1. Arlington
  2. Fiscal Impact
  3. Housing
  4. News

Will More Arlington Housing Raise Town Costs For Schools?

Written by Posted on Less than 0 min read

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.

Related articles

  1. News

Arlington 2020: Cost Distributions of Housing

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

min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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:

min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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:

Min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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:

Min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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:

Min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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:

Min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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:

Min1st quartilemedianmean3rd quartilemax
$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.

Written by
  1. Fiscal Impact
  2. Housing
  3. News
  4. Parking

Communities Need Less Parking

Communities need fewer parking spaces for cars.

In a 2019 study, MAPC found that:

  1. Three out of ten spaces sit empty during peak demand
  2. The key factors that drive parking demand are parking supply, transit accessibility and the percentage of deed-restricted units

This study raises important questions about the wisdom of continuing to commit large sections of the land area of our municipalities to be on reserve for parking cars. Such extra space could be used to benefit the open space, environmental sustainability and the need for more housing.

Written by
  1. Fiscal Impact
  2. Housing
  3. Social Justice

Three Prong Perspective on New Housing Development

Issues of supply, affordability, and equity all contribute to an ongoing housing crisis in Massachusetts. Among U.S. metro areas with knowledge-based industries, metro Boston ranks near the bottom in housing production and near the top on development costs. Due to the latter, production of new affordable housing units has scarcely increased over the past decade. And largely decentralized authority over land use regulations, by 351 cities and towns, does little to foster uniform housing equity standards.

Clark Ziegler in MassBENCHMARK Journal vol.21 issue 1

For more information on the challenges of supply, affordability and equity, see the article. Clark Ziegler is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.

Written by
  1. Housing
  2. News

Four Big Housing Challenges In Metro Boston

Data in a Mass Housing Partnership report shows how far behind the Boston metropolitan area has fallen in meeting the housing needs of its citizens. There are four primary categories for measuring the inadequacies: 1. Availability, 2. Affordability, 3. L0cation and Mobility and 4. Equitability. See the full report for more data and examples. Two slides are shown below.

Despite increasing population and job growth, Mass. has one of the lowest rates of housing production in the USA
Average zoning jurisdictions in Mass. arrepresent only 10,000 people. This makes it hard to achieve meaningful, broad public policy goals.
Written by
  1. 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
  1. Fiscal Impact
  2. Housing
  3. Social Justice

Race-based Inequality of Economic Opportunity

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.

Written by
  1. Arlington
  2. Housing
  3. Master Plan
  4. News
  5. Social Justice
  6. Town Meeting
  7. Zoning

Accessory Dwelling Units

Accessory Dwelling Units (aka “granny flats”)

The following information was presented to the Arlington Redevelopment Board in October, 2020 by Barbara Thornton, TMM, Precinct 16

This Article  proposes to allow Accessory Dwelling Units, “as of right”, in each of the 8 residential zoning districts in Arlington.

Why is this zoning legislation important?

Arlington is increasingly losing the diversity it once had.  It has become increasingly difficult for residents who have grown up and grown old in the town to remain here.  This will only become more difficult as the effects of tax increases to support the new schools, including the high school, roll into the tax bills for lower income residents and senior citizens on a fixed income.  For young adults raised in Arlington, the price of a home to buy or to rent is increasingly out of reach.

Who benefits from ADUs?

  • Families benefit from greater flexibility as their needs change over time and, in particular providing options for older adults to be able to stay in their homes and for households with disabled persons or young adults who want additional privacy but still be within a family setting.
  • Residents seeking an increase in the diversity of housing choices in the Town while respecting the residential character and scale of existing neighborhoods; ADUs provide a non-subsidized form of housing that is generally less costly and more affordable than similar units in multifamily buildings;
  • Residents wanting more housing units in Arlington’s total housing stock with minimal adverse effects on Arlington’s neighborhoods.

What authority and established policy is this built on?

Arlington’s Master Plan is the foundational document establishing the validity and mission for pursuing the zoning change that will allow Accessory Dwelling Units.

Under Introduction in Part 5, Housing and Residential Development, the Master Plan states:  Arlington’s Master Plan provides a framework for addressing key issues such as affordability, transit-oriented residential development, and aging in place.

The Master Plan states that the American Community Survey (ACS) reports that Arlington’s housing units are slightly larger than those in other inner-suburbs and small cities. In Arlington, the median number of rooms per unit is 5.7.  There is a great deal of difference in density and housing size among the different Arlington neighborhoods.  The generally larger size of homes makes it easier to contemplate a successful move to encourage ADUs.

What do other municipalities do?

According to a study (https://equitable-arlington.org/2020/02/16/accessory-dwelling-units-policies/), by 2017 65 out of 101 municipalities in the greater Boston (MAPC) region allowed Accessory Dwelling Units by right or by special permit. The average number of ADU’s added per year was only about 3.  But by 2017, Lexington had 75 ADUs and Newton had 73.  Both of these communities were among about 10 “as of right” municipalities in the MAPC region.  This finding suggests that communities with more restrictions are less likely to see any significant affordable housing benefits.

Even in the midst of a housing crisis in this region, according to Amy Dain, housing expert, (https://equitable-arlington.org/2020/02/18/zoning-for-accessory-dwelling-units/) most municipalities still have zoning laws that restrict single family home owners from creating more affordable housing.

And this is despite the fact that, as according to Banker & Tradesman, March 10, 2020: https://www.bankerandtradesman.com/63-percent-in-greater-boston-back-adus/, 63% of people in the region approve of ADUs.  California has recently passed strong pro-ADU legislation.  A study by Zillow further corroborated this strong interest in communities across the US, including our region.  https://equitable-arlington.org/2020/03/10/adu-popularity/.

Learn more about Accessory Dwelling Units/ “Granny Flats” here: https://planning.org/knowledgebase/accessorydwellings/

Written by
  1. Arlington
  2. Fiscal Impact
  3. Housing

What Is Impact on Arlington School Costs of More Housing?

Does Arlington need more housing? If yes, will more housing result in higher school costs? There is a perception that more housing means more school age children and more school age children will strain the capacity and expand the budget of the Arlington Public Schools.

Prelimary reviews suggest that more housing would not strain the APS capacity for a variety of complex reasons. These reasons include: school age children do not always go to APS; by the time new housing came on line, the school enrollment, now growing, will have begun to decline; Arlington needs more diverse kinds of housing, not just family housing; the 283 units of housing that came on line through Brigham Square and 360 contributed more in property tax revenue than they cost in school enrollment costs…. by over $980K in 2019. Read this for more information.

More analysis is needed. More discussion is needed. These are complicated and nuanced issues. Readers with additional comments should send them to info@equitable-arlington.org.

Written by
Next
Recent Posts
Sign Up For Our Mailing List