The citizen participation process including presentations, discussions, public hearings, letters and comments has been long and arduous. The issues are complicated and sometimes feelings run high. In such situations, there can be a feeling that citizens have not been heard. This document, “Guide to Zoning Amendments Related to Multifamily Uses and Mixed-Use“, summarizes many of the issues that have been raised and the changes that have been made in the zoning Articles as a result of the citizen participation in the public review process. Citizens have been heard.
Related articles
It’s New Year’s eve and I’m determined to get my third and final “Arlington 2020” article written and posted before 2021 rolls in. I’ve written these articles to paint a picture of Arlington’s housing stock, and how our housing costs have changed over time. The first article looked at the number of one-, two-, and three-family homes and condominiums in Arlington. The second article looked at how the costs of these homes has varied over time.
In this article, I’m going to look at the per-unit costs for our different housing types. The per-unit cost is just the assessed value, divided by the number of units. For condos and single-family homes, the unit cost is simply the assessed value. For two-family homes, it’s the assessed value divided by two. For a ten-unit apartment building, it’s the assessed value divided by ten. We’ll look at the price ranges within housing types, as well as the general differences between them.
The information here doesn’t include residential units from Arlington’s 76 mixed-use buildings. (My copy of the assessor’s data doesn’t distinguish between residential and commercial units in these buildings; I’ll try to say more about them in 2021.) It also omits units owned by the Arlington Housing Authority.
Condominiums
Condominiums provide the most variety and cost diversity. A condo can be half of a duplex, or part of a much larger multi-family building. The low end of the scale tends to be 500–600 square foot units that were built in the 1960’s; the high end tends to be more spacious new construction.

This graph is a histogram, as are the others in this article. The horizontal axis shows cost per unit, and the vertical axis shows the number of units in each particular cost band.
The per-unit price distribution is
min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$92,600 | $344,450 | $473,100 | $500,086 | $640,850 | $1,241,000 |
Single-family homes
Single family homes are heavily concentrated around the $700,000 mark. There’s very little available for less than a half million dollars.

Per unit rice distribution:
min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$103,700 | $679,900 | $771,900 | $825,172 | $908,750 | $3,232,700 |
The $103,700 single-family home deserves some explanation. The property straddles the border between Arlington and Lexington; it appears that the $103k assessed value reflects the portion that lies in Arlington.
Two-family Homes
Two-family homes are the bread and butter of East Arlington; they’re also common in the blocks off Mass ave near Brattle Square and the heights. Many of these homes are older and non-conforming, and they’re gradually being renovated and turned into condominiums.
As a reminder, these are costs per unit (as opposed to the cost of the entire two-family home).

Per unit price distribution:
Min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$209,050 | $440,550 | $472,000 | $479,175 | $508,588 | $1,140,450 |
Three-family Homes
Unlike Dorchester and Somerville, three-family homes are not a staple of Arlington’s housing stock. But we have a few of them. Most were built between 1906 and 1930.

Per-unit price distribution:
Min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$227,567 | $313,733 | $336,950 | $344,292 | $362,600 | $719,000 |
Small Apartments (4–8 units)
The majority of Arlington’s small apartment buildings were constructed during the first half of the 20th century. The most recent one dates from 1976.

Per-unit price distribution:
Min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$154,950 | $202,950 | $227,775 | $231,619 | $255,775 | $403,875 |
Large Apartments (9+ units)
You’ll see three outliers in the per unit-cost distribution for large apartment buildings. These correspond to the newest apartment complexes in Arlington: The Legacy (2000), Brigham Square (2012), and Arlington 360 (2013).

Per-unit price distribution:
Min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$117,013 | $141,383 | $153,006 | $195,789 | $170,973 | $474,631 |
All combined
Finally, we’ll put it all together in one picture, representing nineteen-thousand and some odd homes in town.

