The presentation, dated March 11, 2019, includes slides used to present the information necessary to understand the rationale for zoning changes, the location of the zoning areas under consideration and the charts, tables and maps that help describe the situation. The proposed zoning changes, especially articles 6, 7, 8, 11 and 16, only cover changes affecting about 7% of the Town, those parts of the Town that are currently zoned R4-R7 and the B zoning districts.
Related articles
A report by Mass Housing Partnership’s Shelly Goehring looks at Arlington’s housing development history and policies to understand how municipal action and inaction can contribute to housing inaffordability and can limit the population diversity within a community. The report implies that it has been difficult historically for reputable housing developers to work with the regulatory structure within Arlington to get housing built.
Massachusetts has the nation’s 2nd largest gap in homeownership between households of color (31% own homes) and white households (69% own homes).
See the complete report for more information.
(by Steve Revilak)
In 2021 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed the MBTA Communities act, which requires cities and towns served by the MBTA (aka “MBTA Communities”) to create districts where multi-family housing can be built by-right, without a disretionary approval process. The law was intended to help address the Commonwealth’s housing shortage, and to encourage more transit-oriented development. Building housing near transit and walkable areas has a lot of environmental benefits; it let’s people take trips without driving, lessens congestions, and cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a solid strategey.
Arlington created its multi-family districts in the fall of 2023 and the Attorney General’s office approved them in June 2024. The laws have been on the books for just over a year — what kind of a difference are they making in Arlington?
2024 was a slow year for the MBTA Communities act in Arlington; there was one application which turned a two-family home on Belknap St into a pair of two-family homes, for a net change of two additional dwellings. 2025 has brought more activity. There are four applications under the review by the Arlington Redevelopment Board but none have been approved yet. These are:
- 225 Broadway, to convert a two-family home into a four-family,
- 126 Broadway, to convert a two-family home into a mixed use building with space for a business on the first floor, and 14 apartments,
- 18 Grafton, to convert a one-family home into a four-family, and
- 9-11 Robbins Road to convert a two-family home to nine apartments
There was an additional application to convert four apartments to five at 259 Broadway, but the applicant withdrew after their first hearing.
If all of these projects are approved, the net change will be an additional 26 homes, which represents a 0.1% increase relative to the 20,460 dwellings that Arlington had as of the 2020 census. It’s been a very slow trickle.
The MBTA Communities act was a meaningful reform which is just starting to make a difference. It’s bringing proposals for smaller multi-family homes that used to be the mainstay of our housing stock, but are generally rare today. However, the MBTA Communities Act is only one tool and Massachusetts will have to do more in order to build the 222,000 homes we need.
(By Vince Baudoin and James Fleming)
Could Arlington be better using its curb space? Here are some ways the curb can be used to create green infrastructure, promote public safety and accessibility, support sustainable transportation, strengthen business districts, and enable new ‘car-light’ development.
Roughly six inches high and made of concrete or granite, the curb marks the edge of the roadway, channels runoff, protects the sidewalk, and gathers stray leaves. When not assigned any other use, the space in front of the curb it usually serves as free storage for personal automobiles.
Yet the humble curb is a limited resource that can serve the community in many more ways. Have you thought about how your town budgets its curb space? For that matter, has your town thought about how it budgets its curb space?
While Arlington mostly uses its curb space for parking, some areas have other curb uses designed to achieve a specific goal. Consider the streets you use often. Have you seen an unsolved problem, or a missed opportunity, that a different use of the curb could help solve?
Create green infrastructure
The Town has miles of paved roadway. When it rains or snows, water runs into storm drains, carrying salt, oil, and other pollutants with it. The storm drains dump these pollutants directly into long-degraded waterways such as the Mill Brook, Alewife Brook, and the Mystic River. The Public Works department struggles to keep grates clear and drains from overflowing.
One solution: Use the curb for more greenery! The curb can be extended to create a rain garden or tree planting strip. The rain garden helps slow runoff and filter the water before it enters the drain, while trees benefit from additional room for the roots to grow without damaging the sidewalk. A side benefit: narrowing the street encourages drivers to slow down, making neighborhoods safer.
Promote public safety and accessibility
Often, portions of the curb are set aside for public safety purposes. For example, a fire lane provides fire department access to key buildings, such as the high school, shown below. Fire hydrants also enjoy special curb status.
Other times, no-parking zones are established to enhance the free flow of traffic, such as here at Broadway Plaza:
Where pedestrian crosswalks are present, a curb extension is a key safety enhancement. By narrowing the roadway, the curb extension encourages drivers to slow down and look for pedestrians. For pedestrians, it reduces the distance they must cross and prevents cars from parking directly next to the crosswalk and blocking visibility.
