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“It’s one of the small failures of transparency and good governance in Massachusetts among a litany of others that have not yet added up to cataclysmic problems or dramatic issues,” said Evan Horowitz

“You don’t always get the best work out of a company if it doesn’t have an incentive to perform well,” Horowitz said.

According to a recent report, conducted by the GBRB and cSPA, 70 communities — more than a third of the CPA’s towns and cities — have failed to allocate funding above the 10% threshold to affordable housing.

"I think there was a risk with the [House and Gov. Maura Healey's] packages, that they were just going to make the state a little bit too vulnerable to economic downturns by siphoning away some necessary revenue..."

“A lot of stuff counts as spending it on housing,” including paying staff and putting money into designated housing trust funds, and “even by that very loose definition towns aren’t spending very much.”

The report said CPA investments in housing are "especially limited" in Massachusetts suburbs, while urban areas devote more than half of their CPA spending to housing and rural areas more than 40%.

“The pandemic created some unique and difficult circumstances,” said Evan Horowitz. “But it’s still unbelievable that we got our accounts so fouled up that professional auditors can’t spot billions of dollars in misdirected funds.”

The report said that housing has been overshadowed in CPA due to "a clear and longstanding tension between this commitment to housing and the other facets of the program, like historic preservation and the protection of open space."

“We’re in a housing crisis, and we have this great program that can create a lot of housing units,” said Evan Horowitz, the report’s author. “But we’re not taking full advantage.”