Planning Board Meeting

Good evening. Welcome to the March 31st, 2026 meeting of the Cambridge Planning Board. My name is Tom Sieniewicz and I am the chair. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, adopted by the Massachusetts General Court and approved by the Governor, the City is authorized to use remote participation at meetings of the Cambridge Planning Board. All members, applicants and members of the public will state their name before speaking. All votes will be taken by roll call. Members of the public will be kept on mute until it's time for public comment. I will give instructions for public comment at that time. And you can also find instructions on the city's webpage for remote planning board meetings. This meeting is being video and audio recorded and is being streamed live on the City of Cambridge's online meeting portal and on cable television channel 22 within Cambridge. There will also be a transcript made of these proceedings.

I'll start by asking staff to take board member attendance and verify that all members are audible.

Thank you, Tom. This is Jeff Roberts from Community Development. H. Theodore Cohen, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you? Present, visible, and audible. Thank you, Ted. Mary Flynn, are you present? Is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Mary. Mary Lydecker, are you present? Is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible and audible.

Thank you, Mary. Diego Macias, are you present? And is the meeting visible and audible to you? Present, visible and audible. Thank you, Diego. Ashley Tan, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Ashley. Carolyn Zern, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Carolyn. Associate members, Dan Anderson, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you? Yes, Jeff, present, visible, and audible. Thank you, Dan. Joy Jackson, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Visible and audible.

Thank you, Joy. And Thompson-Avich, can you confirm that you're present and the meeting is visible and audible to you? Present, visible, and audible. Thank you, Tom. So it's a full boat. We have seven planning board members present and two associate members.

Great. Thank you very much, Jeff. The first item is an update from Community Development Department. Please also introduce any staff that may be present at tonight's meeting, Jeff.

I will do that, thank you. And let me just take a, I have to move my screen to see who's present. Again, Jeff Roberts, I'm the director of zoning and development at the community development department. With me from my team in zoning and development, we have Swathi Joseph and we have Emily Hutchings. And we have from the urban design team, Eric Thorkelson, that I believe does it for staff. Just as a little bit of an what's to come at the planning board tonight, we just have one small piece of general business and then we'll be talking about the annual housing report, which is a something we'll get to in just a second so anyone who's tuned in for that just bear with us we'll be getting to that shortly We only have one meeting planned in April at this point. It's way at the end of April, April 28th. And we have two items.

on the agenda for that meeting. We have the first hearing on the PUD application for the HealthPeaks development proposal Alewife Quadrangle District. So the board heard about this last month at a pre-application conference and then the next step is moving forward with their application. So this will be the first hearing on that. And then we also have an item scheduled related to a city salt shed facility, actually a replacement of a salt shed. that's proposed in Danahy Park. And the reason why that comes to the planning board is because there is a provision in the zoning, kind of a less well-known provision that says that A non-open space use in an open space zoning district of which Danahy Park is is an open space zoning district has to come

to the planning board for a hearing and an advisory report. So there's no determination or action or permit that's required from the planning board. The board is just required to have a hearing and, make a report that goes back to the city on that proposal. So we'll be doing both of those on April 28th. So it'll be a long time and that basically that'll be the entire month of April. So that'll be a fairly busy agenda, but nothing else before that. So you can save your strength. Other things of note that are happening, there have been a number of zoning related discussions happening at city council. In recent weeks and there are some follow-ups that are planned.

So next Monday on April 6th, there will be a follow-up discussion to talk about active uses on Mass Ave and Cambridge Street. This is following up on a policy order that came when the city council was considering amendments to the rezoning of Mass Ave and Cambridge Street, which they adopted, but with some additional items that they wanted staff to look at. So there was a discussion about that a couple weeks ago and there's going to be a follow-up on Monday. Next Tuesday, April 7th, there is A follow-up discussion among both the Housing Committee and the Neighborhood Long-Term Planning Committee A follow-up on their discussion of the annual housing report, which we'll be talking about in a second.