Finally, accessible parking spaces can be created along the curb. Arlington has at least 50 designated permit-only on-street parking spaces that provide convenient parking for residents with mobility issues or other disabilities.
Support sustainable transportation
When the curb is mostly used for cars, it is easy to overlook how curbside facilities can enhance other forms of transportation.
In the space of one or two parked cars, this bikeshare station offers space for 11 bikes. However, because it is installed on the roadway, it must be removed every winter so that snow can be cleared. If the curb were extended, the bikeshare station could be used year-round. Another nice feature is bicycle parking: the space to park one car can be used to park six or more bicycles.
A bus stop allows buses to pull to the curb. In some cases, it is appropriate to extend the curb so the bus would stop in the traffic lane; otherwise, it may experience delays when it merges back into traffic.
A bus priority lane provides a dedicated right of way for buses, helping to improve on-time performance. To date, these lanes extend only a few hundred feet into Arlington along Mass Ave. They have proven beneficial in many other communities.
Bike lanes, particularly if they are separated from cars by a physical buffer, greatly enhance the safety and comfort of people traveling on two wheels.
But with a limited roadway width, adding bike lanes is difficult unless the community is flexible enough to consider consolidating curb parking on one side of the street, or moving it to side streets entirely.
Finally, the Town could expand the use of on-street spaces for electric vehicle charging stations, such as this one on Park Ave:
Strengthen business districts
Nowhere is the curb more valuable than in business districts. Businesses thrive when their customers have a convenient way to reach them. Metered parking encourages people to park, do their business, and move along so another patron can take that space. Revenue from parking meters can be spent to improve the business district–for example, by planting flowers and trees.
Metered parking is not the only valuable use of curb space in a business district. Outdoor dining is a way the Town can directly support its restaurants by enabling them to serve additional customers. Here is one example in Arlington Center:
And in Arlington Heights:
Other valuable curb uses in business districts include taxi stands and loading zones. Loading zones in particular are crucial to businesses’ success and help prevent the street from being clogged by early-morning delivery trucks, late-night food-delivery vehicles, and everything in between.
Enable new ‘car-light’ development
With high housing costs and a relatively small commercial tax base, Arlington could benefit from some kinds of development. However, land is valuable and lots are small, so if new buildings are required to have large parking lots, it is very difficult to build new homes and businesses. Plus, large parking lots bring more cars and more traffic. But better curb management can help resolve this dilemma, supporting car-light development that is more sustainable and affordable.
For example, on-street permit parking can enable nearby development with few or no off-street parking spaces. New housing or businesses are a better use of land than parking and will generate more property tax revenue. When parking permits are priced appropriately, they are available to residents who need them but discourage households from adding extra cars they do not need.
Take these hillside houses: access to on-street parking made it possible to build on a steep hillside, where it would have been too expensive and difficult to blast to create off-street parking.
Conclusion
Ask your town leaders if they have a curb management strategy. Is the Town using its limited curb space in support of goals such as green infrastructure, public safety and accessibility, public transportation, local business, and car-light development?
This is the second in a series of “Arlington 2020” articles. The first article looked at the number of one-, two-, and three-family homes and condominiums in Arlington, and how that housing stock has changed over time. This article will examine changes in the value of those properties. We’re going to look at “value” through the lens of property assessments, so we should start with an explanation of what property assessments are and how they’re used.
A property assessment is simply the Town Assessor’s best estimate of what a property is worth, based on market values. The assessor’s office inspects properties every ten years; during intervening years, assessments are adjusted based on sale prices of similar homes in a given tax neighborhood. For all practical purposes, assessed values tend to trail market values by two years. In my neighborhood, property assessments are spot on — my house was assessed at $501,000 in 2020; during 2018, sales of similar homes in the neighborhood ranged from $495,000 to $520,000.
Condominiums have a single assessed value, which includes land and buildings. Otherwise, assessed values are broken down into land value, building value, and yard items (e.g., a garage or a shed).
Assessed values are used to determine the tax rate. The assessors page on the town website has calculations in worksheet form, but for all practical purposes, it’s just a division problem. One takes the total tax levy and divides by the sum of all property assessments (in thousands of dollars), and that’s the tax rate. An individual’s taxes are the assessed value of their property (in thousands of dollars) multiplied by the tax rate. If an individual owns (say) 1% of the assessed value in town, that individual will pay 1% of the property tax levy.
The main point is that assessed values are based on market values, but with a two-year lag. Consequently, we can use them as a way to see how home prices have changed over time.
