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Andrea Campbell
Boston mayoral candidate Andrea Campbell told an audience at an online forum Wednesday that she would remove fully-affordable multifamily developments from the city’s Article 80 approvals process if elected.
The District 4 city councilor told an audience at an event moderated by nonprofit advocacy group Housing Forward – MA Executive Director Josh Zakim that she would look for many ways to streamline the permitting and entitlement process for residential projects in the city.
“We need to be building more housing in the city of Boston, and to do that we’re going to have to cut the red tape and bureaucracy to do that,” she said. “Someone said [to me] it’s easier to build affordable housing maybe in New York City than it is in Boston. That’s just ridiculous.”
All developments larger than 20,000 square feet must go through the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s Article 80 review process before heading to the city Zoning Board of Appeals for variances – needed by most projects, given the city’s decades-old zoning code – and the Inspectional Services Department for building permits. The process includes several layers of community review, with less for projects below 50,000 square feet, and often results in changes to a project’s size, program and design.
“it doesn’t remove community process, right? It just takes away some of the layers of bureaucracy that can take a project two or three years to go through, and that’s before we get shovels in the ground,” she said. “And that’s just problematic. We know there’s a significant demand for housing that is at affordable pricing points. And we know the longer we drag out the process, it is the consumer that bears the brunt right the cost of the unit goes up for them.”
To speed up the development process, Campbell said she would add more staff to the BPDA and the Inspectional Services Department, particularly hires who are more savvy about development financing and can explain that side of the project to residents and better work with developers to find solutions to residents’ concerns about a particular project.
Campbell said she would also initiate a citywide planning process aimed at finding consensus in the city’s neighborhoods for how to rezone some areas for more housing, especially at smaller scales like three-family houses. However, she said, some downzoning may be appropriate in some areas.
“Now you have someone building, but the neighborhood has changed dramatically, where you have single-family homes [today], 10 years ago it might have made sense to put up a 6-story building. Now it doesn’t,” she said. “When you think about the how cut back, in terms of the open space these communities have now is limited. When you think about the congestion created by the number of cars that will come to this development.”
Campbell said she would also boost the city’s focus on helping public housing residents who want to buy homes or move to privately-owned rental housing do so, in order to free up units for residents in need.
Housing Forward – MA estimates the city of Boston needs to add 69,000 new homes by 2030 to keep up with demand, Zakim said.