The agenda for that is a little bit up in the air, so you can look at the meeting portal to see So that's a hearing on the 7th. And the Council, also the Housing Committee of the City Council had a hearing to talk about central square zoning and the planning work associated with that, which was conducted in 2024. and that meeting ended with some discussion and there'll be a follow-up to that meeting but that's, I believe, to be scheduled at this point. I don't think there's a date on that. But look forward to that.

So those three things and more going on at City Council in April. And the final thing I wanted to note is just recently, The city released the five-year report of the affordable housing trust. I actually have a copy of it here on my desk. It's a nice little publication. You can get it online as well. and it's a remarkable report as planning board members know having been involved in development review over the last five years and work around the affordable housing overlay. It's been a really remarkable five years in affordable housing for the city of Cambridge. And so this report's a really in-depth and thorough summary Not just of the projects, but also the financing and all of what goes into making affordable housing happen. Here in the city.

And this was released at a media event which took place at 52 New Street, which is the second affordable housing overlay project to be completed. And it's starting to That's all for my updates. I'll turn it back to the chair.

Great, thank you. Are there any questions for Jeff from board members? If so, say your name. Ted?

Yeah, Jeff, can we receive hard copies of that report?

I will check. I would say send us a message if you'd like. I don't know if we'll send them to all the plan board members. I know some of you, like I am, are generally paper free. This was an exception in my case of picking one up. but you can send us a message and we can look to see if there's extra copies somewhere we can send to you.

Okay, thank you.

Okay. Great, thank you. All right. Thank you, Jeff. The next item on the agenda here is an approval of some meeting minutes. The board has received certified transcripts for the meetings held on February 24th and March 3rd of 2026. Are there any questions from board members about the transcripts or corrections? Please state your name before speaking. Seems they're complete as usual. Only full board members will act on this particular item. Is there a motion to accept the transcript as the meeting minutes? Remember to say your name before making that motion.

This is Diego. So moved.

Thank you, Diego. And a second? Ted, second. Thank you, Ted. Roll call on that, please, Jeff.

On that motion, Ted Cohen. Mary Flynn, Mary Lydecker, Diego Macias, Ashley Tan, Carolyn Zern, and Thompson-Avich. Yes. That's all members voting in favor.

Great, thank you, Jeff. So agenda item number one, For tonight, the next item is a request for an extension of time to apply for a building permit on planning board case PB-402 at 815 Summerville Avenue. CDD staff will provide an update. Jeff, can you explain why this is before us?

Yes, this is Jeff again. So this is a special permit that was granted on April 25th, 2024. The special permit was to modify building and site plan requirements for the alteration of an existing building in excess of 25,000 square feet in gross floor area to accommodate a new use. and the special permit requires that the permittee obtain a building permit within two years of the special permit being granted and the permittee has provided a letter requesting a two-year extension of that time until April 25th, 2028.

Thank you very much. Are there questions from the board about this matter? No one's indicating such, so is there a motion to agree to this extension of time? And remember to say your name before proposing a motion.

This is Mary Flynn. I move that we grant the extension of time.

Thank you, Mary. And a second on Mary's motion.

This is Mary Lydecker. Second.

Okay, double Marys. All right, roll call vote on that issue, please, Jeff.

On that motion, Ted Cohen? Yes. Mary Flynn?

Yes.

Mary Lydecker?

Yes.

Diego Macias? Yes. Ashley Tan?

Yes.

Carolyn Zern?

Yes.

And Thompson Avich? Yes. That's all members voting in favor.

Thank you, Jeff. Agenda item number two here tonight. The next agenda item is a discussion of the annual housing report. the board will hear a brief presentation from the community development department and after that the board will have an opportunity to discuss and ask questions after which we may take public comment we will discuss that as a boardroom to get to that point Jeff, if you could begin with some background and an overview on the process and give the presentation on the report. Thank you.

