[Editor’s note: This series examines communities in Massachusetts that have increased affordable housing, as well as cities and towns in which the percentage of affordable units remains low.]
When a developer proposed building 40 homes five years ago in a Raynham business park that wasn’t designed to accommodate mixed uses, local officials battled to keep the housing from being constructed.
The developer successfully appealed the town’s denial of the project and eventually the development was built with 24 units instead of 40. “That served as a wake-up call,” said Town Planner Richard McCarthy.
The small town in southeastern Massachusetts with only about 12,000 residents was spurred to more actively plan for housing when it started seeing an influx of proposals like these under the state’s comprehensive permitting process or Chapter 40B, which allows developers whose projects include affordable housing to circumvent local permit denials in communities with low affordable housing stocks. Within a four-month period in 2002, the town had received four Chapter 40B proposals. “We were just getting hammered,” McCarthy said.
Raynham was one of only 16 communities across the commonwealth that increased its affordable housing by more than 5 percent over the last eight years. The town was also one of 17 to be added to the list of communities where at least 10 percent of the housing is deemed affordable by the state, according to information from the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association. Currently, there are a total 39 communities out of a total of 351 cities and towns that fall into that category. Almost 30 other municipalities are nearing the state-set 10 percent goal, with 8 percent or more of their housing stock deemed affordable housing.
Some Bay State communities are actively taking steps to increase and maintain affordable housing by adopting inclusionary zoning requirements, offering density bonuses to developers who create affordable units and designating certain parts of their communities for denser development. Others are developing affordable units on town-owned land or working through their local housing commissions to acquire housing using public resources.
Still, other municipalities have reached the 10 percent affordable housing goal after permitting a few large apartment developments under Chapter 40B, the state’s so-called anti-snob zoning law.
Communities that reach the 10 percent threshold or make significant progress in adding to their affordable housing stock within certain time periods are no longer subject to Chapter 40B and therefore cannot have local permitting decisions overturned.
In Raynham, the town worked cooperatively with the developers of two Chapter 40B projects, one of which produced 240 rental units, while at the same time fighting projects that were proposed for remote sites with little infrastructure or were considered too dense for the location, said McCarthy.
When the town created its master plan, the Housing Committee was reluctant to designate areas in the community where denser, affordable housing could be built, according to McCarthy. But now, the town is working with a regional planning agency on developing some type of housing plan.
“We’re engaging in a housing study to put a strategy in place to make sure that we maintain our 10 percent,” McCarthy said.
The state Department of Housing and Community Development counts all housing units that are affordable to households earning 80 percent of the area median income as affordable. That number is divided by the total number of housing units in the community, a number that is based on the most recent U.S. Census.
Chapter 40B supporters say a lot of the affordable housing production is occurring under the anti-snob zoning law, which allows developers to bypass certain local zoning rules in communities where less than 10 percent of the housing is affordable. Some suburban communities are eager to reach 10 percent to prevent so-called “unfriendly” 40B projects, developments that they think are too dense and inappropriate in size and location, from emerging.
But some town officials say reaching the 10 percent doesn’t keep the pressure off. Even though reaching the 10 percent enables Raynham to deny “bad projects,” McCarthy said, “We’ve got to maintain 10 percent now at this point.”
Marc Draisen, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council – a regional planning agency for 101 communities in Greater Boston – said some towns are trying to suggest through zoning where affordable housing would be appropriate within their borders. In that manner, a community is able to support affordable housing development under its own terms and in locations that it considers appropriate, he said.
How communities react once they reach the 10 percent threshold varies from town to town, said Draisen. While some towns reach the 10 percent threshold “feel they’re done,” according to Draisen, there are other communities that have been “very friendly to affordable housing for years.”
In fact, many of the towns and cities that have expressed interest in Chapter 40R, a law passed last year that enables towns to receive cash incentives from the state for establishing smart-growth districts where affordable housing can be developed, are communities where at least 10 percent of the housing is considered affordable, Draisen said.
“It doesn’t seem to matter that they’ve reached or exceeded 10 percent [affordability],” he said.
That appears to be the case in Burlington, which like Raynham exceeded the state goal 10 percent affordable housing this year.
“We’re always being proactive [about] creating affordable housing,” said Jayne Hyde, co-chairman of Burlington’s Housing Partnership. “We feel more than ever we need to really maintain it and keep going forward.”
