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Why Should Arlington Have an Affordable Housing Trust Fund?

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Text of Warrant Article 8: (To be considered at Special Town Meeting (Virtual), Mon. 11/16/20 at 8:00 p.m.)


“ARTICLE 8 ACCEPTANCE OF LEGISLATION/BYLAW AMENDMENT/ MUNICIPAL AFFORDABLE HOUSING TRUST FUND

To see if the Town will vote to accept Massachusetts General Laws c. 44 § 55C, to authorize the creation of a Municipal Affordable Housing Trust Fund to support the development of affordable housing in Arlington, establish a new bylaw for the administration of same; or take any action related thereto. (Inserted by the Select Board)”


What will it do? How will it work?


A Proactive Step to Address Housing Affordability. With a municipal affordable housing trust, Arlington will join more than 113 Massachusetts municipalities that have formed a housing trust fund to support a proactive strategy for building housing affordability. The Trust is a small step the Town can take to more proactively address the housing affordability crisis that challenges many of our current residents and makes Arlington increasingly inaccessible to new residents. Creating affordable housing can also be a strategy for maintaining or increasing diversity.


Ability to Act Quickly.
A primary benefit of a housing trust is to enable the Town to act quickly to support or participate in transactions that increase or preserve affordable housing in Arlington. Without a Trust, the Town does not have the flexibility or agility to act quickly. Following are some examples, though there are many other ways that trusts can and do advance housing affordability:
• Financing the acquisition and/or development of market properties for conversion to affordable housing by a nonprofit developer;
• Purchasing an existing affordable home to ensure resale to another low income buyer, or purchasing a market rate home to create an affordable homeownership opportunity;
• Providing flexible financing to increase the number of affordable units or reduce income levels in existing or new projects that include affordable housing.


Developing a Housing Trust Strategy Over Time.

The strategies to be pursued by the Trust would be set forth by the Trustees in a plan or proposal(s) they would lay out after they are appointed, most likely after/through a process of public engagement. The specific strategies are, deliberately, not part of the warrant article or the Bylaw proposed for adoption. This allows the Town the flexibility to set and modify the Town’s housing strategies over time, in a manner that is responsive to the public and its elected representatives. The Bylaw requires the strategy or plan, and most major Trust decisions, to be approved by the Select Board, and Town investments in the Trust would still require Town Meeting approval.


Funding the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Creating affordable housing requires substantial subsidy. The Trust’s ability to cause more affordable housing to be created or preserved in Arlington will be directly related to the availability of resources to fund it and leverage additional state and federal resources. The vote before the Special Town Meeting this fall will not provide any funding for the Trust.

While it is anticipated that the Trust might receive initial funding via a grant of Community Preservation Act funds from the CPA Committee, to increase our impact, more resources will be needed.


How Other Communities Fund Their Housing Trust Funds.

The Community Preservation Act is the most common source of funding, but the most impactful trusts tend to have a variety of funding sources that result in a steady flow of financial resources into the Trust. Other municipalities have tapped into a variety of additional sources, including inclusionary zoning payments, federal HOME funds, voluntary/negotiated developer payments, proceeds from sale of tax foreclosed or other Town-owned properties, cell tower payments, cannabis-related revenue, short-term rental fees, fees for managing housing lotteries, sale of bonds, general municipal funding, and private donations. Many also donate excess town property to their housing trust for sale and redevelopment as affordable or mixed income housing. More recently, a number of cities and towns have proposed home rule petitions that would allow them to impose a small fee on the transfer of real property to fund their housing trusts, and there is state legislation proposed to authorize cities and towns to impose such transfer fees without sending a Home Rule Petition to the state legislature.


Building Trust Resources Through a Transfer Fee.

The Housing Plan Implementation Committee originally recommended that Town Meeting adopt a bylaw creating a housing trust and create a funding source for it by voting to authorize the filing of a home rule petition to impose a modest real estate transfer fee. Although the Select Board elected to defer consideration of the transfer fee until 2021, such a fee is attractive to many, because it would be borne only by those selling their Arlington homes or properties, and because it provides a mechanism to capture a very small portion of the extraordinary equity increase that Arlington property owners have realized over many years due to regional market forces. The details of such a fee are important and merit further discussion, but it presents a promising potential revenue source to empower the Trust to be proactive.


The Process.

