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.
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| 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…”
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| 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