Per-unit price distribution:
Min | 1st quartile | median | mean | 3rd quartile | max |
$92,600 | $417,175 | $555,825 | $587,975 | $759,900 | $3,232,700 |
While there are lower-priced options available, a person coming to Arlington should expect to buy (or rent) a property that costs just shy of half a million dollars (or more).
Here is a spreadsheet with the cost distributions mentioned in this article.
Prepared by: Barbara Thornton with the capable assistance of Alex Bagnall, Pamela Hallett, Patrick Hanlon, Karen Kelleher, Steve Revilak and Jennifer Susse.
As Arlington considers new zoning and other policy decisions to increase the amount of affordable housing in the town, a concern has been raised about the threat of greater costs to the Town’s budget from new people with school age children moving into the town. The concern: additional children in the public schools costs the town more than the additional new property tax revenue the Town collects from the new housing.
This post examines this concern, drawing on data from two recent housing developments, representing 283 units of housing in Arlington, to determine that actually the Town budget gains over 4.5 times the actual cost of paying for the students. According to the most recent 2020 tax bills, the Town expects to collect $1,250,370 in revenue and to spend an additional $269,589 for the new Arlington Public School students living in these developments.
The data suggests that the fear of increased school costs, overwhelming the potential new revenue from new housing construction is not warranted.
For more information, see the full post here.
Dave Weinstock, an Arlington resident interested in affordable housing wondered about the concept of “developer math”. The math involved in planning an affordable housing projects is a problem that needs to get solved in order to have anything built here in Arlington, or anywhere. This topic comes up frequently in community discussions about the need for more housing.
Questions are raised around:
- 1- Why build so many units vs. smaller buildings
- 2- Why parking is costly and inefficient use of land
- 3- Why can’t more affordable or all affordable units be built?
- 4- The cost of subsidizing affordable units and how that may translate to higher rental rates/costs, etc.
Dave found a great Architecture and Development firm in Atlanta (Kronberg Urbanists + Architects, based in Atlanta GA) that lays out a nice presentation, includes sample proformas, and real life scenarios that may help us understand this piece of the puzzle better when evaluating any project and how developers may be incented to build certain types of projects or do certain types of work.
Here is a link, reformatted to be within this website, to the presentation, showing the varieties of choices, costs, formulas and outcomes developers consider before deciding if the project can be built: https://equitable-arlington.org/developer-math_kua_071420/
Much of our hope for more affordable housing depends on the market forces of capitalism and the willingness of developers to build for good, not just for profit. But the developers must be able to cover their costs. Many communities are highly skeptical of developers, assuming the community will get tricked, the developer will get greedy and the promised housing will be a disappointment. Trust is needed. But so is verification. We all need to learn the developer math.
What are the math factors that a developer considers before deciding to build affordable housing?

Here is a link to the original presentation. https://www.kronbergua.com/post/mr-mu-let-s-talk-about-math
The presentation, dated March 11, 2019, includes slides used to present the information necessary to understand the rationale for zoning changes, the location of the zoning areas under consideration and the charts, tables and maps that help describe the situation. The proposed zoning changes, especially articles 6, 7, 8, 11 and 16, only cover changes affecting about 7% of the Town, those parts of the Town that are currently zoned R4-R7 and the B zoning districts.
I’ve had an annual ritual for the past several years: obtain a spreadsheet of property assessments from the Town Assessor, load them in to a database, and run a series of R computations against the data. I started doing this for a number of reasons: to understand what was built where (our zoning laws have changed over time, and there are numerous non-conforming uses), the relationship between land and building values, the capital costs of different types of housing, and how these factors have changed over time.
I’d typically compile these analyses into a fact-book of sorts, and email it around to people that I thought might be interested. This year, I’m going to post the analyses here as a series of articles. This first installment contains basic information about Arlington’s low-density housing: single-, two-, and three-family homes, as well as condominiums. Condominiums are something of an oddball in this category — a condominium can be half of a two-family structure, part of a larger residential building, or somewhere in between. There’s a lot of variety.
Here’s a table showing how the number of units has changed over time, since 2013.
land use | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Single Family | 7984 | 7983 | 7991 | 8000 | 7994 | 7994 | 7998 | 7999 |
Condominium | 3242 | 3304 | 3367 | 3492 | 3552 | 3662 | 3726 | 3827 |
Two-family | 2352 | 2332 | 2308 | 2282 | 2263 | 2218 | 2183 | 2139 |
Three-family | 207 | 201 | 196 | 194 | 193 | 190 | 185 | 182 |
Arlington’s predominant form of housing — the single family home — has stayed relatively static; we’ve added 15 over the last seven years. The number of condominiums has increased significantly: +585 over seven years. That, coupled with the reduction of two-family homes (-213) and three-family homes (-25) leads me to believe that a fair number of rental units have been removed from the market.
Next, I’d like to look at how these homes are spread across our various zoning districts. (The “Notes” section at the bottom of the post explains what the zoning district codes mean).
Zone | Single-Family | Condo | Two-family | Three-family |
---|---|---|---|---|
B1 | 8 | 22 | 13 | 11 |
B2 | 1 | 4 | 1 | |
B2A | 1 | 18 | ||
B3 | 59 | 4 | ||
B4 | 1 | 59 | 5 | 5 |
B5 | 1 | 1 | ||
I | 8 | 18 | 7 | 1 |
R0 | 502 | |||
R1 | 6798 | 168 | 200 | 7 |
R2 | 647 | 1816 | 1881 | 124 |
R3 | 4 | 39 | 11 | 17 |
R4 | 23 | 79 | 2 | 3 |
R5 | 3 | 616 | 5 | 4 |
R6 | 2 | 686 | 8 | 7 |
R7 | 1 | 243 | 2 | 1 |
A few points to note:
- R0 is our newest district, which was established in 1991. It consists only of conforming single-family homes.
- R1 is Arlington’s original (per 1975 zoning) single-family district. It’s predominantly single-family homes, but there are a fair number of two-family homes, and even a few three-families. The presence of condominiums suggests additional multi-family homes (that consist of two or more condominiums)
- R2 is predominantly two-, and three-family homes. Although three-family homes are no longer allowed in this district, R2 has the largest number of three-families in town.
- Residential uses are no longer allowed in the industrial (I) districts, but the I districts contain 34 homes. These buildings pre-date the current zoning laws (aka “pre-existing non-conforming”). A good portion of the Dudley street industrial district is a residential neighborhood.
I’m pointing out these conformities (and non-conformities) for a reason. The zoning map (and use tables) dictate what is allowed today, along with specifying a vision for the future. Our zoning bylaw happens to contain a strong statement to this effect: “It is the purpose of this Bylaw to discourage the perpetuity of nonconforming uses and structures whenever possible” (section 8.1.1(A)). Despite the strong statement of intent, it can take decades (if not generations) for a built environment to catch up with the bylaw’s prescriptions.
I’ll finish this post with a breakdown of how condominiums are distributed across the various zoning districts:
Zone | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | delta |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
(N/A) | 14 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -14 |
B1 | 16 | 16 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 22 | 22 | 22 | 6 |
B2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
B2A | 19 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | -1 |
B3 | 55 | 55 | 61 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 4 |
B4 | 47 | 47 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 59 | 12 |
I | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 18 | 0 |
R1 | 140 | 144 | 146 | 148 | 150 | 154 | 162 | 168 | 28 |
R2 | 1355 | 1406 | 1456 | 1518 | 1574 | 1670 | 1723 | 1816 | 461 |
R3 | 22 | 25 | 28 | 31 | 31 | 37 | 37 | 39 | 17 |
R4 | 65 | 67 | 67 | 79 | 79 | 79 | 79 | 79 | 14 |
R5 | 616 | 616 | 616 | 616 | 616 | 616 | 616 | 616 | 0 |
R6 | 630 | 632 | 635 | 683 | 683 | 683 | 686 | 686 | 56 |
R7 | 243 | 243 | 243 | 243 | 243 | 243 | 243 | 243 | 0 |
The last column (“delta”) shows the difference between 2013 and 2020. The largest increase occurred in the R2 (two-family) district, followed by R6 (medium-density apartments, where most of the increase took place in 2014) and R1 (single-family).
That it will do it for the first installation. In the next post, we’ll look at how the cost (assessed values, actually) of Arlington’s low density housing has changed over the last seven years.
Here is a spreadsheet, containing the various tables shown in this article.
Notes
Arlington’s zoning map divides the town into a set of districts, and each district has regulations about what kinds of buildings and uses are allowed (or not allowed). The districts mentioned in this article are:
- B1 (Neighborhood Office district)
- B2 (Neighborhood Business distrct)
- B2A (Major Business District)
- B3 (Village Business District)
- B4 (Vehicular-Oriented Business District)
- I (Industrial District)
- R0 (Single-Family, large-lot district)
- R1 (Single-Family Distict)
- R2 (Two-Family District)
- R3 (Three-Family District)
- R4 (Townhouse District)
- R5 (Low-Density Apartment District)
- R6 (Medium-Density Apartment District)
- R7 (High-Density Apartment District)
Arlington’s Zoning Bylaw describes each district in detail (see sections 5.4.2, 5.5.2, and 5.6.2)
The discussions on zoning have been confusing because while zoning covers ALL of Arlington’s land and the zoning bylaws for all Arlington’s zones are referenced, the key issues of greatest interest to Town Meeting are the discussions about increasing density. These discussions pertain ONLY to those properties currently zoned as R4-R7 and the B (Business) districts. These density related changes would affect only about 7% of Arlington’s land area. The map shows the specific zones that would potentially be affected. They lay along major transportation corridors.

