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Happy Halloween today and happy first snow yesterday. I will be set up from a safe distance this evening in front of my house with a table of individual candy goody bags for the kids while supplies last. Please exercise caution with the trick-or-treating to maintain social distance and reduce the spread of covid-19. Fortunately many costumes already involve masks, but make sure everyone has non-costume masks as well.
Pumpkin carving contest
Do you have a great pumpkin carving somewhere in Newton this year? The Newton Highlands Area Council wants you to enter it (one per family) into a contest by Nov 2, whether you live in Newton Highlands or not. Photos (just the pumpkin, no one else in frame) should be emailed in (see link below) to be posted on the Newton Highlands Area Council instagram. Winners of the categories Scariest, Funniest, and Most Original pumpkin carvings will receive gift cards to the candy store “Indulge!” on Lincoln St in Newton Highlands. Contest details at: http://www.newtonma.gov/gov/neighborhood/highlands/default.asp
Final voting method reminders
If you have not voted yet for Tuesday’s long-awaited national election, please make sure to do one of the following: vote in person between 7 AM and 8 PM on Tuesday (some locations including in Ward 5 have changed due to covid-19 so double-check) OR drop off your mail ballot in one of the white ballot boxes outside City Hall before polls close at 8 PM on Tuesday. (It is not recommended to mail it through the USPS at this point, although it will be counted if postmarked by Nov 3 and received by Nov 6.) Nearly 40,000 residents have already voted by some means.
Zoning redesign overview
I’m not a member of the Zoning & Planning Committee of the City Council, but I wanted to take the time this week with the lighter schedule to write a thorough overview of the current zoning redesign effort and my perspective on it.
For more than a decade, the City of Newton has gradually been working toward a comprehensive zoning redesign for the first time since the 1950s, when the city was adjusting to the growing prevalence of personal automobiles. The main problem with the existing zoning code is that it was designed for a very different era nearly seven decades ago, it is difficult to understand or read, and it was designed without the aid of computers to map out the reality on the ground of existing lot sizes and uses.
As a result, many residents find it very difficult to make basic changes to their homes, and many residents feel that they are getting steamrolled by entities that have the resources to navigate the expensive, confusing and time-consuming process for getting permission to do things. (One unresolved point of debate is how we can streamline the permitting process for ordinary homeowners seeking to make small changes.) Any modernizing overhaul of zoning should therefore strive to make more residents happy, to the extent possible, as opposed to continuing or expanding the status quo policies that are already frustrating residents.
Since 2017 (with some hiatuses to work on other tasks), the Zoning & Planning Committee of the City Council and the Planning Department staff have been working on drafting a new document and soliciting public feedback. Although this document covers every type of district in Newton, including commercial, industrial, residential, and more, public attention has so far been primarily focused on the residential reforms being debated during this two-year term. There will not be a City Council vote on any comprehensive zoning redesign proposals being debated until toward the end of 2021 (next year), following plenty of public comment. (The comprehensive approach, compared to a piecemeal approach, is intended to make sure all the pieces fit together appropriately and that the various tradeoffs and compromises balance each other.) The Council has been holding very frequent Zoom meetings on the redesign with outside input and very high public attendance relative to the in-person meetings before everything went virtual.
For the debate on the residential districts, the following major strategic goals, as I interpret them, were adopted early in the process by the Council, although without agreement on the exact tactic of fulfilling them:
1) Increasing a diversity of housing stock types and increasing housing opportunity: The zoning code should through various means partially address or compensate for the dramatically rising cost of homes in Newton, while recognizing that many owners’ retirement plans are tied to those rising values.
2) Economic and environmental sustainability: The zoning code should promote a greater deal of environmental sustainability both in the design of homes themselves and in the orientation of denser housing toward village centers (which would also help businesses there be viable) and toward public transportation.
3) Preserve and protect what we like: The zoning code should more closely reflect the city as it exists – while also adjusting certain zoning to fit with the comprehensive plan for where the city should be going, including supporting the goals above.