Burlington reached 10.6 percent affordability with the help of several projects, including a creative land swap that involved the town and two developers, said Hyde. The deal yielded 78 senior housing units, including 42 affordable condominiums. The town’s officials also make an effort to secure affordable housing in any residential development proposal that comes before them, explained Hyde.
‘Local Control Issue’
Most of the communities that were at 10 percent in 1997 have not increased their affordable housing inventories by large percentages in the last eight years, and some have even slipped because they’ve lost federally subsidized public housing units and gained more high-end housing.
Lincoln was the only town to fall off the list of communities with 10 percent affordable housing. When the state calculated the housing inventory in 1997, 10.1 percent of the town’s housing stock was deemed affordable. In 2005, that percentage fell to 8.7 percent.
Part of the reason for the decline may have to do with the fact that town probably had more market-rate than affordable housing production, according to local officials. BJ Scheff, chairman of Lincoln’s Housing Commission, said the commission has been working continuously to boost its affordable housing numbers. But in a community where land and housing costs are so high and developable land is limited, that task can be tough, she said. The median selling price for a single-family home in Lincoln last year was $924,750, according to The Warren Group, parent company of Banker & Tradesman.
“We have other constraints too because we don’t have sewer,” said Scheff, noting that Lincoln relies on individual septic systems.
Despite the challenges, the town has worked to preserve its diversity and was the first to reach the state-set 10 percent goal of affordable housing, according to Scheff.
The town reached 10 percent with the help of two large mixed-income housing developments that were developed on land was controlled by the town: Lincoln Woods, a 125-unit rental development near the Mall at Lincoln Station; and Battle Road Farm, a 120-unit homeownership development near Hanscom Field, where about 40 percent of the units were affordable.
The town also negotiated with developers to include affordable housing in their projects. Just last year, the town worked with the developer for Minuteman Commons, a 32-unit condo development for people 55 and over, to set aside six units for lower-income households. It also used community preservation funds to buy a condominium and resell it as an affordable unit, and is currently in the process of building two rental units on land that Lincoln purchased from the state several years ago.
In the spring, Lincoln’s Housing Commission will ask town meeting to approve a program that would encourage owners of accessory apartments to rent them at affordable rates for at least 15 years.
Mark Whitehead, Lincoln’s town planner, said local officials are also hoping to present an inclusionary zoning law that would require an affordable housing component for any proposed subdivision that’s six units or larger.
Reaching 10 percent puts development back under local control, explained Whitehead, enabling the town to reject housing projects that don’t “work with the town.” Once Lincoln achieved 10 percent affordable housing, it was viewed more as opportunity to encourage development that fit into the town, he said, rather than a license to stop affordable development completely.
“It’s not that we don’t want to have any more affordable housing built,” he said. “It’s a local control issue of what works best for Lincoln.”
Due to its convenient location near the intersection of Route 9, the Massachusetts Turnpike and Interstate 495, Westborough has had a slew of development proposals under Chapter 40B. From 1992 to 2002, there were five Chapter 40B projects totaling about 650 units, 75 percent of which were rental, said Town Planner Jim Robbins. Town officials worked with the developers proposing those projects to make them more “palatable” to residents, Robbins said.
While such projects helped advance the town’s affordable housing numbers, Westborough officials realized that they had to continue to work to keep the count up. When the town’s leaders saw that Westborough was approaching the 10 percent threshold four or five years ago, they decided to be proactive about the types of affordable housing they wanted to see developed, Robbins said.
“Instead of being prey to a developer who wants to do a comprehensive permit in an area where we prefer it not to be done, we wanted to be able say ‘this is how we want it done,'” he said.
One of the things town officials decided to do was increase density near the train station to reduce traffic on local streets. Last year, the town established a transit-oriented village, a district where developers could build 10 units per acre as long as 20 percent of the units being built are affordable.
The town also allows developers to transfer development rights to the transit-oriented village and other parts of the community. Under that mechanism, a developer who owns an acre of land in a residential district with one-acre zoning can preserve the land permanently and transfer development rights to the transit-oriented village and receive a density bonus as well, allowing him to build a maximum of 14 units per acre. A developer is currently in the permitting process to build 300 townhouses in the transit-oriented village using transfer rights.
