and financial operators tend to be a optimistic as used-car dealers. But the Massachusetts Banker and Tradesman is now reporting some pessimism.

Many, if not most middle income people, have come to treat their house as a financial asset, as well as a home.

Massachusetts has suffered a net population loss since 1990, and all observers blame the crushing cost of housing. There is no doubt of the cumulative effect of rent, mortgage and tax subsidies on a largely unregulated housing market. It raises the floor of the cost of housing.

Universities are meeting the crisis by handing out housing subsidies to faculty, students. Some banks and biotech corporations have followed suit. This only skews the market further against people who cannot get such subsidies.

House prices are at record levels in relation to average income, and not only in America. Never before have real house prices been rising so fast, for so long, in so many countries.

Just keep this in mind. When the real estate bubble broke in the late 1980s, seventy billion dollars of real estate equity evaporated overnight—in eastern Massachusetts alone. This time, all observers agree, it will be different. And it just could be much worse.