Major changes to Arlington’s zoning are being proposed as our 2016 Housing Production Plan is updated, and in the recently released Fair Housing Action Plan, prepared for us by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. These changes are being framed as pathways to increase our supply of affordable housing and redress historically exclusionary zoning. The latest proposal gaining traction is to allow multi-family units in all districts, including those currently zoned for single families.
However, the idea that multifamily housing drives affordability, and therefore greater inclusivity, is just mistaken. All you have to do is look at the duplexes built in town, on the sites of former single-family houses, to see that more housing does not equal cheaper housing. What it does do is maximize the developer's profit for a particular parcel. Instead of fixing up and selling one house for $1 million, the developer demolishes the single family, builds two units, and sells each for $1 million. In just one example, the Webcowet neighborhood has seen seven single-family homes, which listed for $700-$800K, demolished, with all trees lost. They were replaced with luxury duplex townhouses that are now selling for well over $1 million each.
Many people have the mistaken idea that the housing market works like a commodity market, where pure supply and demand economics drive prices. Housing prices are in part driven by overall supply and demand, but they have a lot more to do with location, perceived desirability, nearby amenities, and other factors. Why else would real estate ads tout “desirable Dallin neighborhood” or “steps from Capitol Square?” What people fail to consider is that we live in a regional housing market. Supply and demand influencing housing prices is not limited to just one town. Real estate economists will tell you the regional housing market for the Boston area is very large, extending to New Hampshire, Framingham, and Quincy.
Adding housing has not lowered prices in nearby communities, such as Cambridge, where the construction of large condo buildings and widespread gentrification have driven people out of neighborhoods that were deemed undesirable not so many years ago. Million-dollar condos in Somerville would have been unthinkable fifteen or twenty years ago, but now Somerville is trendy and increasingly unaffordable, despite all the new condo construction and the conversion of industrial sites to housing. With tech jobs increasing in Cambridge and the Seaport district, neighborhoods near the Red Line with amenities for young populations have been in tremendous demand and prices have soared.
To create affordable housing, we have to build affordable housing. Otherwise, we will simply add primarily market-rate housing and continue to look like we currently look, with little increase in affordability or diversity.
There is a growing consensus among housing researchers that adding housing does not create affordability except under very specific circumstances, which do not exist in Arlington and are not created by any of the proposals we’ve seen thus far.
We need better plans, not the same old plans.
