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by Beth Elliott
I’m a member of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Board and an attorney with over 15 years of practice in affordable housing law. Views expressed are my own, not those of the Trust.
The Town of Arlington and the Arlington Affordable Housing Trust Fund have created the Acquisition, Creation and Conversion (ACC) Program to provide a flexible source of funding for creating deed-restricted affordable housing in Arlington. Up to $250,000 is available per restricted unit, and the Town has dedicated federal ARPA funds to support the ACC Program.
ACC Program funds can be used to build new deed-restricted affordable units, whether rented or owned. ACC funds can only be used for existing units if the current tenants will not be displaced.
“Deed-Restricted” Is Important
“Deed-restricted” is the key component here. Housing that is “deed-restricted” as affordable housing is protected by a legally binding agreement that is recorded against the property in the registry of deeds. This agreement specifies the levels of affordability that must be maintained and for how long. It’s a public commitment to provide affordable housing that binds the current owner of the property as well as anyone else who buys the property while the restriction is in place. The ACC Program requires affordability for at least 20 years for rental units and in perpetuity for homeownership units. For rental properties, this means that tenants know that their units will remain affordable for the long term, even if their landlord changes.
Personally, I’m most excited about the potential to use the ACC Program to apply these protections to existing naturally occurring affordable housing in Arlington. For example, if an owner of an existing apartment building participates in the ACC Program, some or all of the apartment units will become deed-restricted affordable housing. Because ACC Program funds can only be used if the existing tenants aren’t displaced, this locks in deed-restricted affordability for the existing tenants. This innovative feature of the program is rare in my experience of affordable housing programs, and it has RFP potential to make meaningful change for existing tenants of naturally occurring affordable housing.
Get the Full Rules
In addition, the ACC Program can be combined with other funding sources, so there is great opportunity for owners to propose their own solutions. The Request for Proposals (RFP) issued for the ACC Program, available here, provides the full rules for participating in the program.
You may not know who your Town Meeting Members are. You may not even know what precinct you live in. We’re here to help!
What’s My Precinct?

This PDF map of Arlington is divided by precinct. You may need to zoom in to see your precinct.
Who Are My Town Meeting Members?
The town of Arlington has a public list of town meeting members and their contact information. Send them an email telling them how you feel, or ask them if you can take a walk and discuss the MBTA Communities Plan.
The material in this post came from my efforts to learn about when Arlington’s housing was built. The data comes from the town’s 2019 property tax assessments, where I took our nineteen-thousand-and-some-odd homes and apartments and broke them down by housing type and decade built. It’s not exactly a history housing of production, though it is a close approximation. In this analysis, a single-family home built in the 1912 and rebuilt as a two-family in 1976 would show up as two units built in the 1970s. Similarly, a three-family home that was built in the 1924 and later converted to condominiums would show up as three condominiums built in the 1920s.
Here’s the visual summary:

And here’s a small spreadsheet with the underlying numbers.
My first surprise was at how much we built in the 1920s: just under five thousand units. This was our biggest decade for housing production, and nearly double our second biggest (the 1950s). Another surprise was the 1990s; 132 of our homes were constructed during that decade, which is the smallest number since the 1870s.
What about homes constructed before 1850? There are only 117 of them, and they’re omitted from the data set. I’ve also omitted residential units in mixed-use buildings, since my copy of the assessors data doesn’t break mixed-use buildings into residential and non-residential units.
Arlington is in the process of update the town’s 2016 Housing Production Plan, and the Housing Plan Implementation Committee and Planning Department have put together a “meeting in a box” as part of their outreach efforts. The idea is to package a set of discussion questions and supplementary materials, so that groups can talk through the questions on their own and provide written feedback. Meeting in a box materials are available from the town website.
I tried this with a group of friends. Here are the questions, and points that came up during the group discussion. Notes that these are discussion notes (transcribed from large sheets of easel paper), and don’t represent agreement or concensus.
Question 1: Housing Needs. Arlington residents have expressed concerns about the housing needs of older adults. Other needs identified so far are the cost and condition of rental housing, the impact of Arlington’s housing sale prices on the ability of young families to find a home in Arlington they can afford, and the impact of limited housing choices on racial and ethnic diversity in Arlington. What housing needs are you most concerned about?
- Address historical racial injustice and land use policies.
- Diversity and types of housing. Availability and affordability.
- Lack of diversity of housing types.
- Every house sold is a total bidding war.
- Better “stage of life housing” matches.
- Having an adequate range of options for lots of different needs.
- Impact on the regional housing shortage.
- Arlington is served by the T and buses; we have a responsibility to provide housing because we have access to transit.
- I was lucky to get in a few years ago, before prices started going crazy.
- We spend too much time romanticizing our old crumbling houses with lead paint.