Again, these are just my explanatory phrasings. Some Councilors or residents following the debates might disagree with my exact framing.
Mapping zones and form-based zoning
One of the earliest steps was to draft a map, with computer assistance, for proposed new zone categories and then to solicit many rounds of public feedback (still ongoing!) as to whether those were appropriately mapped or not – and whether the restrictions on each zone should be tighter or looser than in earlier drafts. Each village center tends to have specific commercial-focused zones, surrounded by a more transitional mixed zone (“Neighborhood General”), surrounded by primarily residential-focused zones, which take up most of the city (and which have taken up most of the Council’s review energies so far). And of course there are some special zones for preserving open space or community buildings.
Newton already has a great deal of diverse types of housing across its many different neighborhoods and even specific blocks. One shift in approach for our zoning code was to move away from some of the older broad-brush design requirements (which don’t always fit on unusual lot sizes) and to move toward a primarily “form-based” methodology that classifies the various different types of buildings (both commercial and residential) into a list of typologies based on size and kinds of buildings. The forms themselves would have flexible ranges of aesthetic design within them, but it would give a sense of what an appropriate footprint and massing would be for a given block or neighborhood.
The new mapping has new zone labels compared to what we have now. Assigning specific blocks was based on a combination of lot size and what is there now as well as what is around it. So for example, current SR2 resident areas that already have many two-family homes got changed to R3 in the draft to reflect what exists on the ground. By contrast, SR2 areas with large lots and single-family homes (such as the area around Waban Ave) tended to be assigned to R1 (reflecting existing lower density). And SR2 areas with somewhat smaller lots with single-family homes tended to be relabeled as R2, reflecting a sort of middling density already in place.
The main difference between R1 and R2 is that the required setbacks are much larger/more expansive in R1 than R2 (i.e. larger yards and lower density), that there will more physical building area occupying the R2 lots relative to the size of the lot because of smaller required setbacks/frontages, and that the largest building type (House A) is allowed in R1 but not in R2 (simply because the lots in R2 aren't big enough for them, whereas the huge R1 lots could be large enough). The proposed setbacks are generally larger in the proposed code than in the existing code, so that a new house couldn’t be built so close to its neighbor.
In response to community feedback, a planned new R4 zone (an offshoot of R3 only for already existing multi-family areas to better classify places where there are or should be more than 3 units in a building that won't be part of the Village Centers or Neighborhood General) will be proposed but hasn't been added yet to the draft mapping at all. It is still up for debate how big these three zones in and around the village centers should be. (Earlier map drafts had restricted them to pretty small areas.) Also there are still clearly some policy disagreements on the mapping, as well as outright errors that need to be corrected in the next draft mapping. But there won't be new completely updated map drafts until the dimension controls and setbacks/frontages for each zone are more firmly settled by the Zoning & Planning Committee – so that we know more clearly what is appropriate for each area. There is still plenty of time to weigh in with staff or your City Councilors.
Converting to additional units
The form-based approach of building typologies does not merely promote consistency of massing and footprint or outright housing preservation exactly as-is in a given neighborhood – although it does help with residents who favor that – but it also allows some interesting strategies for creating new housing without totally changing the look of a neighborhood. For example, one proposed idea under consideration would seek to allow homeowners to convert an existing home into a multiple-unit dwelling – but only if it would not require significant additions or massing changes to do so.
So, a few of the largest existing homes in the city could potentially be converted into several units, and a greater number of existing homes could be divided into two-family homes, but without making any of them larger than they already are. There are actually a number of neighborhoods in places like Newton Centre (Beacon St) and Newton Highlands (Lincoln St) where this happened a long time ago already.
Although it would be technically possible for these conversions to happen, that doesn’t mean it will happen, because the market demand for much of Newton (given its reputational appeal and proximity to Boston) will probably remain heavily skewed toward single-family homes. For example, it’s hard to imagine many of Newton’s stateliest manor houses on gigantic lots becoming six-family units, even if a few hundred are technically huge enough to be converted within their existing footprint and massing. That being said, a majority of existing single-family homes would be large enough to be convertible to two-families, if the market favored that. Less than a third would be large enough to be converted into three-family homes. The numbers drop off precipitously for even greater unit conversions. More than a third-of existing single-family homes in Newton are too small under the latest drafts to be convertible into additional units at all.
