What the New MBTA Mandate Will Mean for East Arlington

The New East Arlington?

 Just over a year ago, our State legislature passed a law revising the Zoning Act to create a special overlay zoning district within half a mile of MBTA stations,

“An MBTA community shall have a zoning ordinance or by-law that provides for at least 1 district of reasonable size in which multi-family housing is permitted as of right; provided, however, that such multi-family housing shall be without age restrictions and shall be suitable for families with children..."https://www.mass.gov/doc/draft-guidelines-for-mbta-communities/download
 

The law did not specify what a reasonable size district was, leaving it up to the Dept of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to fill in this 'minor' detail.  What the DHCD came up with is staggering in its potential impact on East Arlington. 

Arlington is being punished by the State.  Our crime was allowing too many homes to be built on small lots, putting us into the top 4% densest communities in Massachusetts.  The new MBTA overlay district mandate now requires us to zone for the increase of far more households than our much less dense neighboring communities, who have lagged behind in providing housing.


The law requires that we create an MBTA district within a half mile of the Alewife T station, for which our local zoning bylaws must be amended to allow 3 family houses or apartment buildings by right on each lot.  Dimensional restrictions such as height, lot size, front and side yard setbacks, parking requirements, and others must be eased so that many, many more units per acre could be built.  Just how many more is dependent upon how dense a community already is.  Illogically, denser communities must do the most, while lightly developed communities can do the minimum.  For Arlington,  our zoning bylaws must be loosened sufficiently to permit the eventual expansion of this neighborhood to 5115 units, 25% of Arlington’s current housing stock.  This is not what our legislators voted on--it was unilaterally tacked on by the State Dept. of Housing and Community Development (DHCD).

In this part of East Arlington, within that half mile radius, there are roughly 1200 housing units. The housing density is already slightly greater than 15 units per acre, generally considered to be suitably dense for neighborhoods near a T station.  But it is more than 90% comprised of two family and condo duplexes.  According to the MBTA mandate, these don’t count.  It is part of DHCD Newspeak that the definition of multi-family now excludes the two family home.

The nearly impossible requirement of this mandate is that for Arlington, this zoning district within the half mile radius must have the potential to accommodate 5115 housing units on just the 80 buildable acres.  Much of the rest cannot be developed, including the unusable wetland section of the Mugar tract, Thorndike Field, Magnolia playground, Alewife Brook and Reservation, and Route 2.  Zoning for 5115 units on 80 acres means achieving 64 units per acre, more than four times denser than now.

Rezoning for townhouses and small apartment buildings won't meet the requirement.  This would require extreme zoning for Rindge Towers type of density.  We could comply with the MBTA Mandate by rezoning this district to allow 22 story apartment buildings by right.  By Right means that the plans do not have to be reviewed by the Redevelopment Board or the Zoning Board of Appeals.  Residents have zero say regarding a development next door.  All they would get is one week of advance notice that construction was to begin.  And these buildings could be built anywhere in this neighborhood.  Up to twenty-one Rindge Towers could possibly be built, replacing every existing home in this neighborhood as well as the East Arlington businesses along Mass Ave.  That would satisfy the Mandate.  And of course all of these households would continue to be limited to Lake St and Mass Ave for access.

The Mandate does offer some flexibility.  If we can't squeeze all 5115 potential units inside the half mile radius, we are allowed to expand the rezoning in order to locate up to half of the units outside that district.  That means we could get away with 11 story towers similar to Somerville's Clarendon Hill apartments on Broadway, by expanding the MBTA district to cover most of Precincts 2 and 4.

  

The Mandate goes even further in not accepting age-restricted senior housing developments as qualifying.  It appears to exclude small studio and one bedroom apartments, because it specifies that the housing must be suitable for families with children. 

We should start thinking about where to build a third elementary school to supplement Hardy and Thompson.

Our new 5 year Housing Plan is already obsolete, even before approval by the Select Board. It briefly references the MBTA Mandate in glowing terms such as the ‘winds of change’ and ‘Governor Baker’s legislative victory.’ Written prior to the issuance of the DHCD guidelines, it mistakenly believes that the goal is a reasonable 15 units per acre, rather than the four time greater density that the Mandate actually requires of Arlington.  It fails to consider how Arlington might comply with these extraordinary demands, and it does not examine the impact.

The Future Hardy School Neighborhood?

Don Seltzer

Squeezing Out the Middle Third

 

 Squeezing Out the Middle Third

 

Next week, Arlington’s Redevelopment Board will complete its review of the draft version of the new Housing Production Plan before passing it on to the Select Board to approve.  The submitted plan is deeply flawed in that it does not include the required analysis of likely growth as it affects our infrastructure, particularly our schools.  Also, it diverges from the goal of increasing affordable housing by proposing measures that are only meant to improve housing choices for the very highest income households.

