Here comes the neighborhood

For 17 years, developer Buff Chace has planned to build residential neighborhoods on the edges of his Mashpee Commons shoppin g center on Cape Cod. And for most of those years, municipal or county regulations and conventional zoning have stood in the way, even while Mashpee Commons blossomed into a prosperous collection of over 90 stores, restaurants, and service businesses. Now, by using a state law that allows developers of affordable housing to override restrictions imposed by local governments, Chace expects to start constructing 396 townhouses, apartments, detached houses, live/work units, and “patio homes” next year. The housing, and about a dozen acres of parks and open space, will fill 52 acres within a few minutes’ walk of the steadily growing retail center. Under Chapter 40B of Massachusetts General Laws — originally dubbed the “Anti-Snob Zoning Act” — Chace can ignore Town of Mashpee zoning if he makes 25 percent of the new housing units permanently available to people with below-average incomes. On Cape Cod, where a median-priced house costs $345,000, Chapter 40B has become an important and sometimes contentious source of affordable housing. “We’re doing this as a ‘friendly’ 40B, where it’s fully negotiated with the town,” says Douglas S. Storrs, senior vice president of Chace’s Mashpee Commons Limited Partnership. “We’re not forcing it down their throats. We’ve met with every board in town.” Mashpee Town Administrator Joyce Mason concurs that unlike some developers of 40B projects, who she says “rape the land” and push large apartment projects onto unwilling towns, the developers of Mashpee Commons have taken into account the town’s concerns about open space, aesthetics, impact on the town budget, and other matters. Although the 396 units do not comply with current zoning, Storrs notes that “we’re conforming to the local master plan and the regional master plan” The housing is seen as critical to helping Mashpee Commons, which has 185 acres overall, evolve into a multi-dimensional town center. In an area where zoning currently calls for two-acre house lots, Chace and Storrs intend to build detached houses on 5,000- to 10,000-square-foot lots and townhouses on 2,500- to 3,000-square-foot lots. Also in that area will be 665-square-foot one-bedroom patio homes, each with its own courtyard — an idea suggested by Andres Duany, who, with his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, has been involved in planning at Mashpee Commons since 1988. In an area currently zoned for commercial development, Chace and Storrs intend to use Chapter 40B to build townhouses, apartments, and live/work units. The overall project will contain a mix of rental and for-sale units, which the town administrator says should “open up opportunities for young teachers, first-year firefighters” and others who now have a hard time finding housing. The project is expected to break ground in the latter half of 2004. It will take an estimated seven to ten years to complete, Storrs estimates. Although the developers have forged close relations with town officials over the years, “I’m sure a lot of people in town will be opposed,” says Sean Gonsalvez, who covers Mashpee, the third-fastest-growing municipality in Massachusetts, for the Cape Cod Times. “It’s already an impossible traffic situation at the rotary,” Gonsalvez says. Traffic and the impact on the Mashpee River and surrounding waterways “will be the two big issues for people,” he says. The 40B application may well triumph despite the expected opposition. Currently the only housing at Mashpee Commons is 13 apartments above a few of the center’s shops. There’s a waiting list for those apartments, which command monthly rents ranging from $725 for a 600-square-foot studio to $925 for an 885-square-foot one-bedroom apartment to $1,375 for a two-bedroom, 1,350-square-foot unit. Independent of the state-authorized affordable housing law, the developers are breaking ground this September on four new buildings containing 27 one-bedroom and loft-style units — part of a total of 100 residential units permitted for the core of Mashpee Commons. When all the housing now planned is built, Mashpee Commons will contain approximately 500 households, furthering the developers’ goal of converting a strip shopping center into more of a community gathering place. “Once this is built, this becomes a real downtown,” says Storrs. Plans for building residential neighborhoods outside the core have long been stymied. Storrs says he and Chace ultimately decided not to try to persuade the town to change its zoning because that would have required a hard-to-obtain two-thirds vote of approval by a meeting of all the town’s residents, which takes place only once a year. The state law authorizing 40B housing suspends ordinary zoning but does give the local Zoning Board of Appeals substantial influence over the size, design, and placement of the housing. Since the early 1970s, the act has permitted production of about 30,000 housing units statewide, including 18,000 units for people with incomes below 80 percent of the area median. Storrs notes that the exteriors of the affordable units at Mashpee will look indistinguishable from the market-rate units among which they will be interspersed.