Geoff Engler
Geoffrey Engler
Co-founder, Strategic Land Ventures
Age: 49
Industry experience: 25 years
Breaking down barriers to multifamily development in Massachusetts runs in the family for Geoff Engler. His father, Robert Engler, started Cambridge-based consulting firm SEB Housing in 1970 after Massachusetts legislators enacted the Chapter 40B comprehensive permit law, which makes it easier to build multifamily housing in communities with zoning restrictions. The elder Engler has consulted on projects in more than 100 communities that generated more than 12,000 housing units under Chapter 40B. Geoff Engler joined the firm in 2005, and founded Needham-based Strategy Land Ventures with developer Justin Krebs six years ago to pursue approval of their own multifamily projects. The firm has five projects totaling 551 units in progress, including the recent groundbreaking of a 147-unit project at 416 Cambridge St. in Winchester, along with projects in Bridgewater, Medway and Scituate.
Q: In your consulting work at SEB, what’s the profile of a typical client?
A: The typical clients are developers of multifamily housing, ranging from more of the small development companies to some major national and some publicly-traded developers.
Q: One of your consulting services is entitlement risk analysis. What are some of the red flags you look for when a client is assessing a site?
A: There’s certain things relative to the state regulations, first of all. If towns have achieved their minimum threshold status of having 10 percent of the housing stock as affordable, they have more control over 40B projects that get filed. That’s the first order of business, seeing whether or not the town has hit 10 percent. There are other considerations. Towns can do a housing production plan, and if they get that plan certified by the Department of Housing and Community Development and they make progress, that provides the municipality with more control over the applications they review. If a town has not hit 10 percent, you look at what’s the access like? What are the municipal services? Does it need a wastewater treatment plant? Are you trying to put a 300-unit development at the end of a residential cul-de-sac? There’re 10 or 15 things you would look at right off the top and say, “You have a serious issue here,” or not. Presuming there are no deal-breakers, you would move forward to get a site approval letter from a subsidizing agency, which is your ticket to file with the local zoning board of appeals.
Q: Are communities viewing housing production plans as a defensive mechanism against development?
A: I don’t want to paint every community with a broad brush. Some do in earnest want to create affordable housing and they want a roadmap, but in my experience, most towns have done housing production plans as a way to fight off projects they don’t want and to limit development. We’re currently before the Manchester-by-the-Sea ZBA and they did a housing production plan, but they achieved compliance as a way to stop our project. They tried to count an existing housing development as affordable, even though they had no basis other than an informal survey. The reason we liked [the site off School Street] is we have no residential abutters near us. We’re not creating shadows, we’re not visually impacting them, but we have a very strong opposition group fighting that.
Q: What are the benefits and drawbacks of a developer pursuing a “friendly 40B” approval?
A: The major distinction is in a friendly 40B, before you file with the statement, you have to have the endorsement of the chief elected official in the municipality, the select [board] chair, the mayor or the city council president, before it gets filed with the DHCD. You have to do more due diligence up-front to see if the town is more receptive to what you’re proposing. I spent nine months in Manchester and half a dozen hearings with the Board of Selectmen, and at the 11th hour the town asked us to surrender all appeal rights, which was a total deal-breaker. There was no way I could do that, so I had to pivot and do a traditional 40B. One of the benefits of 40B as a developer is you have a strong appeal mechanism.
Q: What do developers need to know about whether a town can assert safe harbor?
A: If a town has more than 1.5 percent of its total land area designated for affordable housing, that also affects the equation. How that land area gets calculated is a little more detailed and complicated. Eight or 10 times, we’ve seen towns incorrectly doing those calculations and asserting they hit their land area minimum. The preponderance of cases that have been adjudicated have found in favor of the developer as it relates to the land area minimum.
Q: What are the best community outreach strategies to overcome opposition to development and specifically 40B projects?
A: You’re trying to have neighborhood meetings and it’s an intensive grassroots campaign to try to get support. Sometimes no matter what you do, the municipality or neighborhood groups are not going to be supportive and that’s OK. Every project is different. Real estate is always local. If you asked the citizens of the commonwealth, 90 percent would say we need more housing. But when you have to do it in a town, it’s very specific and not conceptual.
Engler’s Five Favorite Movies Set in Boston:
- The Town
- The Departed
- Good Will Hunting
- Spotlight
- The Fighter
