Remember the Globe editorial calling on the City of Newton to tear down the paper wall of exclusionary zoning? (Here’s the V14 post on it.) Turns out that, a few weeks ago, the mayor’s planning staff took the necessary next step: they revised Article 3 of the the draft zoning ordinance to allow some significant form of multi-family housing on every lot in Newton. (Article 3 covers Residential Districts.)
What makes Newton’s zoning exclusionary zoning is the vast number of properties in the city that are zoned single-family-only. (The city has eased the rules that govern accessory dwelling units (ADU), but those rules have not added significant new homes — though the pace is increasing — and ADUs are not the answer for a whole bunch of folks who need a place to live.)
The new draft Article 3 has two major changes that take the exclusionary out of our zoning. First, it will be legal to build a two-family home on any lot in the city. Second, it will be legal to convert any existing home to a multi-family home. In the draft ordinance, single-family-only zoning is history. Editorial note: as it should be.
What makes the new draft Article 3 significant is that it appears to acknowledge that including exclusionary zoning in the working documents of zoning reform validates the historical wrong of exclusionary zoning. So, kudos to Mayor Ruthanne Fuller and her planning staff for taking the first step to erase this bit of systemic racial bias out of our city’s land-use regulation.
Before you celebrate (or despair), understand that the changes to Article 3 are just the first step to eliminating exclusionary zoning. The absolute earliest a new zoning ordinance would become law is over a year from now. There are a number of councilors who seem intent on preserving exclusionary zoning (though they probably wouldn’t put in those terms). The City Council, specifically the Zoning and Planning Committee (ZAP), and the Planning Department are planning lots of discussion and different opportunities for public input and feedback. The draft ordinance is, really, just the reference for the next fifteen months or so’s discussion and debate.
Important note: making it legal to build multi-family homes does not make it illegal to build a single-family home on a lot. And, it does not mean that anyone will be forced to make their home or lot multi-family. You want to live in your single-family, detached house until they cart you out, may you have a long and prosperous life and enjoy your home for decades. You want to sell your single-family, detached house to some young couple who would like to raise a family in that same house, may their generations accumulate decades of happy memories.
But, if you or your neighbor wants to build a duplex or convert your home to three small apartments, godspeed to you or them, as well!
There are lots of interesting and important questions that I (and, presumably, others) will address in subsequent posts. How big can new two-family homes be? How many units can an existing home be converted to? Will the new zoning encourage teardown? Is this going to change the scale of my neighborhood? Will this just create more luxury housing? Will this actually lead to more minority families living in Newton? Will this create more affordable housing? What is the environmental impact?
Those questions require more space and attention than this single blog post. More importantly, the answers to many of these questions won’t be settled until ZAP and the full City Council have made the inevitable changes they will make. City Councilors will decide what limits are put on the multi-family options that the draft ordinance introduces.
Lots of interesting stuff ahead. Stay tuned!
Tearing down single-family houses and replacing them with duplexes that cost $1.4mil each – that’ll really make a difference.
The real barrier to economic and racial justice in Greater Boston is and always has been the existence of local government, with its separate school systems and security forces.
@Michael
Philosophically, I agree with you. But the real world evidence doesn’t really bear this out.
The government structure of the Western United States has created vast cities. The City of Los Angeles is 5.5x larger than Boston by area and covers half as much land as Rhode Island. Its law enforcement and educational systems are “unified” across the entire city. Yet income inequality is similar. Pacific Palisades is every bit as economically isolated from Watts as Newton is from Dorchester.
It’s not a perfect case, because LA *does* have a handful of independent cities that are sort of inside its boundaries (Beverly Hills and Santa Monica on one end, Compton and Long Beach on the other).
But there are a reasonable number of “big” cities that have unified governments and are no “better” than Boston on issues of race and equality. I wish it were so easy.
But Michael raises a key point. How will we feel if in effect these changes create more units of housing so expensive that those who can afford to move in are just as wealthy and privileged as those already here? It then follows to ask, “Is high-density housing so virtuous that it is worth it for Newton to become more crowded and its roads more congested?” Note that the plans are not coordinated with efforts to improve the public transit to discourage the newcomers from driving as much as those who live here do.
Yes, these zoning plans will please the supporters of high-density living. What will they do to make Newton a more socioeconomically and racially diverse community? Very little, I fear.
Hi Bob,
Your question is a great one: “How will we feel if in effect these changes create more units of housing so expensive that those who can afford to move in are just as wealthy and privileged as those already here?”
Sean’s point is exactly this: the ZAP team is weighing options to address this question. I would perhaps say “this is a concern” or “this is a question that must be addressed” but certainly not “because of this concern we shouldn’t modify zoning to allow by right conversions.” (these are hypothetical statements, I’m trying to quote or paraphrase your comments with them)
Thanks,
Jason
@Donald, I would say that there are more similarities than differences between Los Angeles County and metro Boston, in that the former has several dozen municipalities in addition to the city of Los Angeles itself.
One of my favorite walks in the world is the 20 miles along the coast from Redondo Beach to Santa Monica (I managed to do it ten times last year on my way to and from Asia) and just about every community I pass through has its own fiscal autonomy, schools, and police – Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Santa Monica/Malibu…the only exceptions are Venice and Marina del Rey (although as an unincorporated municipality the latter actually gets its own sheriff’s station). Away from the coast, as you said there’s Beverly Hills as well as Culver City, West Hollywood, Glendale, and a slew of others.
So my point is that in an economically-integrated metropolitan area, the real source of inequality is allowing higher-income residents to opt out in their own fiscally-autonomous enclaves with total indifference to the plight of urban neighborhoods, as they have egregiously done in Boston since the days of Judge Garrity.