This Plan, developed by consultants Barrett Planning Group LLC and Horsely Witten Group Inc, will be the replacement for our current Plan approved in 2016.  A comparison with this previous plan reveals a serious lack of analysis and discussion of the real impacts of the proposals.

The State Dept of Housing and Community Development provides guidelines for just what needs to be in a Housing Production Plan. 

 https://www.mass.gov/doc/housing-production-plan-guidelines/download
In particular, there is the fundamental requirement that:

…At a minimum, the Plan must examine:
The capacity of the infrastructure to accommodate future growth, including plans  to ensure that future needs are met. The analysis should evaluate the impact of future housing development… The infrastructure analysis should evaluate the capacity of water and sewer systems, roads, utilities, public transit, schools, and any other public facilities that will impact or be impacted by future housing development.

There are no such analyses in this plan.  There isn’t even an estimate of growth.  All that we see under the headings for infrastructure are filler material, describing what we have now, but no insight into what level of growth can be handled and how to plan for it. 

Look at the entry for public schools.  In Arlington’s last HPP there were four pages of analysis of the impact on schools.  In this report, there is just a single paragraph, dismissing capacity as being of no concern, based solely upon the 2015 McKibben forecast which predicted that we would have reached our peak in student enrollment by this year.  However, that 2015 forecast made no assumptions about housing growth, nor changing family demographics from new, denser housing.  Last year’s Census shows that Arlington’s population is growing far faster than McKibben predicted.  We have already reached a population level that the report predicted we would not achieve until the 2030’s.

2016 Population Prediction

Consider this rule of thumb - for every 80 housing units we add, expect to fill up another classroom.
 

Consider the cost of a new elementary school - $55,000,000 (Marblehead’s Brown Elementary School, recently opened).

The analysis of transportation infrastructure is similarly deficient in any real content.  It reduces down to the simplistic statement that the most significant impact of traffic is that it will spur opposition from neighborhood residents during the permitting process.  


The other failing of this draft housing plan is that it strays from the specific direction of the state in its scope.  The guidelines emphasize that the Plan should address housing for families making “not more than 30% Area Median Income (AMI), more than 30% but not more than 80% AMI, and more than 80% but not more than 120% AMI…”

And yet, the very first recommended action in this plan has nothing to do with this range of affordability.  It seeks to eliminate our single family districts by allowing two-family homes by right everywhere.  It is implied that this will somehow lead to more affordable housing.

It is an unrealistic pipe dream to expect that by doing so, we will somehow generate any sort of trickle down housing for low income households of under 80% AMI.  This is not a matter of speculation.  Arlington has many hundreds of single family homes in the R2 districts.  As these gradually reach the market - and sometimes without actually going on the market - they are immediately snapped up by developers for teardown and conversion to duplex condos,  for which each unit is more expensive than the original single family.  

In the past 5-6 years, almost 70 homes in R2 districts have been demolished and redeveloped as duplex condominiums.  Some were single families, some were traditional two family rentals.

All were moderately affordable, but all were replaced with more expensive condos. These examples show clearly the likely trend if we allow two families by right in R0-1 districts.

 

 

 

Much the same is happening with older two-family homes, a major part of our rental stock. As the draft plan acknowledges,

"Two-family rentals have historically been common in Arlington, but as two-family properties convert to condominium ownership, the supply of small-scale rental options will decline"

It is clear from dozens of recent duplex conversions in town that this type of redevelopment spurs accelerated gentrification, producing housing affordable only by high income families making more than 200% of AMI.

At last month’s presentation to the Redevelopment Board, the author of this draft report was asked by a Board member how the elimination of single family zoning to allow duplexes would increase affordability when recent sales data showed that single family homes were being replaced with condo duplexes.

The report’s author was quite candid that “Not everything in this report is about affordability…I was not thinking about affordability with two family… some of it is about choice…”

 

December 16 Presentation of draft HPP

 

The “choice” that is being promoted is for the affluent.
“As you become more affluent your housing choices decline… if your incomes go up the housing choices decline”.

 
The author was referring to households in the 200%+ AMI category, who could afford/wanted to spend $1M or more on a home.  The ‘problem’ of choice was that their selection was primarily limited to traditional single family homes, because there are not enough luxury condo duplexes in Arlington to satisfy the demand.

There is nothing in the State Guidelines to suggest that we should be implementing housing policy to promote more choices for households making more than 200% AMI.

The residents who would be most affected are the one third of Arlington households that have an income of between $100K and $200K.  This includes many of our first responders and two-income teacher households.  For this Middle Third, smaller, older single family homes that range from $600K - $800K are attainable.  But this Housing Plan attacks that existing moderately affordable housing base by encouraging teardowns and replacement with duplex condos.  

 What the Actual Data Shows About R2 District Trends

 

 The Middle Third of Arlington is slowly being squeezed out, by eliminating the home ownership that is within their means. Arlington needs a Housing Plan that focuses on adding more affordable housing, rather than accelerating gentrification.

Don Seltzer