This timely report on the question of affordable housing vs. density comes from the California Dept. of Housing & Community Development and mirrors the situation in the region surrounding Arlington MA.
Housing production has not kept up with job and household growth. The location and type of new housing does not meet the needs of many new house- holds. As a result, only one in five households can afford a typical home, overcrowding doubled in the 1990’s, and too many households pay more than they can afford for their housing.
Myth #1
High-density housing is affordable housing; affordable
housing is high-density housing.
Fact #1
Not all high density housing is affordable to low-income families.
Myth #2
High-density and affordable housing will cause too much traffic.
Fact #2
People who live in affordable housing own fewer cars and
drive less.
Myth #3
High-density development strains public services and
infrastructure.
Fact #3
Compact development offers greater efficiency in use of
public services and infrastructure.
Myth #4
People who live in high-density and affordable housing
won’t fit into my neighborhood.
Fact #4
People who need affordable housing already live and work
in your community.
Myth #5
Affordable housing reduces property values.
Fact #5
No study in California has ever shown that affordable
housing developments reduce property values.
Myth #6
Residents of affordable housing move too often to be stable
community members.
Fact #6
When rents are guaranteed to remain stable, tenants
move less often.
Myth #7
High-density and affordable housing undermine community
character.
Fact #7
New affordable and high-density housing can always be
designed to fit into existing communities.
Myth #8
High-density and affordable housing increase crime.
Fact #8
The design and use of public spaces has a far more
significant affect on crime than density or income levels.
See an example of a “case study” of two affordable housing developments in Irvine CA, San Marcos at 64 units per acre.

San Paulo at 25 units per acre.

Both are designed to blend with nearby homes.