By Sumner Brown
Affordable housing and Chapter 40B affordable housing are not exactly the same.
My wife and I moved to Belmont from Cambridge while I was a graduate student. We rented. It was wonderful! We had wildlife, trees, and grass outside our windows. We had a parking spot. We bicycled to work and school. We liked the neighbors and the neighborhood. We lived in the lower part of a single-family house while the owner, Miss Bryant, an elderly woman, and her dog Zangy were upstairs. The building was of very high quality, but this was not luxurious housing. There were no doors between the upstairs and us. The other limitation was storage space. We had to resist buying another book.
When I graduated, we stayed for three more years until we could afford to buy a house half a mile away. In all, we rented at 105 Beatrice Circle for seven years. Now, a developer from Florida plans a 40B development that will replace a single-family home at 91 Beatrice Circle with sixteen apartments with three and four bedrooms each.
As a graduate student couple, we were a low-income family. We could afford to live at Beatrice Circle with Miss Bryant. But we were not living in “affordable housing” as far as 40B is concerned.
The 40B statute has no regard for affordable housing unless it is 40B-certified as affordable. If you wish your property to be 40B-certified as affordable, you need to put a long-term affordability restriction on your deed. The wonderful housing I enjoyed while a graduate student did not count.
My instinct is to care more about what housing opportunities low- and moderate-income people have available in Belmont than how many 40B units we have. Data about Belmont housing exists in considerable detail. It comes in part from the American Community Survey (ACS), which asks detailed questions of some sample of people everywhere in this country—How many bathrooms? Do you have a refrigerator? What is your income?, etc.
These data formerly were collected during the census when some households received a long form. Now, the ACS is separate from the census.
I have so far only found summaries of piecemeal data. For example, Belmont’s web site includes a document called Belmont’s Housing Future, Housing Production Plan, April 2018. The Belmont Land Trust and consultants for the town prepared this document. From this document, which used ACS data, I find that 9.3 percent of Belmont households have income of $25,000 or less, and 12.8 percent have income between $25,000 and $50,000. There are about 10,000 households in Belmont. The Belmont Housing Trust looks at these data and says we need more 40B affordable housing. I look at this data and think that there are over 2,000 low-income households that are somehow living in Belmont, and adding 337 more units of 40B affordable housing will not help those 2,000 households much.
One reason it will not help much is that the affordable units in the 40B Belmont Uplands silver maple forest development, now called the Royal Belmont, are still too expensive for anyone with income less than about $34,000 if they limit their housing budget to 30% of income. (See “How Affordable Housing Works Here”, p. 10) Before the Uplands and Cushing Square developments, we needed 647 units to reach immunity from more 40B developments. Our need for 40B immunity was reduced to 337 units, but only 72 units are affordable.
40B developments impose a cost on a community. They require comprehensive permits, which means multiple zoning restrictions can be overruled.
Unless affordable housing developments are age-restricted to seniors, these developments in Belmont can be expected to increase our property taxes because we must pay for educating the school children they attract. The first proposal for the McLean development had age-restricted rental units. It would not have been a financial burden to the town.
That the silver maple forest in the Belmont Uplands (bit.ly/GoogSearSilverMapleForest)was lost to a 40B development is a reminder that what should be saved for environmental health and quality of life for future generations is at risk. Massachusetts Audubon’s Habitat sanctuary is in financial trouble from COVID-19.
I hope the Belmont Hill School is not suffering financially. If they are, developers will be ready.
Sumner Brown is a director of the Belmont Citizens Forum.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.