In terms of successful metropolitan mergers, one nearby example with which I’m very familiar with is Montreal, which merged all 28 of its on-island municipalities about 20 years ago. The implacable anglophone minority did manage to throw a wrench into the works and demerge some of the towns on the West Island, but the island’s linguistic school districts and police force remain essentially unified. As a result, there’s a much narrower band of socioeconomic outcomes and quality of life across the island of Montreal than in metropolitan Boston – which I believe is the goal that we should be striving for.
The point of Sean’s post, doing away with single-family housing, is a move in the right direction, but at the end of the day it won’t have any real impact beyond the feel-good tokenism of possibly relocating a few hundred families from economically-disadvantaged neighborhoods, modestly increasing tax revenues by allowing for ≈$3mil duplex assessments in place of some $1.5 million houses, and/or providing income for developers and real estate agents in what’s admittedly bound to be an economically-miserable sector.
And as Bob Jampol points out, it’s not impactful to implement rezoning in a vacuum, for example with an already-castrated MBTA that has nowhere to go but down following COVID-19, infrastructure that will be underfunded for the foreseeable future, etc.
“the real source of inequality is allowing higher-income residents”
This is kind of redundant no?
Wages have been stagnant and decreasing for what’s left of the middle class.
Building more housing is fine, but the existing inequality between those in the profession that are high earning – finance, upper management, Law, high tech ceos, etc, will bid up the prices. The result will be higher priced density, I’m afraid.
Well intentioned but misses root causes. Won’t bring back pre 1975 middle class neighborhoods. This is well laid out in the book “Evil Geniuses”, by Kurt Anderson.
@Michael
I don’t think I buy your correlation and causality in Montreal.
“As a result, there’s a much narrower band of socioeconomic outcomes and quality of life across the island of Montreal than in metropolitan Boston”
I agree that Montreal has a much narrower band of socioeconomic outcomes and quality of life. I have some dear friends who moved there from Newton for precisely that reason. In 1970. The amalgamation of Montreal is less than 20 years old; this is the kind of process that is generational in measuring results.
From an economic standpoint, Montreal has not kept pace with other Canadian cities (Vancouver and Toronto) and is well behind Boston (which is among the richest cities in North America). The difference between Montreal and Boston is not that their poor people are better off and living dignified lives at higher incomes…it’s that they have far fewer rich people. But lots of “culture” to help people forget that they are relatively poorer.
I know, I know, money’s not everything. But in this case it’s the only reasonable unit of measure.
These changes will clearly lead to much higher density in Newton. As others have pointed out, the density that results will be high-end, “luxury townhomes”. Why? Because these townhomes maximize profits for developers, which in turn allows them to outbid other potential purchasers of the home. Net result – more density, but not more socioeconomic diversity.
As a parent, I will say that the increased strain this would place on Newton schools concerns me greatly. Due to a lack of facilities and resources, the public schools in Newton will be operating on a hybrid or remote only basis for the foreseeable future. It seems imprudent to add more students to a system that clearly can’t cope with present demands.
Finally, the comparisons to Montreal are inapposite. The marginal tax rate in Montreal is 53%, and that starts at a little over $160,000 USD. The government offers free healthcare, free education (or at the college level, incredibly subsidized), and very affordable childcare. I would argue these policy choices account for much more of the socio-economic equality in the Montreal area (and much of Canada, really) than metropolitan amalgamation.
@Rick, I don’t think it’s redundant – my parents moved from Boston to Needham before I was born and that single decision was the primary reason for my prosperity. But people shouldn’t have to move to separately-administered, well-funded school districts to guarantee opportunity for their children. Every student in the state should have access to a uniform education in the place where they live. That’s why this idea of increasing housing density so a few highly-involved urban parents can escape to the suburban promised land is so nutsy. The paper walls that are the root cause of inequality aren’t just zoning bylaws, they’re town charters.
@Donald, you make a good point that the poor of Montreal can very easily forget that they’re poor. But I would argue that their higher quality of life is because of the programs that are uniformly funded and/or administered at the metropolitan or provincial level – including (most importantly) primary and secondary education, very low-cost post-secondary education, geographically-balanced low-income housing, local community service centers (CLSCs), first-class parks and recreation, 900 kilometers of cycling infrastructure, and a robust and ubiquitous transit system that truly eliminates the need for car ownership. All of this would be possible in Boston if the inherently unequal systems of local taxation were to be abolished and replaced with fairer and more progressive revenue collection on a statewide basis, or at least a metropolitan one.
Speaking of regressive tax policy that unfairly benefits wealthy white suburbanites –
“Why are Democratic party leaders [Biden, Pelosi, Schumer] fighting to get rid of one surprisingly progressive element of the 2017 tax bill?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/opinion/salt-tax-deduction-cut.html
Because they’re a bunch of useless hypocrites who don’t give a rat’s behind about economic justice, that’s why.
Eliminate the SALT deduction.
I don’t make money in the city, so I can freely say what this is about, no offense intended.
Many residents living in single-family houses will sell to developers who will convert the houses into many apartments. The residents will make extra money, to be used to relocate to a better place, while Newton rapidly changes for the worst. The idea that this is helping the world is a fantasy. If you want to save the world allow people to work remotely, which lets people live wherever they want at a fraction of the cost, and without the pollution. Everybody saw that this is possible. Now we should be convinced that jamming more people in Newton is the solution?
A relatively few people, mostly “paper” ( lawyers , finance) or pure tech ( software engineers ) can work remotely. Waiters, plumbers, electricians, warehouse workers, baristas, the list goes on, cannot. The virus has driven income inequality to its highest. And yesterday’s Boston Globe ( print version) article on the bidding wars in the suburbs bear this out. That may be short lived.
Income inequality is at the heart of the housing crunch. Everywhere will become like Martha’s Vineyard – no homes for the help.