To my mind, this idea of conversion to more units within the existing massing and footprint of certain homes effectively represents a compromise between people who were concerned that form-based zoning didn’t go far enough toward our redesign goals and people who were concerned that the changes were going to go too far. It would (if approved) add housing capacity while preserving visual character. As Councilor Danberg noted, houses like hers (Newton Centre) and mine (Waban) used to be inhabited by a lot more people. My great-aunt grew up in the house with her four sisters, her parents, and her grandmother all living there (at least briefly before people went their separate ways or passed on).
One other observation that I wanted to make is that this compromise recognizes that there actually is quite a bit of housing diversity already in the city that some residents and maybe even some of us on the Council might not think about because we don’t really notice that it’s diverse. There are various different housing types in Nonantum, Newton Centre, West Newton, Oak Hill Park, Chestnut Hill, Upper Falls, and so on.
Lincoln Street in Newton Highlands is obviously a great example of a place where housing conversions in the past added more capacity by turning big single-family victorians into two or three unit homes that still look like the historic neighborhood people expect there. Oak Hill Park is an example of a place that experimented at one point with some totally different ways of organizing housing and streets, originally with a vision of pedestrian orientation, although that’s no longer the situation there.
On Wyman Street in Waban, near my house, there are apartment buildings, duplexes, and single-family homes all in a fairly small area, and it’s not particularly controversial to anyone today. Newton is not as uniform as some people have suggested in recent emails to us on the City Council.
What I do hear complaints about is single family teardowns & jumbo single-family rebuilds in places like Waban or teardowns of small single-family homes in Upper Falls that are being replaced by jumbo two-families that also aren’t affordable or sustainable or consistent with the neighborhood.
There’s got to be better ways of going about this and regulating building types that are consistent with our stated goals of sustainability, affordability, diversity, and character. To me it seems like our zoning redesign draft is continuing to head in the right direction and meeting a lot of residents’ desires as expressed, even if some people think it’s much more of a radical change than what I view as really more of a confirmation and solidification of a lot of what we already have. The redesign approach especially in the recent drafts is about playing up Newton’s existing strengths to meet new objectives.
Teardowns vs Lot subdivision
Since many residents have expressed concern about the pace of teardowns and full (or nearly full) rebuilds of homes and what that means for neighborhood character in terms of home sizes, one heavily debated point has been what are the best ways to rein in – or at least significantly discourage – teardowns and jumbo rebuilds by making them outright unbuildable on some lot sizes or financially undesirable on others. (Of course, some people don’t want that reined in at all and have argued against regulating it.)
There are a few zoning code changes for lots which affect the allowed buildable area, and modifying each of them in one direction or another when drafting the proposed reforms can greatly change the maximum buildable construction. The Planning Department designed these proposals to act like “levers” on what is allowed to be built. These levers are: minimum lot frontage (the narrowest side to side width a lot can be along a street), minimum setback (shortest distance from the lot line to the building), maximum lot coverage (the most square footage that the structures like a house, deck, pool, etc. can cover of the total lot), and minimum lot size (area) & depth (length from street to the back line). Note here that “lot coverage” is proposed to replace a less comprehensive “Floor Area Ratio” (FAR) in the existing code.
On the one hand, reducing the likelihood of teardowns in favor of larger rebuilds is something many residents have asked for and it could have positive effects in terms of environmental sustainability (new homes embody a great deal of emissions and if they’re much larger for a single-family they tend to cancel out their high-efficiency technology benefits) as well as on attainability for homebuyers (who would not have to outbid redevelopment companies to purchase a place to live). On the other hand, many other residents (and sometimes even the same residents!) also want to retain the right to maximize the sale value of their property if they plan to retire somewhere else and these restrictions would cool down those bidding wars.