- Arlington’s zoning encourages mansionization. As a result, we get one big expensive house rather than two smaller more affordable ones.
- What’s happening in Arlington today is the same thing that happened to Lexington 20 years ago — it became a community for affluent professionals only
- There’s too much emphasis on keeping things the way they were 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago.
- Housing can be about preserving economic diversity, but we need a variety of housing types to do that.
- I’d be happy to see more people in town.
- Getting an affordable rental unit here is like winning the lottery.
- The suburbs have shut down housing production. That’s one of the things causing gentrification in Boston.
- Arlington’s housing mainly caters towards families with children. For our town’s financial health, we also need housing for families without children.
- With climate change, our practice of low-density, car-oriented, land-intensive sprawl is no longer sustainable. Density can be an important tool for addressing climate change, and we should use it to that effect.
Question 2: Challenges to Meeting Affordable Housing Needs. Participants in interviews conducted for the Housing Plan and at the June 9 Housing Plan Meeting were asked about challenges or obstacles to providing affordable housing in Arlington. Several challenges were identified, such as difficulty finding locations that for new housing development or redevelopment, how the Town’s Housing Trust Fund and CPA funds should be used to meet housing needs, and general tensions and disagreement about growth in Arlington that make it hard for people to agree. What challenges do you think are the biggest impediments to meeting housing needs in Arlington?
- There’s not a stable funding source for Arlington’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
- Housing is really expensive here.
- There are not enough affordable housing developers that are willing to navigate Arlington’s anti-development stance. They’ll build in other communities, where there’s less resistance.
- There’s a lack of political will to add affordable housing, or housing in general.
- There’s not enough land where multifamily housing can be built.
- There’s unreasonable resistance to new multi-family buildings, like apartments.
- The housing production plan identifies a number of opportunity zones. But they’re small, and there’s not enough land to create much of an opportunity.
- Our housing authority is not very aggressive about utilizing the land they have. Their leadership doesn’t seem to want to do it.
- The belief that “Arlington is full”. In reality, we’ve just chosen to be (by virtue of current zoning).
Question 3: Opportunities for Reaching Agreement. What steps would help to bring Arlington residents together about providing affordable housing? How can the Town balance concerns about housing needs and natural resources protection? Or concerns about housing need and preserving Arlington’s built environment? What do you think most could people agree on?
- Concern about exurban sprawl.
- Concern about gentrification.
- Our parking requirements make housing more expensive than it needs to be.
- We can agree on worries. I’m skeptical that we’ll be able to agree on solutions.
- There’s an unwillingness to accept incremental progress.
- Many incremental changes feel too big.
- If people feel threatened by affordable housing, they’ll oppose it.
- Shared values around the importance of having residents of a variety of economic situations.
- Do people really care about environmental sustainability when they move into a house? Not sure how you get people to sign on.
- There’s a conflict between anti-density and sustainability.
- If you don’t build here, there will be evergreen builds outside of 495.
- Teachers who teach here should be able to afford to live here.
- We need business growth and tax base growth.
- New housing should feel like it blends into the surrounding neighborhood.
- Our neighborhoods are changing. The fact that we’re not doing proactive things doesn’t prevent them from changing.
As you can see, our group had a range of opinions and even a few points of disagreement – for example, “there’s an unwillingness to accept incremental progress” vs “many incremental changes feel too big”. I feel like that pair is a good illustration of how different people have different comfort zones; a situation that can be challenging to navigate. Metro Boston is growing, as are metropolitan areas all across the country. Our new arrivals will need places to live, and I’d hope to see Arlington be proactive in addressing that need.
A recently constructed project with 44 units of affordable housing shares a footprint with a new public library in this Chicago neighborhood. The Mayor and the Housing Authority initiated a competition for proposals from architecture firms to build projects that feature the “co-location” of uses, “shared spaces that bring communities together”, according to a recent article by Josephine Minutillo in ARCHITECTURAL RECORD (October 2019).
This project is an excellent example of how a municipal policy (increasing affordable housing) can drive creativity to meet policy goals. This project resulted from a combination of publicly owned land, municipal initiative, a quasi public housing agency expertise and a private architecture/ developer with a commitment to affordable housing. Could a project like this work in Arlington MA?
The cost of building a residential unit, single or multi-family, correlates directly, if not precisely, with its cost to resident tenants or owners. The following study and data (using Assessor’s data) demonstrates that higher density housing is more affordable than single-family housing. Whether you look at the median cost of all housing across the Town or the unit costs of the newer, more expensive, apartments built in the last decade, density yields lower prices. The town wide median is $438,900 per unit.
The newest projects (420-440 Mass Ave., Brigham Square and Arlington 360) range from $249k per unit to $412K per unit. These three developments alone contributed 414 new units of housing to the Town.
