Affordable & Middle Income Housing

Bryan is honored to have earned the endorsements of
affordable housing organizations Engine 6 and Voters for a Vibrant Newton.

 
 

Addressing Newton’s affordable housing crisis requires a comprehensive, multi-pronged approach, and Bryan is the only candidate in this race who is willing to use all the tools at our disposal. Bryan has fought for affordable housing on multiple fronts, having successfully advocated for 100% affordable housing like Haywood House, a senior housing development that allows seniors to age in place, and supporting the conversion of the West Newton Armory into affordable units. Bryan successfully advocated for mixed-use developments that increased Newton’s affordable housing inventory, such as Northland and Austin Street, and supports the creation of an affordable housing trust and making accessory apartments more cost-effective.

We don’t have enough housing in Newton. We don’t have enough affordable housing for our workforce. We don’t have enough housing for seniors who want to downsize. We don’t have enough housing for first time home-buyers, renters, and families with low-to-moderate incomes. We are in a housing crisis and we need to act.

In December, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies put out an alarming report stating, “... everyone in the industry has noted an imbalance where supply is clearly too small to meet demand. There is no more fundamental economic rationale for prices to go up than that.” They continued, ‘Today’s high rate of house price appreciation builds upon supply and demand imbalances that have been growing for years, and the pandemic seems to be introducing and accelerating changes...that add to the momentum.”

If there were just one thing we could do to create the affordable housing Newton needs, we would have done it already. Instead, we must use all of the tools at our disposal:

  • 100% Affordable Housing
    We can, and do, create 100% affordable housing developments in Newton like Haywood House and the West Newton Armory. These types of developments allow for deeply affordable, local, state and federal subsidized housing for a diverse population like those whose families have experienced cycles of poverty, coming out of homelessness or a domestic violence situation, or living with a disability that limits their income. However, more often than not, 100% affordable housing is created by for-profit developers relying on these subsidies. Expecting it to all come from non-profit developers is a misunderstanding of how 100% affordable housing works.

  • Housing Built by Nonprofit Developers
    Nonprofit developers are another excellent partner in affordable housing creation, but like every other piece, they are not a cure all. Newton is not an attractive place  for non-profits to build due to the high cost of land and all the hurdles they need to jump over to get a project approved. Nonprofit developers are burdened with complicated funding structures that can often involve 10 or more partners, and multiple subsidy sources. They often lack the funding for protracted pre-construction periods and don’t have the infrastructure to battle through long fights with citizens groups. The attempt to overturn the City Council's approval of Northland and the costly fight to win at the ballot box further deterred many nonprofit organizations from working with us. 

  • Mixed-Use Developments
    Simply demanding that developers include more affordable units is not an effective strategy.     We need to build strong, trusted relationships with the very best developers, both for-profit and nonprofit. Setting up barriers will deter good developers from working with us and attract bad developers who want to build sub-par buildings. 

    Mixed-Use Developments like Northland, Austin Street and Washington Place, which Bryan supported, can revitalize our city centers by providing more retail space along with more market-rate and affordable apartments. They can be built to a net zero building standard to help us meet our climate goals and should be transit oriented and in walking distance to basic amenities, while also adding to the vibrancy of our village centers through features like a public plaza and public murals (Austin St), non-profit space (Washington Place), and public green space and commuter shuttles (Northland).

    By planning ahead through processes like the Washington Street Vision Plan, we can ensure that we create housing opportunities that fit the scale of our neighborhoods while ensuring Newton can be more economically diverse AND becomes more racially diverse. Bryan will evaluate development projects with a critical eye toward ensuring they bring the best possible benefits to the city. 

    He will look to prioritize benefits such as positive environmental impact, additional affordable housing—including some deeply affordable housing—green space, fitting the character of the surrounding neighborhood, new community space, improvements to the surrounding streets and sidewalks, positive impacts on transportation, and synergy with existing retail.

  • Reducing Our Local Preference
    Under our Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance, 70% of affordable units must go to people who live, work or have children in the schools in Newton. This makes it much harder to increase our racial diversity, and Bryan supports lowering the percentage for this local preference. 

  • Zoning Redesign
    Newton’s residential zoning ordinance hasn’t been significantly updated since 1953. Bryan's goals are to see a zoning code that allows for more housing—including affordable housing—in our village centers, disincentivizes teardowns and McMansions, incentivizes more middle income housing, ensures that new housing is environmentally sustainable, and makes accessory apartments more cost effective.

    The current zoning redesign process is long, but it provides us the opportunity to address many of our housing problems, including our burdensome and costly permitting processes and policies that were purposefully created to deter low income and people of color from living here (Newton residents are only 4 percent Black and 5 percent Hispanic or Latino compared with the state's average of 9 percent and 12 percent respectively). 

    In addition, zoning redesign provides an opportunity for action on climate change by ensuring that new housing is required to be more environmentally sustainable. Bryan supports increasing our inclusionary zoning requirements so that new residential buildings must provide adequate options for a variety of income levels. He supports decreasing parking requirements by requiring more aggressive transportation management techniques, through which we can ensure that new residents are relying less on cars as their primary transportation method. By doing so, we can reduce the impact new residents will have on traffic and reduce carbon emissions at the same time. But zoning redesign is just one tool. 

  • Accessory Apartments
    Accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which are commonly referred to as accessory apartments, are a separate living space added to single-family lots.These are often added on to a home so a parent or a child can live with their family, but still have their own space, or as a way for a homeowner to bring in additional income through rent. 

    While these are currently allowed in Newton, the permitting process is prohibitively difficult and costly, making them not a viable option for far too many homeowners. There are also many homes that should be able to add an accessory apartment but currently don’t meet the requirements, whether it’s a detached dwelling over a garage or within the existing building envelope.

  • An Affordable Housing Trust
    In addition to the existing tools, new tools can be created to meet our housing needs. Bryan supports the creation of an Affordable Housing Trust in Newton. Affordable Housing Trusts are used in many municipalities to support the preservation and production of affordable housing, and are established by the city using Community Preservation Act (CPA) funds. Currently, the CPA funds in Newton are spread among grants to housing, historic spaces, open land and recreation. It’s past time Newton creates its own, dedicated Affordable Housing Trust, and increases our CPA contribution to help fund it.

The history of racial segregation and housing discrimination, including the construction of the MassPike, which destroyed a historically Black neighborhood in West Newton, has created generational barriers to greater racial diversity here in Newton. Our outdated zoning code has continued these exclusionary policies and created barriers to affordable housing for our seniors, children, teachers, police, firefighters, and other city workers. In order to move forward and embrace a more diverse future, we must create greater economic diversity, and we must do this by using all of the tools at our disposal.