Housing Chapter of the Master Plan

In 2015 Town Meeting approved the Master Plan. Following is the Housing chapter of that plan. It contains a great deal of information about details of the housing situation in Arlington, challenges of housing price increases, needs for specialty housing, opportunities for meeting these needs, etc. The authors found that “most cities and towns around Arlington experienced a significant rise in housing values from 2000 to 2010. A 40 percent increase in the median value was fairly common. However, Arlington experienced more dramatic growth in housing values than any community in the immediate area, except Somerville. In fact, Arlington’s home values almost doubled.” This and related data helps explain why the need for affordable housing is now so acute.

Communities Need Less Parking

Written by Guest Writer August 12, 2019

Housing
News

AMI Explained

by Steve Revilak

The term “AMI” or “Area Median Income” comes up in almost any discussion about affordable housing, because it’s used to set rents and the household incomes for people who are eligible to live in affordable dwellings. AMI is a fairly technocratic concept and my goal is to make the concept (and the numbers) easier to understand.

AMIs are set each year by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; broadly speaking, an AMI is the median income of a region. Arlington is part of the “Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH HUD Metro FMR Area” which consists of more than 100 cities and towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Median incomes represent the “middle” family income of an area—half of households make more, and half make less.

In the process of turning median incomes into income limits, HUD also considers household size: larger households are assigned larger AMI limits than smaller ones, in order to reflect the higher cost of living for more family members.

How do these limits translate into affordable housing regulations? Arlington’s affordable housing requirements (aka “inclusionary zoning”) require that rents for affordable units be priced for the 60% area median income, but the dwellings are available to households making up to 70%. Let’s show an example with some numbers.

Household size	60% Income Limit	70% Income Limit	60% Rent
1	$68,520	$79,940	$1,717/month
2	$78,360	$91,420	$1,959/month
3	$88,140	$102,830	$2,203/month

HUD considers an apartment suitable for a household if it has one bedroom less than the number of household members, so a two-bedroom apartment would be suitable for a household of three, a one-bedroom would be suitable for a household of two, and a studio would be suitable for a household of one. The monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment would be calculated as follows: $88,140 ÷ 12 × 30% = $2,203. The 30% comes from HUD’s rule that affordable housing tenants should not be cost-burdened, meaning that they pay no more than 30% of their income in rent.$88k or $102k/year can seem like a lot of money (and once upon a time it was). To get a better sense of what these income levels mean, I looked into what kinds of jobs pay these wages. To that end, I found wage information from the Arlington Public Schools report to Town Meeting, the Arlington town budget, and wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here are a few scenarios:

Scenario 1: single adult

Scenario 1 represents a single adult living alone, and earning between $68,520 and $79,940. Jobs in this pay range include:

Elementary classroom teacher ($62,000 – $75,000)
Town planner ($75,000 – 79,000)
Animal Control Officer ($72,000)
Firefighter ($73,640)
Librarian ($70,395)
Lab Technician ($70,710)
Social Worker ($71,470)
Subway operator ($72,270)
Licensed Practical Nurse ($75,690)
Paralegal ($77,500)
Chef ($78,040)
Carpenter ($78,000)

Scenario 2: single parent with household of two

Scenario 2 represents a single parent earning between $78,360 and $91,420/year. Jobs in this pay range include:

Office Manager – Assessor’s office ($80,399)
Assistant Town Clerk ($77,375)
Town Engineer ($74,000 – $80,000)
Police Department Patrol Officer ($87,000)
Town Budget Director ($88,488)
Telecommunications equipment installer ($80,350)
Plasterer and Stucco Mason ($82,250)
Electrician ($82,380)
Cement Mason ($86,250)
Plumber and pipe fitter ($90,580)

Scenario 3: household of two, both adults

Scenario 3 has two adults, each earning $39,180 – $45,710 per year. Jobs in this salary range include several that we’ve come to know as “essential workers” during the pandemic.

Special education teaching assistant ($34,290)
Arlington Public Schools Paraprofessional ($36,290 – 42,440)
Substitute Teacher ($34,921)
Inspectional Services Record Keeper ($44,481)
Food preparation worker ($39,590)
Bartender ($39,730)
Childcare worker ($40,470)
Ambulance Driver ($40,890)
Waiter ($41,440)
Pharmacy aide ($41,460)
Bank teller ($42,270)
Tailor and dressmaker ($43,790)
Restaurant cook ($44,140)

You may have noticed gaps in these lists — for example, there are no jobs listed in the $50,000 – $60,000 range because it’s in between the income limits for one- and two-income households. It’s also worth noting that a fair number of town employees’ salaries would qualify them for affordable housing (the town is Arlington’s largest employer).

So who qualifies to live in affordable housing? People with a lot of ordinary, working-class jobs, including many town employees.

Written by Guest Writer December 4, 2024

Affordable housing in Fullerton, CA. 83 units per acre.

Myths & Facts About Affordable Housing & Density

Written by Barbara Thornton February 10, 2020

Arlington & Exclusionary Zoning History

Written by Guest Writer August 5, 2019

News

Arlington 2020: Low Density Housing

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)

Arlington 2020 assessors data

Written by Steve Revilak July 5, 2020

News

Yes on Article 16

Article 16 is a proposal to encourage the production of affordable housing in the town of Arlington. I brought this article to town meeting for several reasons, namely, our increasing cost of housing and our increasing cost of land. Arlington is part of the Metropolitan Boston area; we share borders with Cambridge, Somerville, and Medford, and are a mere 5.5 miles from Boston itself. Years ago, people moved out of cities and into the suburbs. That trend has reversed during the last decade, and people are moving back to urban areas, including Metro-Boston. Metro-Boston is a good source of jobs; people come here to work and want to live nearby. That obviously puts pressure on housing prices, and Arlington is not immune from that pressure.