Discussions of “affordability” represents a spectrum of terms. Units can be affordable because zoning and market conditions allow the units to be built for less money than a single family home. Or they can be affordable because the builder has received subsidies that reduce the cost. Or they can be affordable, as in the case of inclusionary zoning, because the permission to build is contingent on at least some of the units being “permanently” (99 years) available to qualified tenants or buyers based on legal restrictions.
This is our national challenge for the next 25 years, according to Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, Executive Vice President/Chief Strategy Officer for MassDevelopment, the Commonwealth’s economic development and finance authority.
Fuhrer prepared this slide presentation for a meeting with regional affordable housing experts and developers in November, 2020. Part 1 looks at projections for the financial markets and issues in tax exempt financing and how such financing can help provide more affordable housing for poor people.
Part 2, starting on slide 13, looks more explicitly at the sources of racially based economic inequality in the US. The study’s author spent decades working with the Federal Reserve and determines that research shows the scourge of Black poverty compared to other races is not due to education but rather to land use, zoning and housing finance decisions set in place by governmental agencies that have intentionally limited access to equity building opportunities for Black Americans.
Slide 18 shows the U.S. Black population in Boston region has a household median net worth of about $0. While the white population in the region has an estimated net worth of $247,000 per household.
Changing landuse and zoning policies as well as using tax exempt financing are some of the ways to remedy this long standing problem. Additional causes are listed on slide 20:
Key examples:
• Post Civil War “reconstruction” an embarrassing string of broken promises and abuse
• Social Security and unemployment insurance in the 1930s excluded domestic and agricultural workers
(65% of black workforce excluded, versus 25% of white
• Debate about whether it was intentionally discriminatory
• Housing assistance in the 1940s (e.g. Levittown written clause excludes black homeowners)
• The GI bill post WWII a tiny fraction went to black soldiers
• Housing policy post 1950s
• Welfare reforms of the 1990s
• Current: Education spending disparities; criminal justice disparities (the “War on Drugs”); policing disparities; voter registration restrictions
See the full slide presentation here.
It’s January 2023, and as we do every year, folks in Arlington are taking out nomination papers, gathering signatures, and strategizing on how to campaign for the town election on Saturday April 1st. The town election is where we choose members of Arlington’s governing institutions, including the Select Board (Arlington’s executive branch), the School Committee, and — most relevantly for this post — Town Meeting.
If you’re new to New England, Town Meeting is an institution you may not have heard of, but it’s basically the town’s Legislative Branch. Town Meeting consists of 12 members from each of 21 Precincts, for 252 members total. Members serve three-year terms, with one-third of the seats up for election in any year, so that each precinct elects four representatives per year (perhaps with an extra seat or two, as needed to fill vacancies). For a deeper dive, Envision Arlington’s ABC’s of Arlington Government gives a great overview of Arlington’s government structure.
As our legislative branch, town meeting’s powers and responsibilities include:
- Passing the Town’s Operating Budget, which details planned expenses for the next year.
- Approving the town’s Capital Budget, which includes vehicle and equipment purchases, playgrounds, and town facilities.
- Bylaw changes. Town meeting is the only body that can amend the towns bylaws, including ones that affect housing and commercial development.
Town Meeting is an excellent opportunity to serve your community, and to learn about how Arlington and its municipal government works. Any registered voter is eligible to run. If this sounds like an interesting prospect, I’d encourage you to run as a candidate. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Have a look at the town’s Information for new and Prospective Town Meeting Members.
- Contact the Town Clerk’s office to get a set of nomination papers. You’ll need to do this by 5:00 PM February 8th, 2023 at the latest.
- Gather signatures. You’ll need signatures from at least ten registered voters in your precinct to get on the ballot (it’s always good to get a few extra signatures, to be safe).
- Return your signed nomination papers to the Clerk’s office by February 10, 2023 at noon.
- Campaign! Get a map and voter list for your precinct, knock on doors, and introduce yourself. (Having a flier to distribute is also helpful.)
- Vote on Saturday April 1st, and wait for the results.
Town Meeting traditionally meets every Monday and Wednesday, from 8:00 — 11:00 pm, starting on the 4th Monday in April (which is April 24th this year), and lasting until the year’s business is concluded (typically a few weeks).
If you’d like to connect with an experienced Town Meeting Member about the logistics of campaigning, or the reality of serving at Town Meeting, please email info(AT)equitable-arlington.org and I’d be happy to make an introduction.
During the past few years, Town Meeting was our pathway to legalizing accessory dwelling units, reducing minimum parking requirements, and loosening restrictions on mixed-use development in Arlington’s business districts. Aside from being a rewarding experience, it’s a way to make a difference!