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Democratic 2022 Governor

MAURA HEALEY

Maura has deep roots in Massachusetts. Her parents both grew up in Newburyport. Her maternal grandparents met in Gloucester, where her grandfather worked on the fishing docks and her grandmother, whose ancestors settled on the Parker River in Newbury in 1636, went to nursing school. Her paternal grandparents came from Ireland and worked as a domestic worker and a janitor.
Maura was born at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1971 while her father served as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, and later as a civil engineer in the Environmental Protection Agency. Her maternal grandmother was determined that her grandchild be born on Massachusetts soil. She traveled through a snowstorm down Route 1, flew to Maryland, snuck into the delivery room wearing her nursing outfit, and placed a bag of soil from a family woodlot in Byfield below the delivery bed so that Maura could be “born” over Massachusetts. What mothers and grandmothers will do!

Housing

Maura’s background in housing has been focused on making it easier for people to afford to stay in their homes.

Maura’s background in housing has been focused on making it easier for people to afford to stay in their homes. When she was chief of the Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division, she led the office’s efforts to hold banks accountable after the mortgage crisis. She’s worked for years to stop illegal evictions, help tenants navigate the eviction process, and hold landlords accountable. She’s sued realtors for discrimination, and brokered a settlement with the Boston Housing Authority over health concerns in its facilities.  In Lynn, she’s been working to help a family after their landlord forced them to live in filth, harassed them, and then called ICE on them. As Massachusetts approached an eviction crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Maura instructed her team to step up their efforts to help tenants navigate the state’s process to access rental assistance. The office purchased tables for community centers to provide people with a local place where they could fill out the application and launched an internal task force to handle evictions in multiple languages.

One of the top issues Maura hears from residents and business owners across the state is housing affordability as they struggle to keep up with rising rents and mortgages. As Governor, Maura proposes:

  • Expanding and preserving housing supply through increasing state resources, addressing local zoning barriers, and protecting 40B.
  • Increasing first-time homeownership and helping close the racial wealth gap through expansion of down payment assistance and housing counseling.
  • Combating homelessness through expansion of permanent, supportive housing. 
  • Increasing economic mobility of low income residents in public and assisted housing through workforce development and other services.
  • Incentivizing the creation of units around MBTA stations.
  • Making our rental assistance process more transparent and accessible to people without computers or who don’t speak English.
  • Empowering communities to enact local rent stabilization policies.

Additionally, Maura believes expanding rail service will help ease the housing crunch in Boston and bring economic development to other areas of the state. Maura also knows that climate plays a significant role in our housing crisis. We can’t let our communities become vulnerable to extreme weather, nor trapped in a situation where they can’t afford mounting utility bills, like what we’re seeing right now. State funds need to go toward weatherizing and preparing existing housing for solar, targeted at low-income communities.