Another reason for proposing Article 16 was my desire to start a conversation about the role our zoning laws play in the cost of housing, and how they might be used to relieve some of that burden. During the 20th century people discovered that one cannot draw a line on a map and say “upper-class households on this side, lower-class households on that side”, but one can draw a line on a map and say “single-family homes on this side, and apartments on that side”. For all practical purposes, the latter achieves the same result as the former. When zoning places a threshold on the cost of housing, it determines who can and cannot afford to live in a given area.

Today 70% of Arlington’s land is exclusively zoned for single family homes, the predominant form of housing in town. In 2013, the median cost of a single-family home was $472,850; this rose to $618,800 in 2018 — an increase of 31%. We can break this down further. The median building cost for a single-family building rose from $226,300 in 2013 to $248,100 in 2018 (an increase of 9.6%), and the median cost for a single-family lot rose from $243,700 to $360,900 (an increase of 48%). Land is a large component of our housing costs, and it continues to rise. Certain neighborhoods (e.g., Kelwyn Manor) saw substantial increases in land assessments in 2019, enough that the Assessor’s office issued a statement to explain the property tax increases. To that end, multifamily housing is a straightforward way to reduce the land costs associated with housing. Putting two units on a lot instead of one decreases the land cost by 50% for each unit.

Article 16 tries to encourage the production of affordable housing (restricted to 60% of the area median income for rentable units and 70% for owner-occupied units). It works as follows:

Projects of six or more units must make 15% of those units affordable. This is part of our existing bylaws.
Projects of twenty or more units must make 20% of those units affordable. This is a new provision in Article 16.
Projects of six or more units that produce more than the required number of affordable units will be eligible for density bonuses, according to the proposed section 8.2.4(C). Essentially, this allows a developer to build a larger building, in exchange for creating more affordable housing.
Projects of six or more units that produce only the required number of affordable units are not eligible for the density bonuses contained in 8.2.4(C).
Projects of 4-5 units will be eligible for the density bonuses in section 8.2.4(C), as long as they are of a use, and in a zone contained in those tables. This provision is intended to permit smaller apartments and townhouses, filling a need for residents who don’t necessarily want (or may not be able to afford) a single-family home. This provision can help reduce land costs by allowing a four-unit townhouse in place of a duplex, for example.

Historically, Arlington has had mixed results with affordable housing production, mainly due to the limited opportunity to build projects of six units or more. It is my hope that the density bonuses allow more of these projects to be built.

In conclusion, the problem of housing affordability in Arlington comes from a variety of pressures, is several years in the making, and will likely take years to address. I see Article 16 as the first step down a long road, and I ask for your support during the 2019 Town Meeting. I’d also ask for your support on articles 6, 7, and 8 which contain minor changes to make Article 16 work properly.

Written by Steve Revilak April 7, 2019

News

Equitable Arlington has a New Look and New Content

Written by Sanjay Newton January 5, 2023

What is a Master Plan?

Article 1 in a series on the Arlington, MA master planning process. Prepared by Barbara Thornton

Arlington, located about 15 miles north west of Boston, is now developing a master plan that will reflect the visions and expectations of the community and will provide enabling steps for the community to move toward this vision over the next decade or two. Initial studies have been done, public meetings have been held. The Town will begin in January 2015 to pull together the vision for its future as written in a new Master Plan.

In developing a new master plan, the Town of Arlington follows in the footsteps laid down thousands of years ago when Greeks, Romans and other civilizations determined the best layout for a city before they started to build. In more recent times, William Penn laid out his utopian view of Philadelphia with a gridiron street pattern and public squares in 1682. Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant developed the hub and spoke street plan for Washington DC in 1798. City planning started with new cities, relatively empty land and a “master builder” typically an architect, engineer or landscape architect commissioned by the land holders to develop a visionary design.

In the 1900’s era of Progressive government in America, citizens sought ways to reach a consensus on how their existing cities should evolve. State and federal laws passed to help guide this process, seeing land use decisions as more than just a private landowner’s right but rather a process that involved improving the health and wellbeing of the entire community. While the focus on master planning was and still is primarily physical, 21st century master planners are typically convened by the local municipality, work with the help of trained planners and architects and rely heavily on the knowledge and participation of their citizenry to reflect a future vision of the health and wellbeing of the community. This vision is crafted into a Master Plan. In Arlington the process is guided by Carol Kowalski, Director of Planning and Community Development, with professional support from RKG Associates, a company of planners and architects and with the vision of the Master Planning advisory committee, co-chaired by Carol Svenson and Charles Kalauskas, Arlington residents, and by the citizens who share their concerns and hopes with the process as it evolves. This happens through public meetings, letters, email, and surveys. The most recent survey asks residents to respond on transportation modes and commuting patterns

We all do planning. Starting a family, a business or a career, we lay out our goals and assume the steps necessary to accomplish these goals and we periodically revise them as necessary. The same thing is true for cities. Based on changes in population, economic development, etc. cities, from time to time, need to revise their plans. In Massachusetts the enabling acts for planning and zoning are here http://www.mass.gov/hed/community/planning/zoning-resources.html. The specific law for Massachusetts is MGL Ch. 41 sect. 81D. This plan, whether called a city plan, master plan, general plan, comprehensive plan or development plan, has some constant characteristics independent of the specific municipality: focus on the built environment, long range view (10-20 years), covers the entire municipality, reflects the municipality’s vision of its future, and how this future is to be achieved. Typically it is broken out into a number of chapters or “elements” reflecting the situation as it is, the data showing the potential opportunities and concerns and recommendations for how to maximize the desired opportunities and minimize the concerns for each element.

The upcoming articles in this series will focus on each individual element in the Town of Arlington’s Master Plan.