The article in front of the Special Town Meeting would start the process of creating a municipal affordable housing trust. Once approved by Town Meeting the Affordable Housing Trust Bylaw would be submitted to the Attorney General to certify its consistency with the state law governing housing trusts within 90 days. Once so certified, the Town Manager will appoint trustees, including at least one member of the Select Board. Once these appointments are confirmed by the Select Board, the Trustees themselves would lead the process of proposing an initial set of goals and strategies for the Trust to implement, after approval by the Select Board.


Financial Stability & Accountability.

The Trust will be governed by the MAHT law passed in 2005 that specifies powers and limitations for trusts of this type. The proposed Bylaw has been reviewed and modified pursuant to suggestions of the Finance Committee to ensure accountability and financial stability. The Trust will be managed by the Treasurer, will be audited annually, will have legal and practical limitations on its borrowing capacity, and will not have the power to pledge the full faith and credit of the Town.

To learn more about municipal affordable housing trusts, refer to the MHP Municipal Affordable Housing Trust Fund Guide, v.3

******

This information was prepared by Karen Kelleher, Arlington Town Meeting Member, Precinct 5, Member, Arlington Housing Planning Implementation Committee and Executive Director, LISC Boston ( Local Initiative Support Corporation)

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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.

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Zoning for Accessory Dwelling Units

by Amy Dain, for Pioneer Institute of Public Policy Research and Smart Growth Alliance, July 2018 (This study updates a 2004-06 study on ADUs by the Pioneer Institute.)

Even in the midst of a housing crisis, zoning laws prohibit most homeowners in cities and towns around Boston from adding accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to their single family houses. An ADU is an apartment within or behind an own- er-occupied single family house that appears from the street to be a single-family as opposed to a two-family house.

Homeowner-voters can be reassured that new rental hous- ing that could be added as ADUs would be highly dispersed and barely visible. The houses are owner-occupied; the land- lord lives next to the ADU renters, so the risk of property-ne- glect or loud parties is minimal. The houses also have to look like single family houses. Since household sizes are shrinking, new residents in ADUs might maintain current neighborhood population densities, but are unlikely to increase them.

Moreover, ADUs are permitted at such low levels now — only 2.5 permits annually per municipality where they are allowed — that permitting levels could increase substantially without being at all noticeable in neighborhoods. If the region were to average five permits per municipality per year across 100 municipalities, over a decade, ADUs could provide 5,000 apartments, dispersed among 538,000 single family houses. Less than one in 100 houses would have an ADU, yet the new rentals would house thousands of people.

Click HERE for the full report.

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A vision for a greener, cooler, more inclusive Arlington takes shape

Some years back, I took a bus ride to a climate rally in New York City with a bunch of other activists. My seatmate was 12 years old, a smart kid from the suburbs who had never been to New York. As we approached Manhattan on the Cross Bronx Expressway, he looked out at a block of concrete apartment buildings and said something like: This is what happens when you don’t care about the environment. Actually, I replied, this is green living: People live close together; they can walk or take public transit; they live in apartments, share walls and heat and are relatively energy efficient; their carbon footprint is far lower than a family in a “green”, leafy single-family suburban house.

But my traveling companion was not altogether wrong about what he saw: New York, Boston, and every other city are now at pains to make a humane, equitable adaptation to a changing climate. We don’t want to create living spaces that bake in the sun’s heat, that have no shade or greenery or open space, surrounded by asphalt and highway, beset with deadly particulate pollution, flooding risk, and polluted stormwater runoff. Heat and air pollution are an expensive and deadly burden that fall especially heavily on low- and middle-income folks — a burden cruelly increasing with climate change.

As we decide what kinds of housing we are going to encourage in Arlington, we can do things in a more compassionate and inclusive way. We can incorporate environmental and aesthetic concerns, while allowing a mix of housing types that accommodate people of diverse incomes, family sizes, and life stages.

We can address both the climate crisis and the crisis-level housing shortage in Greater Boston. Environmental concerns are not a reason to say no to new housing. Rather, they are a part of the housing solution, in Arlington and regionally.