Thank you. This will be me again. So this is, again, we presented this to the Housing Committee and Neighborhood Long-Term Planning Committee of the City Council last week and I'm going to go through it again this week. I think that it's a fairly, I'll just say it's a lot of material. and so we made sure that board members got it in advance and hopefully you've had a chance to review it. I'll try to go through it somewhat quickly. I'll try to be thorough but won't go over every detail. and I promise that we would take a few pauses to ask questions as we go along, but certainly if anybody has a question and wants to jump in with a raised hand with a clarification,

or other immediate questions we go through, feel free to do that in the chair. You should feel free to interrupt me as we get into it. So that's just the procedural setting. So what are we talking about? We're talking about a provision in the zoning ordinance that was added as part of the multifamily zoning. Unlike the rest of the multifamily zoning, this wasn't something that created or amended regulations or policies directly to support housing objectives, but It is something that we thought would be a valuable piece of our housing program. It's a provision that says that we will provide this annual report. This will help to build a resource of data that we can use to inform policy considerations and decisions in the future as we go forward. And it's something that we

It provides that we provide this report to the city council, but when we were having this discussion for multifamily also, the planning board had asked that we get this information. So we decided it was important to share it with both the city City Council and the Planning Board. As a reminder, the annual housing report or the annual housing review is a is one piece of the overall housing review program. The other piece is an evaluation which happens on a five-year cycle. So beginning in 2030, there'll be a more kind of extensive evaluation of Thank you for joining us.

For this first report, we set a few specific goals for what we wanted to do. There's actually a lot of different ways that we might be able to go about put together the information to make an annual housing report. So some of what we decided to do was to try to provide information in different ways and from different perspectives. We realized that there are some important questions that we want to answer and we can't answer all those questions just by showing one We also were trying to be mindful of

collecting and presenting information in a way that could be replicated in future years so that over time we're building a robust timeline of data that will become more valuable to us the more times we do it. We included a few notes which I won't go over all of just about the data, the sources. I'll just highlight a few things that come up throughout the presentation that we'll probably end up going back to. One is just some terminology that we're using when we refer to new units. and we're talking about housing units throughout this. We're not talking about other kinds of development. we're talking about housing units, all of the housing units that are coming into existence. So we're talking about, you know, anything, any unit that didn't exist before that exists now or that's being constructed now we consider a new unit

There's a distinction between that and net new units. So net new units would subtract out units that might be demolished or otherwise removed before construction. So, for example, Demolishing two units of housing and building three units of housing. There's three new units being created, but it's one net new unit that's being created compared to what was there before. Another important caveat with this data is that it's inherently a little bit messy. We realize as we get into this that development proposals are each their unique Each have their unique characteristics and qualities that make them hard to aggregate in a precise way. So it can sometimes be hard to fit things into specific categories, but we did the best we could to provide accurate accounting of what's been happening in housing

We realize it won't be perfect in every case and everything is ultimately somewhat approximate and we need to, you know, as you get into the details, there's a little bit more nuance. There's three main parts to this. First, we thought it was important to cover some high level topics, including a reminder of some of the major policy changes that affected housing in the past year. So that's something that we plan to do every year as we do this report. The second section is focused on development proposals. So anything that sort of comes to our attention through a city required review process is something that we We refer to this sometimes as the pipeline because These are proposals that are still in an early stage of review.

We won't necessarily see those going into construction soon, but it gives us a picture of what we anticipate moving forward in coming years. and then in the last part we look at actual building permits that have been issued so this is more immediate you know what's actually being built at this point in time In addition to building permits, we look at some related activity that, you know, typically precedes, you know, immediately precedes a building permit. And that gives us more of a snapshot of what's being permitted at a specific point in time. As I go through each of these sections, I'll take a break between them to see if we have any questions or discussion. So just jumping into the first section, a lot of this is going to be not news to the planning board. I think you're all familiar with a lot of the policy discussion that's been going on over the past year.

