The new proposal is just the most recent step in a process that reaches back almost a decade, culminating in the Master Plan (2015), the Housing Production Plan (2016) and the mixed-using zoning amendments of 2016. The Town has consistently proposed smart growth: more development along Arlington’s transit corridors to increase the tax base, stimulate local commerce, and provide more varied housing opportunities for everyone, including low and moderate income Arlingtonians. This year’s proposals are no head-long rush into change. Today’s debate is similar to the debate before Town Meeting three years ago. If anything, progress has been frustratingly slow. To realize the Master Plan’s vision of a vibrant Arlington with diverse housing types for a diverse population, we must stay the course on which we have been embarked for so long.
Related articles
Two weeks ago, I helped to organize a precinct meeting for residents and town meeting members. During the meeting, we got into a discussion about public open spaces, how the town funds their upkeep, and whether having more commercial tax revenue might provide additional funding for parks and recreation.
As I discussed in an earlier post, only about 5.6% of Arlington’s is zoned for commercial uses, and that limits the amount of commercial property tax revenue we can generate. Commercial property tax revenue is sometimes referred to as “CIP”, which stands for “Commercial, Industrial, and Personal”. Commercial and Industrial refer to property taxes on land and buildings that are respectively used for commercial and industrial uses. Personal tax is tax on the value of equipment that’s owned and used by a business for the purpose of carrying out whatever their business is. This could include things like desks, display fixtures, cooking equipment, fork lifts, and the like.
In 2020, Arlington’s CIP levy was 5.45%, meaning that 5.45% of our property tax revenue came from Commercial, Industrial, and Property tax revenue. Breaking this down further, 4.2% was commercial ($5,562,528 tax levy), 0.2% was industrial ($278,351 tax levy), and 1.1% was personal ($1,423,117 tax levy). The town’s total 2020 tax levy was $133,350,155. This data comes from MassDOR’s Division of Local Services, and I’ll provide more specific sources in the “References” section of this post.
A CIP levy of 5.45% is low (compared with other communities in the commonwealth), and occassionaly folks like to talk talk about how to raise it. Which is to say, we about how to raise the ratio of commercial to residential taxes. I moved to Arlington in 2007, when our CIP levy was 5.37%. This increased in subsequent years, peaking at 6.26% in 2013, and has been gradually decreasing since. Recall that 2008 was the year the housing market crashed, and the “great recession” began. The value of Arlington’s residential property fell, but the value of business properties was relatively stable in comparison. Thus, our CIP percentage got a boost for a couple of years.
Tax levies (the amount of tax collected) are a direct reflection of the tax basis (the assessed value of property). I’m going to shift from talking about the former to talking about the latter, because that will lead nicely to a discussion about property wealth. Which is to say, the aggregate value of property assessments in town.
Here’s a chart showing Arlington’s net CIP and residential property values, from 1983–2020, adjusted to 2020 dollars. (This is similar to the chart that appears on page 102 of Arlington’s Master plan, but for a longer period of time).

Generally speaking, the value of Arlington’s residential property has appreciated considerably, and there’s a widening gap between our residential and CIP assessments (in terms of raw dollars). Because the gap is so large, it’s helpful to see it on a log scale.

Viewed this way, the curvatures are generally similar, but residential property wealth is rising faster than business property wealth.
In summary, there are three reasons why our CIP is as low as it is: (1) a limited amount of land where one can run a business, (2) the value of residential property is appreciating faster than the value of business property, and (3) occasionally business properties are converted to residential (perhaps with the residential property being worth more than the former business property). That’s not to say we can’t improve the commercial tax base. We can, but we will have to think about what and where, and how to compete with a generally competitive residential market.
References
- MassDOR Division of Local Services reports
- DOR Query Tool for Municipal Property Assessments
- DOR Query Tool for Municipal Tax Levies
- Spreadsheet of Arlington Property Assessments, 1983–2020. Data obtained from MassDOR, with calculations added to adjust for inflation.
- Spreadsheet of Massachusetts Property assessments for 2020. Data obtained from MassDOR.
(Updated 7/2/2020, to add log scale graph and revise conclusion.)
(Contributed by HCA Board Member Laura Wiener, and Executive Director Erica Schwarz)
The Housing Corporation of Arlington (HCA), the Town’s non-profit housing developer, is excited to create a new development on Sunnyside Ave with 43 new affordable homes. The homes will be a diverse mix of sizes and serve people of different incomes, all under 60% of the area median income. Arlington and the entire Greater Boston region have a severe shortage of affordable housing, which this project will help to address. Arlington’s Master Plan, Housing Plan, and Housing Trust Action Plan all acknowledge the need to create significantly more affordable housing.
