A Massachusetts city girds for housing pressures

In 2008, Reconnecting America urged Somerville, Massachusetts, to take “strong, proactive steps” to ensure that the city’s coming wave of rail expansion produced “equitable transit-oriented development.” The fear was that as the regional transit authority extended its Green Line commuter rail service and added a station on the Orange Line, existing low- and moderate-income residents would see better-heeled people move in and bid up the price of housing.

One action the densely-built, approximately four-square-mile municipality took to alleviate the pressure was to adopt an inclusionary zoning ordinance. The mayor, Joseph A. Curtatone, “is very committed to restoring what was once a vibrant network of transit-line access that Somerville lost in the 1950s and ‘60s,” says Planning Director George Proakis. “He believes it’s critical to supporting sustainable development in the long term. At the same time, the mayor recognizes that part of Somerville’s appeal is its social and economic diversity, and he’s determined to preserve it.”

In most parts of the 76,000-population city, the ordinance mandates that at least 12.5 percent of housing in new developments be affordable. This requirement applies to any development containing 8 or more units. In the densest transit-oriented development districts, 15 percent of the units must be affordable.

A chief area where the requirement is being applied is Assembly Square—a mixed-use concentration that’s being built from scratch around the new Orange Line rail station. A project of Federal Realty Investment Trust, Assembly Square will contain 2,100 housing units, approximately 2 million square feet of offices, and other uses, says Proakis. “It’s a whole neighborhood,” he says.

Though orchestrated by Federal Realty, some 426 of the units in Assembly Square area are actually being built by the national developer Avalon Bay, mainly in the form of apartments above retail.
Along the future Green Line and next to a community walking and biking path, a development called Maxwell’s Green opened this spring, containing 184 apartments and 15 townhouse condominiums. Twenty-three of the apartments are affordable, and two of the condos were sold as affordable.

Without the affordable housing stipulation, all 199 units could have been beyond the means of the average Somerville resident. The market rate for studios in late April was $1,831 to $2,125.

Townhouse-style three-bedroom units have rented for just short of $4,000 a month. “These are prices we’ve never seen in Somerville,” says Proakis.

Have developers resisted the affordability mandate? “Not really,” says Proakis. “The housing demand around transit is so strong,” he observes, that the affordable component doesn’t make projects economically unfeasible. “The calculation is set, so they know what it costs and can build it into their financial pro formas.” The city itself will not subsidize the below-market units in these private development projects, he says.

The Obama administration helped the City address issues of equitable development by providing funds through its Sustainable Communities initiative for the rewriting the municipal zoning ordinance.

In Somerville, like most cities, different areas require different approaches. Assembly Square is an expanse of over 100 acres previously used for steel manufacturing, a shopping mall, and other business purposes—and able to accommodate an entire new neighborhood. The new project by Federal Realty will cover 45 acres of the new neighborhood. By contrast, much of Somerville consists of 2- and 3-family houses on narrow lots.

The 2008 report, prepared for Somerville Community Corporation, a community development corporation, expressed concern that the 2- and 3-family dwellings could be quickly converted from rentals to condos, causing displacement. To a limited extent, that danger may be dealt with through a revolving loan fund, which would help buy land or buildings with the aim of converting them to affordable housing.

Proakis says the City is hoping to use a portion of its funds from the Sustainable Communities initiative to seed the loan fund. “It’s a tough problem to solve. We’re looking into it,” he says. Somerville, the metropolitan planning council, nonprofit organizations, and others have joined a group that’s studying anti-displacement methods.