As Laura Wiener detailed in another post, The Housing Corporation of Arlington development at 10 Sunnyside (between Broadway and Mystic Valley Parkway, near Route 16), is an excellent example of implementing environmental/sustainability measures in an affordable (i.e. income-subsidized) multi-family dwelling. It is Passive House certified: An extremely stringent standard, using a combination of advanced and repurposed materials, high- and low-tech, to provide human comfort while bringing energy use to an absolute minimum.* The development features plentiful bike parking and a roof garden. It converts previously impervious pavement to landscaping, like planters, where stormwater can infiltrate the ground rather than carrying unfiltered pollutants into Arlington’s water bodies.

Another example of green infrastructure lives charmingly and unassumingly on some of our street corners. In 2020, Arlington installed rain gardens at the corner of Milton Street and Herbert Road in East Arlington. These little curbside oases act as a kind of green filter for storm water, catching pollutants (Fertilizer! Salt! Dog poop! Oil! Brake dust!) before they reach Alewife Brook and the Mystic River. Perhaps co-sited with new housing, wider buildout of rain gardens could keep nutrient pollution out of Spy Pond, preventing nasty algae growth which literally suffocates other aquatic life.

A caveat: We must take care not to load so many creative requirements onto new housing that it doesn’t get built at all. We need the housing. (See “The Problem with Everything-Bagel Liberalism” by Ezra Klein in the New York Times.) And under the new MBTA Zoning that we are required to implement, we must allow three-family housing in our new multi-family zones by right, i.e. without extra requirements or rigamarole.

But we could decide to add incentives to allow more housing above those requirements if such environmental improvements (rain gardens, green roofs, pollinator habitat, Passive House innovations, etc.) are included. Every new building is an opportunity for environmental adaptation. A vision for a greener, cooler, more inclusive Arlington takes shape. We can do this.

New housing development provides an opportunity to incorporate inclusive, environmentally friendly, win-win adaptations. Our environmental and housing goals must not be in tension with each other. With a coordinated approach, we can address the challenges of pollution, climate change, and our chronic and unjust housing shortage.

*As far as I can tell, only two other buildings in all of Greater Boston are Passive House certified: A new multi-family in Roxbury, and a single-family in Somerville.

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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:

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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.

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This 102 page document is the most recently revised set of recommendations by the Town of Arlington’s Redevelopment Board. The report takes into consideration the comments and information provided over the last few months’ public hearing process. It also incorporates a citizen petition which strengthens the case for increasing permanent affordable housing with the passage of these zoning related Articles. Town Meeting convenes on April 22, 2019.

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Will Arlington Set A Housing Goal?

After a week of good coverage on the need for more housing units in the greater Boston region, on August 2, 2019 the GLOBE carried the following editorial, mentioning the situation in Arlington.

Good news? On housing? In Massachusetts?

Yes, that’s right. Even here in the land of the $600,000 starter home, a few forward-thinking cities and towns are starting to make progress on what sometimes seems like an intractable problem: the inadequate production of new housing that has sent the cost of renting or buying in Greater Boston into the stratosphere.

It’s way too soon to declare victory — not when the median sale price for a house in Massachusetts is $429,000 and $420,000 for a condo, according to the Warren Group. High prices happen when demand gallops past supply, causing buyers to bid up prices of existing homes to insane levels. In addition to squeezing renters and contributing to gentrification, the skyrocketing price of housing has evolved into a real threat to the region’s economic competitiveness.

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Thankfully, last year 15 cities and towns in Greater Boston made a joint pledge to pick up the pace of new housing construction by permitting 185,000 new housing units by 2030. Collectively, meeting that goal would mean tripling the pace of housing production. Some of the members of the group, called the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, are doing their part to reach that goal faster than others — but almost all 15 report progress.

Even outside those three, there’s some impressive municipal-level progress. The Revere City Council approved development on the portion of the former Suffolk Downs racetrack that sits in that city, which will eventually bring in a whopping 2,700 housing units

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In Quincy, 1,500 housing units are under construction, and another 1,030 are either permitted or in the process of receiving permits. Medford has 497 housing units in construction. More than a thousand units are expected in Brookline over the next few years, in part thanks to the state’s 40B housing statute that lets developers bypass local zoning when towns have insufficient levels of affordable housing. Newton has 471 units under construction and another 273 permitted.

Other municipalities are working on plans or reforming zoning bylaws to set the stage for future growth. Austin Faison, Winthrop’s town manager, says that will involve setting a housing production goal. Everett rezoned land near the newly extended Silver Line, setting the stage for development. Braintree is in the process of updating its zoning bylaws that would include provisions for denser multi-family housing.