The HCA’s new Sunnyside Ave proposal is located just off Broadway, near the Alewife Brook DCR Greenway and the Somerville line; it’s a great location near a supermarket, bus lines, and a modest walk to Davis Square. Currently, the site is a dilapidated former auto body shop. The proposal is designed to meet the specific needs of HCA’s residents and the Arlington community. The development will be Passive House certified. It includes 21 vehicle parking spaces, approximately 70 bike parking spaces, and a 2nd floor roof garden for tenants to enjoy. The development also includes a community room that the HCA will share with other local groups. The project will also add a sidewalk on Sunnyside Ave where there currently isn’t one. HCA owns the site and expects to start seeking zoning approval in the spring.
Building affordable housing is a long and complicated process, due to the permitting process plus the number and complexity of funding sources needed. The state’s Department of Housing and Community Development receives many more requests than they can fund in every funding round. We expect to complete the permitting process in 2023, secure our financing by the end of 2024, and start construction in early 2025. With an expected construction timeline of around one year, HCA expects to see tenants moving into the building in spring, 2026. A public forum on the project is anticipated in the coming months. Given the complicated funding and permitting challenges, your monetary and public support of our new development on Sunnyside Ave would be appreciated.
The Housing Corporation of Arlington is a non-profit, community-based developer and owner of affordable housing in Arlington. It owns 150 units of affordable rental housing in all parts of town. The units are occupied by a diverse mix of families and individuals. HCA has been purchasing, rehabilitating, and building new housing since 2000, and also provides social service programs to support family stability and build community connection and engagement. Every week, HCA staff help local families who are struggling with the extreme cost of housing, making the creation of more affordable homes both urgent and important.
The staff, board of directors, and the more than 1,000 tenants, donors, and members who make up the HCA organization are very excited about this opportunity to expand Arlington’s portfolio of affordable housing. Our most recent projects included three newly constructed buildings—two in Downing Square (Lowell Street) and a mixed-use property shared with “Arlington Eats” on Broadway. To learn more about HCA or apply for housing, go to: https://www.housingcorparlington.org.
Massachusetts’ 2020 Economic Development Bill included a set of housing choice provisions: these require communities served by the MBTA to provide a district of reasonable size where multi-family housing is allowed by right. The law gives us significant flexibility to design a district that best suits our needs, but the district must allow housing suitable for families with children, without age restrictions, and at a rate of at least 15 dwelling units per acre. Arlington is one of 175 MBTA communities in Massachusetts that share in the responsibility for meeting these requirements.

The law requires a “district of reasonable size”, but what does that mean? Throughout much of 2021 the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) worked on a set of supporting regulations that set the district requirements according to the type of transit service a community has, the number of existing homes in the community (as of the 2020 Census), and the amount of developable land near transit stations. The specifics vary by community, but here is what the requirements mean for Arlington:
- Our district needs a capacity of (at least) 2,046 homes. This isn’t a requirement to build 2,046 additional homes; instead, it reflects the total number of homes that district might contain in the future. For example, if a parcel with a two-family home were rezoned to allow a three-family home, that single parcel would have a capacity of three.
- Our district needs to allow multi-family housing by right. “By right” means that the development only requires a building permit, where the Building Inspector determines whether the project complies with zoning and building codes. While Arlington allows multi-family housing (three or more dwellings on a single parcel) in some areas, such projects are not allowed by right.
- Our district needs to allow (at least) 15 dwellings/acre. This is more or less in line with the density of the streetcar suburbs that were built in East Arlington during the 1920s. Although portions of Arlington likely meet the density requirement, none of these areas currently comply, as they don’t allow multi-family housing to be built by right.
- Our district needs to be at least 32 acres, but it could be larger. We have flexibility here, as we’ll discuss in a moment.
- Finally, due to the lack of developable land around the Alewife T station, Arlington is free to locate its multi-family district (or districts) anywhere in town. We’re not tied to any particular geographic location.
The new law’s requirements provide Arlington with a great deal of flexibility. We’re free to place our district (or districts) anywhere in town, and we’ll be able to choose from a variety of options as long as they meet the requirements set forth above. For example, providing the capacity of 2,046 homes in the minimum district size of 32 acres would give us a density of 64 dwellings/acre; roughly the scale of mid-rise apartment buildings. On the other hand, if we went with the minimum density of 15 dwellings/acre, we’d have a 135 acre district that allowed smaller multi-family homes. Our district can be anywhere within this range; we also have the option of having multiple districts, with smaller multi-family buildings in some areas of town and larger multi-family buildings in others.