So just some high-level information. Most of this is, you know, we'll get into more detail in future sections, but just to get a sense of the scale of what we're looking at. We continue to see proposals move into that pipeline that I mentioned before. There are some proposals that are clearly responding to the zoning reforms which took place last year. That's one set of things that we saw. We saw about 50 building permits for housing issued last year. It's a somewhat higher number of building permits, but still kind of within the same ballpark as building permits that were issued in 2024. There were a few key differences in the types of permits that were issued and the types of project we saw permitted.

specifically a shift away from smaller, or at least among the smaller permitted projects, a shift away from projects that were Reducing the number of units towards projects that increase the number of units, that's really one of the key takeaways. Other than that, it's a little bit difficult to determine given that the building permits that were issued in 2025 were generally for smaller developments. There weren't any big projects that got building permits in 2025. And going along with that big picture, we all acknowledge the economic context and the conditions that we find ourselves in right now. The past few years have been extraordinarily difficult for the development of housing. Locally, regionally, and nationally. Locally, at least, it's been a difficult time for all kinds of urban development.

So not just for residential, but for non-residential uses, commercial uses in particular. A lot of this is due to high construction costs, high interest rates, a great deal of unpredictability in how economic factors both regionally and nationally are changing. So despite this, there still appears to be a strong demand for new development in Cambridge. People are interested in building in Cambridge as we're still seeing things go into the review process. and so we expect to still have developers interested in building in Cambridge. When we did this first annual housing report, we thought it was interesting to look at the, as I just mentioned, the affordable housing overlay, which is a similar kind of housing reform which hit its five-year mark. in 2025.

It provides a little bit of helpful context in terms of looking at the effects of a zoning change and how We might not know exactly what it's going to look like a year out, but we start to get a fuller picture as we start to add up information over a period of time. just to get a sense of that five-year trajectory of the affordable housing overlay. A year after it was adopted, it was adopted late 2020. A year after it was adopted, we had a few projects that were in the conceptual stage but nothing that had completed the design review process yet. By 2022, we saw several projects that had completed design review but nothing yet in construction. And then as time went on, you can see how

The trajectory has continued to stay steady with more units entering the review process and completing the review process, tracking with projects that are entering the building permit phase and going through construction. We finally saw the first housing units delivered from the affordable housing overlay in 2025 last year. And just early this year, as I mentioned, we saw more. So this gives a little bit of a sense of how A zoning change plays out over time and how it can be affected by both just the length of the development process but also economic factors and other factors, which in the case of the affordable housing overlay was fairly favorable because there In addition to the affordable housing overlay, a pretty strong dedicated funding stream for affordable housing. So 2025 was a big year for zoning.

There were some amendments that dramatically transformed how zoning is regulated. We also noted, because we wanted to be thorough about changes, that there were some changes to zoning having to do with flood risk. There was the update to the FEMA flood data as well as the zoning change which no longer required a special permit for development in the floodplain. and there were also some updates to the city's own long-term flood elevation data which has an impact on on design of housing under our flood regulation. So not much to say about that, but important to kind of track these changes when they occur. The multifamily zoning was really the big effort of last year. It's important to remind us all where we started with that, that the city council, as they

in the last council term as they were establishing their priorities, set this agenda of We're forming zoning to end exclusionary zoning to basically provide greater equity in how we zone across the city, not sort of selecting some neighborhoods for more restrictive treatment than others. to promote the creation of more multifamily housing units with a particular focus on the inclusionary housing program and to just generally remove some of the barriers that exist within zoning to housing in order to make both existing housing more conforming and to remove barriers that would add cost to the development of housing. It's fair to say it's one of the biggest zoning changes that we have undertaken. It changed the map in terms of removing our single family and two family

zoning districts, making the neighborhoods in the east part of the city and the west part of the city all zoned to allow multifamily use. It changed the way that housing is regulated fundamentally, removing density limitations and moving to a system of just more dimensional-based requirements of height, setbacks, and open space. in order to simplify the design and the regulatory process. And it changed how Housing is reviewed, whereas housing previously had required, in many cases, special permits. In some cases, if a special permit wasn't required, often a variance might have been needed. to a system that relies less on discretionary permitting and introduces more advisory review for development. The height limits were increased.

