Civic, political, business and community leaders across Massachusetts are in mourning this week as we remember Greg Bialecki, the former Secretary of Housing and Economic Development who passed away suddenly on November 18, 2024. He was 64.
Greg served in Governor Deval Patrick’s administration, rising quickly from permit ombudsman to Secretary of Housing and Economic Development from 2009 to 2015. He remained active in civic life over the past decade while working at Redgate real estate development company. We both worked extensively with Greg during his years in state government and continued to value his feedback on policy and development issues, particularly in regard to tackling our state’s housing crisis.
Greg’s time in office coincided with Joe’s tenure as executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations and André’s time as executive director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance. We had countless conversations, meetings, collaborations and yes, some disagreements. Without fail, he remained accessible and perpetuated a real dialogue animated by intellectual curiosity and creativity. Conversations were filled with questions – so many questions! He would examine an issue from every angle, and he forced advocates like us to sharpen our own thinking and proposals. This approach led to many accomplishments, including:
- The MassWorks infrastructure program, which consolidated numerous smaller programs into the state’s most important economic development fund to this day, now having invested well over $1 billion in communities across the state. His insightful portfolio approach and performance targets steered funding to impactful projects in sensible locations.
- Regional planning and smart growth, including the award-winning South Coast Rail corridor plan. He led the Patrick administration to adopt a multifamily housing production goal and ensure that state investments across agencies aligned with priority development areas and priority preservation areas.
- The Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation which he helped to create and built into the locus of state small business assistance. MGCC later led the state’s efforts to help businesses during the COVID pandemic.
- The Transformative Development Initiative that has helped so many Gateway Cities cultivate more vibrant downtowns and strengthen their unique sense of place.
- The Housing Development Incentive Program which uses a shallow state subsidy to create more than 4,000 desperately needed homes in Gateway Cities—and which has proven so effective at bringing new life into our older downtowns that the legislature recently tripled its funding.
- The Community Investment Tax Credit which provides a 50% donation tax credit to qualified community development corporations and fuels their efforts to build affordable housing and expand opportunity. Greg worked quietly and collaboratively to advocate for the program within the Patrick Administration and helped ensure its ultimate enactment. The program has since been extended and expanded twice by subsequent legislatures and governors.
Greg also had the difficult task of guiding the state’s housing and economic development agencies through the Great Recession and foreclosure crisis. He worked with many partners within the government and private sector to create innovative programs to help families keep their homes and to help communities recover from the housing crash.
Finally, Greg was the first and most powerful state official in a generation to prioritize zoning reform, up to that point considered by most to be a thankless, “impossible” issue. He leveraged his platform to communicate to legislators and the public the ways in which local zoning constrained housing production. He convened municipal representatives, the real estate community, planners, and environmental advocates to try to resolve their differences. Although his efforts to forge compromise did not yield immediate results, his persistence elevated the issue and helped pave the way for the Housing Choices Act and the MBTA Communities Act that passed in 2021.
Greg passed away far too soon, but his legacy of service will continue to benefit the people of the Commonwealth for many years to come. May his memory be a blessing.