Arlington has a track record of producing thorough and comprehensive planning documents, such as our Master Plan, Net Zero Action Plan, Sustainable Transportation Plan, and Housing Production Plan. These plans contain plenty of building blocks that could be used to formulate a compliant multi-family district. Viewed in that light, the MBTA community requirements are an opportunity to meet some of the goals we’ve already set for ourselves; we just have to go about it in a way that satisfies the law’s new requirements.
Arlington has one unique consideration, which doesn’t apply to most MBTA communities. In 2020, Arlington’s Town Meeting sent a home rule petition to the state legislature, asking for permission to regulate the use of fossil fuels in new building construction; it’s an important component of our plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050. A number of other communities in the Commonwealth filed similar petitions, and the legislature responded by establishing a pilot program: ten cities and towns will be allowed to enact “fossil fuel bans”, but only if they (a) have 10% subsidized housing, (b) achieve safe harbor via compliances with an approved housing production plan, or (c) establish a multi-family district of reasonable size by February 2024. Arlington doesn’t meet the subsidized housing requirement (only 6.54% of our homes are on the subsidized housing inventory), and we’re unlikely to gain safe harbor status during the next year; our most viable path to participation hinges on meeting the multi-family requirements.
In summary, the multi-family requirement for MBTA communities creates new requirements for Arlington, while also presenting us with new opportunities: the opportunity to meet planning goals, the opportunity to meet sustainability goals (e.g., by regulating fossil fuel use in new construction), and the opportunity to reimagine how we do multi-family housing in Arlington as our town moves forward into the twenty-first century.
Interview with Aaron Clausen, AICP; City of Beverly, Director, Planning and Community Development
Rather than express generalized worry about the “lack of affordable housing”, Peabody, Salem and Beverly have created an intermunicipal Memorandum of Mnderstanding (MOU) to very specifically define and target the problem and the population they want to address.
According to Aaron Clausen, “There is a fair amount of context that goes along with the MOU, but primarily the communities got together as sort of a coalition to survey and understand what was going on relative to homelessness. What came out of that is a recognition that there is not enough affordable housing generally, and particularly transitional housing, or more specifically permanent supportive housing.
“Salem and Beverly both have shelters, however the shelters were basically serving as permanent housing (and running out of space). That won’t help someone into a stable housing situation. Anyway, this was the agreement (attached MOU) and the good news is that it has resulted in affordable housing projects; one is done in Salem for individuals and Beverly has a 75 unit family housing project permitted and seeking funding that has a set aside for families either homeless or in danger of becoming homeless.
“There is also a redevelopment of a YMCA in downtown Beverly that will increase the number of Single Room Occupancy units. I wouldn’t say that the MOU got it done by itself but it helps demonstrate a regional approach. ”
To see the actual Memorandum of Understanding between these three municipalities to address affordable housing, particularly for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, click HERE.
As the public hearings on the zoning articles proceeded in late winter and early spring, 2019, it became clear that there was a very strong sentiment that the proposed increase in density in these designated zoning districts should result in an increase in affordable housing in Arlington. This coincided with the approved 2015 Master Plan’s stated goals:
- Encourage mixed-use development that includes affordable housing, primarily in well-established commercial areas.
- Provide a variety of housing options for a range of incomes, ages, family sizes, and needs.
- Preserve the “streetcar suburb” character of Arlington’s residential neighborhoods.
- Encourage sustainable construction and renovation of new and existing structures (see ch. 5, pg 77++ for housing section)
- The Yes on 16 report supports the citizen initiated petition resulting in Article 16 and demonstrates the tremendous impact of rapidly increasing land values on the overall affordability of property in Arlington. Building a stack of homes on one footprint is far more financially affordable than creating a single home on the same footprint of land.
A municipality’s master plan is intended to set the vision and start the process of crafting the future of the municipality in regard to several elements, housing, history, culture, open space, transportation, finance, etc. Arlington began a very public discussion about these issues and the development of the Master Plan in 2012. In 2015, after thorough community wide discussion, the Master Plan was adopted by Town Meeting. This year, 2019, the focus is on passing Articles that will amend the current zoning bylaws in order to implement the housing vision that was approved in 2015.
by Annie LaCourt
One of the concerns people have about the current MBTA Communities zoning proposal is the effect that the increase in housing will have on the town’s budget. Will the need for new services make demands on our budget we cannot meet without more frequent overrides? Or will the new tax revenues from the new buildings cover the cost of that increase in services?
