MARC DRAISEN
Opposed to site restrictions
It’s no secret that smart- growth development has been a key part of Gov. Mitt Romney’s agenda during the last two years. But a recent, quiet effort by the Romney administration to steer mixed-income housing developed under the state’s anti-snob zoning law toward town centers and transit-oriented locations has drawn opposition from affordable housing proponents and developers.
Supporters of Chapter 40B, a law that enables developers to skirt local zoning rules in communities where less than 10 percent of the housing stock is affordable to low- and moderate-income households, say that requiring housing developed under the law to be built in so-called smart-growth locations would defeat the purpose of the statute and severely limit affordable housing development. The law, they say, is intended to stimulate the production of mixed-income housing in all Bay State communities, including rural towns and suburbs that may not have identifiable town centers or public transit nodes.
State officials and others who back smart growth, however, say that discussions about transit-oriented and other smart-growth initiatives must include all housing development, including projects developed under Chapter 40B, also known as the state’s comprehensive permit law. They point out that much of the housing developed under Chapter 40B is isolated, often located on the outskirts of communities far away from public transportation and town amenities, which contributes to sprawl and places additional burdens on municipal services and infrastructure.
The issue surfaced last week at a forum to discuss the findings of a new report which looked at how mixed-income rental housing affected single-family home values. The report by the Center for Real Estate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined seven rental housing developments created via the Chapter 40B statute in the Boston metropolitan area and found there was no negative impact on the values of nearby homes in those communities.
“One of the problems with [Chapter 40B] is that’s it’s not smart-growth oriented,” said Matthew Feher, a legislative analyst for the Massachusetts Municipal Association who was one of five panelists at the forum.
The authors of the study, Henry O. Pollakowski, David Ritchay and Zoe Weinrobe, selected some of the most dense and controversial projects developed under Chapter 40B – including a 525-unit development built over three phases in Woburn – and compared the price changes of homes located near those projects with those in the rest of the town. The study looked at home prices over a 20-year period, including the years before the projects were permitted. Home prices in neighborhoods around the developments followed a similar pattern to those elsewhere in town.
Concern over declining property values is just one of the issues that residents and local officials who oppose the development of affordable multifamily housing in their communities raise during the permitting process.
“This study does debunk a myth that a lot of people have,” said W. Tod McGrath, a lecturer at the MIT Center for Real Estate and president of advisoRE LLC.
Finding a Balance
In selecting mixed-income housing projects developed under Chapter 40B for the study, MIT researchers had a tough time finding projects that were integrated into a community and near residential neighborhoods with single-family homes.
The overwhelming number of Chapter 40B projects were either located at the edges of towns or cut off from the nearest community by large amounts of open space, highways, rail corridors or industrial and manufacturing uses, according to the study, and therefore could not be used in the report.
“From our perspective, that’s rather telling,” said Andrew Gottlieb, deputy secretary of the state Office of Commonwealth Development.
Housing developments that are on the outskirts of communities force residents who live in them to use their cars and rely less on walking and public transportation, and they place burdens on communities in terms of school transit costs, road upgrades and loss of community character, he said
“Where we would like to see [new housing development] occur is in areas that are central to communities so new housing takes advantage of existing infrastructure Â… and becomes part of the fabric of the community,” he said.
Gottlieb said it doesn’t make sense to discuss smart-growth development and not include Chapter 40B as part of that discussion.
The state Office of Commonwealth Development, led by Doug Foy, has had discussions with housing advocates and the officials from the state Department of Housing and Community Development about the issue, according to Gottlieb.
While many affordable housing advocates and homebuilders support including smart-growth principles and criteria in Chapter 40B development – by clustering housing units together, preserving open space and using green building techniques, for example – they argue that restricting projects to locations that qualify as smart-growth sites would have a devastating effect on housing production.
Since its inception in 1969, Chapter 40B has produced a total of 35,000 homes in more than 200 communities across the state, including 22,000 affordable and 13,000 market-rate housing units, according to the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association.
“If you Â… required that 40B developments be near transit or town centers that will limit the amount of affordable housing,” said Aaron Gornstein, executive director of the CHAPA. “If you do that, it defeats the purpose of Chapter 40B and undermines the intent of the statute.”
The issue is one of several “deep concerns” about the Romney administration’s recent housing policies that CHAPA cited in a letter to Foy last week.
CHAPA has drafted a set of recommendations on how to include smart-growth criteria in the Chapter 40B site approval process that were presented to Foy. Among the recommendations were that small developments and existing buildings that are being redeveloped be excluded from location restrictions; that developments in areas with no public transit or town centers should not be held to transit-oriented or town-centered requirements; and that developments proposed on undeveloped sites should be located along an existing primary or secondary road or near an employment area.
“Our concern is that smart-growth principles may work at cross-purposes against Chapter 40B if we do not take care to balance these two public policy purposes,” CHAPA wrote in its recommendations to Foy.
‘A Free Pass’
“[T]he application of smart-growth criteria needs to recognize that smaller cities and towns in suburban and rural areas face very different housing issues than urban areas. Such differences must be accounted for if we are not to inadvertently increase barriers to the production of affordable housing in these communities. While sites in these locations may not rank at the top of the smart-growth priorities, there are still demonstrable housing needs in these communities and they must remain eligible for 40B as well as state funding programs.”
No action has been taken on the recommendations and it’s not yet clear what policy changes the Office of Commonwealth Development may propose, according to Gornstein.
Marc Draisen, who as executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council advocates for smart growth, also said he is concerned about the state potentially restricting Chapter 40B projects to smart-growth locations.
“If we cut off locations [where 40B housing can be built], there’s a possibility we’ll see an unacceptable dip in affordable housing production,” Draisen said.
“I agree that some 40Bs are located in places that are not ideal, but that happens with market-rate housing as well,” he said. “I don’t think we should be restricting the ability to locate 40B developments until we make sure we have taken other steps to pick up the state slack in affordable housing production.”
Draisen said developers often build housing on the outskirts of towns because land is cheaper in such locations and town officials are more likely to support dense developments that are far away from existing residential neighborhoods and town centers.
One town official recently told Draisen that he liked a particular Chapter 40B development because it was so far away from the rest of the town that “no one will even know it’s there.”
If the state wants to steer Chapter 40B development to town centers where housing development is more expensive, developers may need state subsidies or other incentives to make the projects work, Draisen said.
Homebuilders argue that applying location criteria to Chapter 40B housing would require a change in statute, which needs approval from the Legislature. They say that the Office of Commonwealth Development’s pursuit of regulatory changes and the adoption of any such changes would likely fail to survive a legal challenge in court.
“The homebuilders’ association strongly opposes any effort to apply smart-growth locational criteria to Chapter 40B development,” said Benjamin Fierro III, legal counsel for the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts.
If the administration’s efforts are successful, “it would result in the wholesale exemption of many suburban and rural communities from the applicability of Chapter 40B,” he said.
“It really would give them [communities without transit nodes and well-defined town centers] a free pass,” said Fierro.
The issue of smart growth and Chapter 40B has popped up before. A task force appointed by Romney that drafted a report with recommendations on Chapter 40B nearly two years ago noted as one of several issues it examined that “principles of sustainable development and smart growth are not a prominent factor in determinations of [Chapter 40B] project eligibility.”
The task force recommended that subsidizing agencies that are determining project eligibility take into consideration several factors to ensure that the project is appropriate to the site, including density and size, principles of sustainable development, and community impact.
Aglaia Pikounis may be reached at apikounis@thewarrengroup.com.