So, one tradeoff in the proposed redesign is making it a bit more viable to subdivide a larger lot and build two (or occasionally more) smaller units as a way of compensating people who were expecting to be able to sell a big lot to a teardown developer. And similarly, as discussed earlier, the notion of being able to convert an existing home within its current footprint into two units (or sometimes more) could also make a property more valuable on the market without increasing the teardown risk.
The environmental sustainability question
There are basically two major elements to this zoning redesign intended to promote environmental sustainability (to the extent possible when you’re talking about housing).
First, location. If more housing is available near village centers and public transportation stops – let’s say a safe and easy 10 minute walk – that could encourage people to drive less, both within Newton and to/from work elsewhere. The more people who live closer to work, either in Newton or in Boston, as opposed to out in the exurbs, the better it is for the environment. That’s the theory anyway!
Second, design. High-efficiency appliances and insulation and heating are all well and good but if the market incentivizes the construction of huge homes for each family, that can easily cancel out the energy savings. Moreover, if a home is in perfectly acceptable condition for continued habitation and is torn down and rebuilt, there is a huge environmental impact from all that construction work and all the new materials – all of which could have been avoided.
The affordability question
When we talk colloquially about affordability in Newton’s housing market, we are often referring to various unrelated things, which can lead to public confusion.
When we talk about the legal definition of upper-case “Affordable Housing,” that has a lot to do with federal standards and income determinations, and those are largely not market-driven and they typically require subsidies, especially if they are not the mixed-income and mixed-commercial projects we have already seen in recent years, which are not 100% affordable and mostly not “deeply affordable.” (That type of project, which helps address a different challenge toward the middle-income range of rentals, was previously addressed in the Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance revision last year.) There are certain things we as a city might discuss later in the zoning redesign drafting phases, when we get to village centers and the transitional Neighborhood General areas (as opposed to residential districts dominated by single-family homes), to address that question of fully affordable and deeply affordable rental housing.
A number of us on the City Council have been researching on our own time what policy changes would have to be adopted to promote low-income rental housing construction that meets those state and federal criteria and subsidies/credits. But as I said, we as a Council have not yet reached that phase of the overall zoning redesign drafting and debate process – it is relatively unlikely that we will see small-scale (one-unit to six-unit) low-income rental housing efforts in the residential districts we’re currently working through, due to those federal and state incentive structures – so, I will return to the topic of affordable rental housing in a future newsletter, but move on here to the next element, on homeownership.
When we talk about a less formal notion of lower-case “affordability” in terms of modest homebuyers among middle and working class families as compared to very wealthy buyers of very large houses, that is an entirely different question, and it’s a much tougher nut to crack because it is so dominated by market competition and the overall high desirability of Newton. Some Councilors have begun referring to this as “attainability” to contrast it with the legal term “Affordable Housing” mentioned above.
The strategies to address this homeowner “attainability” side of the equation could include those previously mentioned home conversions (turning single-family homes into two or three units), as well as further reforms to the accessory dwelling unit (ADU) rules so seniors can rent out attached or detached smaller units while living in the main unit, discouraging teardowns and jumbo rebuilds (so families aren’t bidding against redevelopers), restrictions on the lot coverage and massing of homes within certain zones (so that there are still some modest-sized homes in the city instead of mcmansions), and encouraging the construction of new multi-family housing around the village centers.
Wrap-up
As a final reminder and sum-up: We are both deep into the zoning redesign process and still quite a ways to go on finalizing anything – and in future newsletters I will certainly have many more updates and specific analyses of points I glossed over here. Now and for many months to come is still the time for the public to continue weighing in with feedback and suggested improvements. We have been constantly refining the drafts based on that input and it has been a very constructive process with anyone who has participated in honing the details.
Although I am not on the Zoning & Planning Committee, I will certainly continue to be in communication with my colleagues and meeting with the Planning Department Staff to weigh in on the drafting and relay questions from constituents like you.
Thanks for reading and let me know if you have questions or suggestions. And thanks to Kathy Pillsbury and Lisa Monahan for reviewing my work on this overview.