The simple answers to these questions are
- No: It will not make unmanageable demands on the budget; and
- Yes: the new tax revenue from the multi-family housing anticipated will cover the costs of any new services required.
Adopting the current MBTA Communities zoning proposal may even slow the growth of our structural deficit, as I will show in more detail using as examples some of the more recent multi-family projects that have been built in Arlington.
How Does Our Budget Work and What is the Structural Deficit?
First, some basic facts about finance in Arlington: Like every other community in Massachusetts, Arlington’s property tax increases are limited by Proposition 2.5 to 2.5% of the levy limit each year. What is the levy limit? It’s all of the taxes we are allowed to collect across the whole town, without getting specific approval from the Town’s voters. For FY 23 the levy limit is $135,136,908. $3,271,996 of that is the 2.5% increase we are allowed under the law. But also added to that is $1,202,059 of new growth, which comes from properties whose assessment changed because they were substantially improved–either renovated or by increasing capacity. When we reassess a property that has a new house or building on it, we are allowed to add the new taxes generated by the change in value of the property to the levy limit.
Property taxes make up approximately 75% of the town’s revenue. So – except for new growth – that means that the bulk of our budget can only grow 2.5% a year. Other categories of income like State Aid have a much less reliable growth pattern. If the state has a bad fiscal year, our state aid is likely to remain flat or decrease.
Expenses
On the expense side, our default is a budget to maintain the same level of services year to year. We cap increases in the budgets of town departments by 3.25% and the school budget by 3.5%, save for special education costs which are capped slightly higher.
We also have several major categories of expense that are beyond our control that increase at a greater rate than 2.5%. These include, among other things, funding our pension obligations, health insurance costs and our trash collection contract.
Structural Deficit
This difference between the increase in revenues and the increase in costs is the structural deficit. It’s structural because we can’t cut our way out of it without curtailing services severely and we can’t stop paying for things like pensions and insurance that are contractual obligations.
The question of how MBTA communities zoning will affect this is crucial. So let’s take a deeper dive, first on revenue and then on expenses.
How Will MBTA Communities Affect New Growth?
How MBTA-C zoning will affect new growth depends on what gets built and at what rate. Let’s consider some real world examples:
882 Mass Ave. used to be a single story commercial building. It was assessed at $938,000 and the owner paid approximately $9,887 in taxes annually. It has been rebuilt as a mixed use building with commercial space on the ground level and 22 apartments on 4 floors above. The new assessment is approximately $4,800,000 and the new tax bill is about $54,000.00. That means $45,000 in new growth – new property taxes that will grow at the rate of 2.5% in subsequent years.
Another example is 117 Broadway. The building that used to be at that address was entirely commercial, assessed at $1,050,000 and paid around $11,770 in taxes annually. After being rebuilt as mixed use by the Housing Corporation of Arlington, it is assessed at $3,900,000 and taxed at $43,719. 117 Broadway has commercial on the ground floor and 4 stories of affordable housing above. The new growth for this example is approximately $30,000.
What these examples show, and our assessor believes is a pattern, is that a new mixed use or multi-family building increases the taxes we can collect by as much as 400%, depending on the kinds of housing units.
So we can expect new development under MBTA Communities to increase the levy limit substantially over time, reducing the size and frequency of future tax increases.
How Will This New Housing Affect the Cost of Services?
Of course, with new residents comes a need for additional services. However, town-provided services will be impacted differently. Snow and Ice removal, for example, will not be affected at all – we aren’t adding new roads. Many other services provided by public works are like snow and ice: They would only increase at a faster rate if we added more land area or more town facilities to the base.
Services like public safety and health and human services may see gradual increases in service requests, as more people place more demand on these departments. Right now we have a patrol officer for every 850 or so residents. This means we might need to add a new patrol officer if the population increases by 850 residents. But it’s not clear that a new officer would be needed; it depends on the trends the police department sees in their data. I think of these services as increasing by stair steps: Adding a few, or even a few hundred, residents doesn’t require us to add staff to provide more services. Adding a few thousand might mean we need to add a position but we will have added a great deal to the levy limit before we need to add those positions.
Trash Collection Impact
There is one town service that sees an impact every time we add a new unit of housing – trash collection. The town spends approximately $200 per household on solid waste collection and disposal. As mentioned above, 882 Broadway has 22 new 1 bedroom and studio apartments. When that building was all commercial the businesses paid privately for trash removal. The new trash collection costs will be at least $4,400 annually. It’s possible, however, that the building will need a dumpster and that could cost up to $20,000 annually. Either way the new revenue ($45,000) outstrips the increased costs. The town is working on creative solutions for new buildings to keep this cost as affordable as possible.