Arlington experienced a setback when its town meeting rejected an innovative plan to spur denser housing and allow so-called accessory dwelling units. Town manager Adam Chapdelaine said the town was now launching a “more cooperative effort” and would try again, and that the discussion would include coming up with a numerical goal.

The experience in Arlington points to one way the state can help municipalities. Town meetings and city councils require a two-thirds vote to change zoning, which can empower a small minority to thwart reforms needed to encourage housing. Governor Charlie Baker’s housing bill would change that by reducing to one-half the vote needed to change zoning — and deserves legislative approval pronto.

There’s one other way that the state can help, and this one won’t come as a surprise: better transportation. Access to transit can be a key to successful development. For instance, Revere wants a commuter rail stop at Wonderland. Without direct access to any rail service, Everett is banking on buses as part of its development plans.

Cities and towns that are moving forward on housing production inevitably encounter resistance, and they deserve great credit — not just for taking badly needed steps to build housing, but for doing so in a coordinated way. Keeping municipalities on the same page is part of what’s necessary to break down the longstanding barriers to housing in Massachusetts. As Chelsea city manager Thomas G. Ambrosino put it: “Having it be a region-wide effort and everyone rowing toward the same goal makes it easier for us to defend our efforts, because we can tell those who are critical about building that this is a regional need and everyone is in it together.”

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A Dissertation on Arlington’s Open Space Bylaws

(This post was originally an email message, discussion open space changes proposed by an Affordable Housing article during the Arlington, MA’s 2019 town meeting. It’s also a decent description of our town’s open space laws.)

Sorry this turned out to be a long post. Our open space laws are kind of complicated.

Arlington regulates open space as a percentage of gross floor area, rather than as a percentage of lot area. Let me give a concrete example: say we have a-one story structure with no basement. It covers a certain percentage of the lot area, and has an open space requirement based on the gross floor area (i.e., the interior square footage of the building).

Now, suppose we want to turn this into a two- or three-story structure. The building footprint does not change, and it covers exactly the same percentage of the lot area. However, the open space requirements double (if you’re doing a two-story building), or triple (if you’re doing a three story building). If that quantity of open space isn’t on the lot, then you can’t add the stories.

For this reason, I’d argue that our open space regulations are primarily oriented to limiting the size of buildings. You really can’t allow more density (or taller buildings) without reducing the open space requirements. Alternatively, if the requirements were based on a percentage of lot area, we probably wouldn’t need a reduction. (Cambridge’s equivalent is “Private Open Space”, and they regulate it as a percentage of lot area.)

The other weird thing about our open space laws is that we define “usable open space” in such a way that it’s possible to have none. (Usable open space must have a minimum horizontal dimension of 25′, a grade of 8% or less, and be free of parking and vehicular traffic). I live on a nonconforming lot that does not meet these requirements, as do the majority of homes in my neighborhood.

Suppose I wanted to build an addition, which would increase the gross floor area. With the non-conformity, I’d have to go in front of the ZBA and show that the current lot has 0% usable open space, and that the house + addition produces a lot with 0% usable open space. Because 0% = 0%, I have not increased the nonconformity, and would be able to build the addition, provided that all of the other dimensional constraints of the bylaw are satisified. Although this isn’t directly related to Article 16, it’s an amusing side effect of how the bylaw is written.

Finally, roofs and balconies. Section 5.3.19 of our current ZBL allows usable open space on balconies at least six feet wide, and on roofs that are no more than 10′ above the lowest occupied floor. We allow 50% of usable open space requirements to be satisfied in this manner.

The relevant section of Article 16 would create a 8.2.4(C)(1) which includes the language

Up to 25% of the landscaped open space may include balconies at least 5 feet by 8 feet in size only accessible through a dwelling unit and developed for the use of the occupant of such dwelling unit.

Article 16’s incentive bonuses strike the usable open space requirement, and double the landscaped open space requirement. With only landscaped open space, 5.3.19 doesn’t apply (it only pertains to usable open space). The language I’ve quoted adds something 5.3.19-like, but for landscaped open space. I say 5.3.19-like because it has a 25% cap rather than a 50% cap, and requires eligible balconies to be at least 5’x8′, rather than 6′ wide.

Here are a few pieces of supporting documentation:

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