Boston’s burgeoning growth makes today an exciting era for the city – but judging by a panel discussion among housing experts this morning, it’s not at all clear how the city can tackle longstanding obstacles to accomplish its lofty housing goals.

Boston is projected to grow to more than 700,000 residents in the next 15 years, a number it hasn’t seen since the 1950s, and Mayor Martin Walsh’s new housing plan calls for an additional 53,000 units to be built to accommodate the growth, many of them aimed at middle-class residents. Increasing the density of development in Boston’s existing neighborhood will be a key part of successfully integrating that growth, the panel agreed. The panel included developer Kenan Bigby of Trinity Financial; Sheila Dillon, director of the Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development; architect Frederick Kramer of ADD Inc.; and Paul McMorrow, real estate columnist for The Boston Globe and associate editor of CommonWealth Magazine.

"It’s really about, how do we reshape and repurpose the neighborhoods to reshape this new growth that we’re seeing? We’ve had more growth in this last decade than we’d had in the previous three. And the slow-growth method that we use to send projects through the pipeline doesn’t work anymore," said McMorrow.

Bigby pointed to several key elements of successful projects his group has worked on that have allowed them to build more densely in existing neighborhoods: Finding transit-adjacent sites that allow developers to cut down on costly parking; building along existing busy corridors where larger buildings don’t seem out of place; re-using former industrial or commercial sites with existing infrastructure to support bigger buildings; and including mixed-use features like ground floor retail or office space, which provide amenities to the entire neighborhood, helping to garner community support. Finding a site that ticks off all the boxes can be tough, however, and mixed-use projects generally require more complex financing packages, as different elements of the project take differing amounts of time to come online. That can mean working with city and state partners to make them viable, Bigby said.

Dillon pointed out that the city is currently working with the MBTA and the Massachusetts Department of Transit to help identify underdeveloped, transit-adjacent parcels that would be ripe for development. 

But there remain many obvious obstacles to increasing density, and few obvious solutions. Boston’s outdated zoning code and slow slog of development approvals make it too tough to get new projects done, while the city’s outdated infrastructure makes it expensive. 

But one of McMorrow’s suggestions – a wholesale reform of the city’s zoning, especially near transit – was met with demurrals from Dillon and Bigby, who said that in their experience developers prefer to tackle acquiring potential zoning variances on a project-by-project basis.

When a neighborhood spends years coming to consensus on a development plan, it can actually make it harder for developers to get projects done, Bigby explained.

"When they’ve come up with a plan, they want you to stick to it," he said, which can be difficult for developers, who need to be flexible with project specs in order to respond to shifts in the climate for financing over the many months or years it can take to complete a big development.

And while building projects in places where existing infrastructure can support density is very useful, decades of neglect and under-funding often mean that installing any new development requires extensive, expensive upgrades to sewer tie-ins, utilities and other nuts and bolts – upgrades for which little federal or state funding is available. 

"The days of the government being able to fund the things we need to do are done, and it can’t all be on the backs of private developers," said Kramer. "I don’t have an answer on the funding issue, but we’re not anywhere close to solving that, short-term or long-term."

The event was sponsored by the Greater Boston Real Estate Board and Suffolk University and held at the Modern Theater. NECN’s Peter Howe acted as moderator.