What About Schools?
Regardless of new housing construction, our student population ebbs and flows. Families move in with small children who go through the school system. The kids graduate high school but their parents, now in their 50’s or 60’s, don’t move until they are much older and need a different living situation. When they sell their homes, the new owners are likely to be families with children again. We can see a pattern of boom and bust in our school population if we look back. Right now, we are seeing a drop in elementary population as this cycle plays out again. We now have 221 fewer students enrolled in the elementary schools than we did in 2019.
We account for this ebb and flow in the budget. A number of years ago, we set a policy to add a growth factor to the school budget. We increase the budget by 50% of per pupil costs for each new student. Currently that is $8800.00 per student. But the policy works in reverse as well. We reduce the budget by the same amount per child as the student population wanes. We also see increased state aid under chapter 70 when our student population grows and may see reductions if it shrinks.
Will Multifamily Homes Add Students?
The new multi-family housing generated by MBTA communities zoning may add students to our schools – but not as many as you might think. Other large multi-family developments like the Legacy apartments and the new development at the old Brigham site have not added a lot of children to the schools directly. Going back to our two example buildings, 882 Mass Ave is all studio and 1 bedroom units, so we are unlikely to see children living there. Our MBTA communities zoning, however, must by law allow new housing that is appropriate for families. So for planning purposes, it’s best to assume we will see growth in the school population.
So what will the effect of this new housing be on the school population and our budget? Given that the new housing will be built gradually, it’s more likely to stabilize our student population than precipitously increase it. The same will be true for our budget: We will see some increases in the school budget growth factor but also increases in state aid and increases in tax revenue from the new construction.
Conclusions
If we create an MBTA communities zone per the working groups recommendation or something close to that, we will see the effect on our budget over time, not immediately. Even if the zone has a theoretical capacity of 1300 additional units (total capacity minus what is already there) the development of new housing won’t be abrupt. For budget purposes, we project our long range plan five years into the future.
When we get to a year, say FY 2023, the actual state of our budget never looks exactly like the projection created five years earlier. We cannot predict the future very far out. What we can do is look back and see what the effects of previous development have been on our budget, and we can assess the risks of our decisions. Experience tells us that multi-family development doesn’t break the budget or swamp the schools, even when the developments are large. It also tells us that turnover in the population causes ebbs and flows in the school population, regardless of new development. We can say with certainty that multi-family development increases our revenues through new growth, and that past experience has been that that new growth mitigates the need for overrides.
My conclusion is that the new development that will occur if we create a robust zone that allows multi-family development by right, will at worst give us growth in our revenues that keeps pace with any increase in services we need. At best, those new revenues will outstrip the growth in expenses and help mitigate our structural deficit. The risk of allowing this new growth is low, and the rewards are worth it, in the form of new missing middle housing, climate change mitigation, and vibrant business districts fueled by new customers nearby.
Restrictive covenants are a “list of obligations that purchasers of property must assume … For the first half of the 20th century, one commonplace commitment was a promise never to sell or rent to an African American”. [1] These covenants gained popularity after the Supreme Court’s 1917 decision in Buchanan v. Warley.
Rothstein’s book The Color of Law mentions examples from Brookline, MA; Arlington, MA has examples of it’s own. We’ll look at one from an East Arlington deed dating to 1923. Credit to Christopher Sacca for finding these documents.
First, a land plan to establish content. Below is the subdivision plan for a farm owned by Herbert and Margaret Allen. I count a little over 200 lots in this subdivision. The plan itself states that “no single house shall cost less than $6,000 and no double house shall
cost less than $8,000″. This language also appears in the property deed.

One of the deeds from these parcels appears in book 4631 page 218 and book 4631 page 219, in the Southern Middlesex registry of deeds.
Here’s page 218; the deed begins at the bottom.

Here’s page 219. The racial covenant appears halfway down the page. It reads “No sale or lease of any said lots shall be made to colored people, no any dwelling on any said lots be sold or occupied by colored people”.

The 1920’s were a time of significant residential growth in Arlington, as farmers (called “Market Gardeners” at the time) subdivided and sold off their land. This example shows that Arlington, MA landowners employed some of the same discriminatory tactics for segregation as other communities in the United States. It would take further research to determine how common the use of such covenants was early twentieth-century Arlington.
Footnotes
[1] The Color of Law. Richard Rothstein. pg. 78