Robbins said because land values are so high and there aren’t that many large tracts of land left in town, it’s tough for developers to set aside affordable housing units. “We have to give them a [density] bonus” for the project to make sense economically, he said.
If some communities feel that the pressure to develop affordable housing diminishes once they reach 10 percent, Robbins thinks that “a false sense” of security because as housing is built the numbers change. “If you have a lot of land available, your percentage will fluctuate,” he said.
‘Meaningful Numbers’
That’s a point that Carole Hamilton, Wilmington’s director of planning and conservation, continually stresses to town officials.
“As long as we’re building housing, we still have to accommodate low- and moderate-income folks so we have to keep building [affordable housing],” said Hamilton. “It’s isn’t something where we can just say, ‘OK, we’re done.’ We have to keep planning and moving forward.”
Wilmington, where 9.4 percent of its housing is affordable, has made significant progress in its affordable housing efforts. In the last eight years, the Wilmington affordable housing inventory has increased by more than 5 percent.
Because of the town’s easy access to Interstates 93 and 495, the town really hasn’t had to go to extraordinary lengths to increase its affordable housing count. There have been plenty of developers that have emerged over the years with affordable housing and Chapter 40B proposals.
National developer AvalonBay Communities, for example, built two apartment complexes totaling 324 units under Chapter 40B that have helped boost the numbers. The town has also permitted condo developments for active adults totaling 126 units and a complex of 120 apartments called Regency Place.
“We haven’t had to be as proactive as some other communities that are less desirable,” acknowledged Hamilton.
Hamilton points out that the town hasn’t really had the time to plan and has been reactionary in some cases because it’s had to deal with so many comprehensive permit applications at once. Under state regulations designed to assist communities that have made progress with affordable housing, however, Wilmington will be able to get a breather from Chapter 40B developments that it finds undesirable because it has a state-certified housing plan and has increased its affordable housing by 0.75 percent in a calendar year.
Hamilton said this break will give Wilmington “the chance to solicit projects we like instead of having to react to what someone puts on the table.”
But Wilmington has already taken steps to address its housing needs. The town’s Housing Partnership works with developers to create projects that the town can support, Hamilton said. In addition, the town approved an overlay district for housing for people 55 and older which requires developers who build in the district to include at least 10 percent affordable housing units. The town also allows multifamily housing construction in the central business zone and as part of conservation subdivisions.
And town officials are in the process of considering some form of inclusionary zoning that would require project of a certain size include an affordable component, said Hamilton.
Amherst has employed a wide range of strategies to increase and retain affordable housing, including offering density bonuses to developers of affordable units and working with the local housing authorities to acquire properties, according to Jonathon Tucker, interim director of the planning director.
The Housing Authority is in the process of purchasing land to build 14 to 20 units of rental housing for people who rely on federal vouchers, said Roy Rosenblatt, community services coordinator for Amherst. In addition, the Housing Partnership/Fair Housing Committee is doing predevelopment work to build affordable homes on land that the town took by eminent domain in the late 1980s, he said.
In addition to these efforts, the town has supported “useful comprehensive permit applications,” noted Tucker in an e-mail to Banker & Tradesman, and the Planning Board is currently considering establishing inclusionary zoning rules.
Still, the town saw its percentage of affordable housing fall from 11 percent in 1997 to 10.6 percent in 2005.Tucker explained the most of the new housing developed between 1997 and 2005 was expensive. While some affordable units were built in that time, they did not add up to 11 percent of the total new housing.
The town also lost affordable units at several large, federally supported rental complexes that were expiring-use properties. Such properties were developed with low-interest loans from federal programs in exchange for keeping the rents affordable for a certain period of time. Once the time expires or if the mortgages are prepaid, owners of such properties are free to convert them to market-rate housing.
Amherst was able to preserve some of these units by working with the property owners, the local housing authority and the state, but many were lost, Tucker explained.
“Amherst supports its Housing Authority’s efforts to build or acquire new units, and uses its regulations to encourage the development of new affordable units, but it cannot directly build new affordable housing units in meaningful numbers. It does not possess the resources,” Tucker said.
Part two of this story will examine communities in Massachusetts where little affordable housing has been built.
Aglaia Pikounis may be reached at apikounis@thewarrengroup.com.