With that background information out of the way, we can look at some numbers. Here’s a graph of the median assessed values for condominiums, one-family, two-family, and three-family homes from 2013 through 2020. (the “median” is a value such that half of the assessments are above, and half are below).
| year | Condominium | Single Family | Two-family | Three-family |
| 2013 | $297,800 | $472,850 | $532,650 | $581,600 |
| 2014 | $300,150 | $484,400 | $530,000 | $574,800 |
| 2015 | $318,200 | $507,900 | $572,000 | $616,300 |
| 2016 | $351,050 | $546,300 | $623,150 | $673,550 |
| 2017 | $357,750 | $581,200 | $663,900 | $714,800 |
| 2018 | $395,400 | $618,800 | $732,100 | $787,600 |
| 2019 | $463,250 | $701,550 | $851,200 | $897,500 |
| 2020 | $473,100 | $771,900 | $944,000 | $1,010,850 |
| %change | 58.87% | 63.24% | 77.23% | 73.81% |
As one would expect, two-family homes are worth more than single-family, and three-family are worth more than two. Condominiums have a lot of variety; they could be half of a duplex, or a single unit in an apartment building. But a general upward trend is clearly evident.
These values are straight out of the assessor’s database, and not adjusted for inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistic’s inflation calculator shows 12% inflation between 2013 and 2020; the %change is pretty considerable, even if one deducts 12% for inflation.
Next, I’d like to dig further into the 1–3 family assessments, by breaking them down into the value of land vs the value of buildings, and showing how that’s changed over time.
Single-family homes:
| year | Land value | Building value | Total assessed value |
| 2013 | $243,700 | $226,300 | $472,850 |
| 2014 | $253,750 | $227,050 | $484,450 |
| 2015 | $272,700 | $229,900 | $507,900 |
| 2016 | $296,400 | $243,950 | $546,400 |
| 2017 | $326,400 | $246,400 | $581,250 |
| 2018 | $360,900 | $248,100 | $618,800 |
| 2019 | $440,400 | $250,400 | $701,600 |
| 2020 | $448,600 | $316,300 | $771,900 |
| %change | 84.08% | 39.77% | 63.24% |
Two-family homes:
| year | Land value | Building value | Total assessed value |
| 2013 | $202,500 | $320,550 | $532,650 |
| 2014 | $212,250 | $307,800 | $530,000 |
| 2015 | $256,400 | $309,800 | $572,000 |
| 2016 | $262,500 | $349,400 | $623,150 |
| 2017 | $307,000 | $350,700 | $663,900 |
| 2018 | $352,500 | $373,900 | $732,100 |
| 2019 | $478,300 | $374,850 | $851,700 |
| 2020 | $454,500 | $486,100 | $944,000 |
| %change | 124.44% | 51.65% | 77.23% |
Three-family homes:
| year | Land value | Building value | Total assessed value |
| 2013 | $200,100 | $377,900 | $581,600 |
| 2014 | $209,100 | $364,100 | $574,800 |
| 2015 | $249,800 | $366,550 | $616,300 |
| 2016 | $259,950 | $412,350 | $673,550 |
| 2017 | $298,100 | $412,500 | $714,800 |
| 2018 | $343,050 | $438,800 | $787,600 |
| 2019 | $459,000 | $440,100 | $897,500 |
| 2020 | $440,100 | $578,450 | $1,010,850 |
| %change | 119.94% | 53.07% | 73.81% |
There are several things worth pointing out in these breakdowns.
First, note that the land and building values “jump” a bit between 2019–2020. 2020 was one of our full reassessment years, so I’m willing to attribute this to a periodic course correction. The total increase is generally linear, but the land/building composition has changed.
Second, the median land value for single-family homes is higher than the median building value, for all years between 2013–2020.
Third, most of the increases come from changes in land value. I believe this comes down to location, location, and location. Arlington has a well-respected public school system, and it’s close to universities and tech centers is Cambridge and Boston, and office parks in Lexington, Waltham, and Burlington. City amenities are close at hand.
So what does one do about our rising home prices, and in particular, the rising value of land? The first (and perhaps default) answer is to do nothing. Rising property values are a boon to homeowners who purchased a capital asset (i.e., a house) in the past, and have seen its value appreciate over time. The downside of doing nothing is that each year, increasing housing prices create an ever-increasing income threshold for new residents.
An alternative approach would be to allow more (and smaller) units to be built on each lot. This requires reconstruction or redevelopment, but it allows the cost of land to be amortized among several households. More units/lot means more people and more density, but it reduces the income threshold for buying in to Arlington. (Note that the per-unit cost for three-family homes is lower than the per-unit cost for two-family homes. Similarly, the per-unit cost for two-family homes is lower than the cost of a single-family home).
A third article will look at the distribution of housing prices in Arlington, and how the distribution varies by housing type.
Here is a spreadsheet of data shown in this post.