Residential neighborhoods were allowed up to four stories of housing with an increase to six stories for projects that meet inclusionary housing requirements. Other zoning districts increased the height limits to six stories for housing. In some cases where the previous zoning was higher, it continues to allow taller heights. and the affordable housing overlay continues to allow height increases above the base zoning for all affordable development. So towards the end of the last council term, the city, CDD brought forward some other major zoning reforms. These were rezoning efforts in two of our main corridors. They're based on planning work that we have done in those corridors between our staff and primarily the community planning and design division working on recommendations for these areas.

both they were you know different in terms of the plans and and the recommendations but the overall goals were similar both were intended to allow taller heights for housing No change in terms of the density or heights for non-residential development but while allowing more housing, also encouraging active ground floors and design standards to support the goals of creating an active streetscape. And the final results of those efforts were a rezoning of Mass Ave, which now allows residential use up to 12 stories throughout Mass Ave. and promotes active ground floor use. In Porter Square, there's allowances for up to 18 stories under a PUD process. Cambridge Street,

The height for most of Cambridge Street remained at six stories, but in certain areas like the corner of Webster Street and then at the Lechmere, additional taller heights for housing were allowed. And finally, just to highlight some of the work that we've been doing, not just at CDD, but among various departments, including ISD, historical, the housing department, the community planning and design, and many others. We've been working to stand up some of the new procedures that were created for the multifamily zoning, particularly working out how the advisory procedures would work both at the planning board and at staff level. working on implementing the neighborhood notification procedures. That's something I'll talk about as we get a little bit into this report.

And we now have an ongoing monthly meeting among those departments I mentioned just to talk about what we've been seeing in terms of housing proposals and to coordinate on any kind of implementation issues or other issues that we need to focus on as we work to So why don't I take a pause here to see if there's any questions or discussion?

Dan, go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Dan Anderson, just on slide 11, which was the five-year progress on the AHO, just a couple of questions. Units Completing Design Review. Are those cumulative? Those aren't per year, correct?

Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, this is a cumulative accounting. So the graph is showing. So as... as I mentioned there was you know there was a lot of interest just from the jump in a way with the affordable housing overlay so that first year saw several proposals kind of come into existence. And then since then it's been a more or less steady Thank you for joining us. There's the design review, then the financing, then the construction, then the delivery of the units.

So that's super helpful. I guess one thing that I'm interested in, and maybe I didn't see anything in the further slides, but it really has to do with velocity. So of the 492 maybe that we're seeing in 2022, one, two, three years later, we now have 62 units. with C of O. So, kind of understanding The trajectory of those because it could be some from 2023 that just move more quickly. I'm kind of curious about how how the velocity from initial review to certificate of occupancy go. So it's a general interest and I was looking for information about that, but you answered my question.

Yeah, well, I think that's true. And we certainly could do we could do a more elaborate graph if we if we wanted to of this. But I can just say on reflection, you're right that it's not a you know, it's not just a one to one, you know, everything is paced. exactly evenly, because with the affordable housing overlay, we're seeing a pretty wide range of development. There's some, I think there's, you know, think about Jefferson Park, 250 plus or minus units in that development, which involves a lot of site work and reconstructions. That's a development that's taking a lot more time. The first one was the development on Norfolk Street, which is a somewhat smaller project. It's a combination of renovation and addition, which I don't remember if that was one of the

projects that completed design review in 2022 or 2023 but certainly a much shorter construction time frame than some of the other developments that were permitted early or that went through design review early in the

Great. I just wanted to highlight two things. Dan, thank you for... pointing to something that actually had enough of a timeline to begin to at least speculate about trajectory or change. Given that this is the first year's report, it's very hard to conclude anything necessarily. but I understand that this is your attempt to benchmark and say okay here are the things that we're going to measure you know we can't lose sight of the fact that on slide eight here we've got a at least a hopeful sign that on the smaller scale projects, there's a shift away from decreasing units to increasing units. So something's working out there because the goal overall is to increase the housing stock. My other question actually probably moves into procedure because This point about your ongoing interdepartmental meetings to figure out how you support each other. Just jumping ahead, we know that the Historic Commission is seeing

A huge volume of work and I'm wondering how they're doing. That's all. But maybe we jump, you can answer that when we get further into the deck.

Right, we'll get in there when we get to it. And I should have also mentioned at the beginning that all of those departments I mentioned were instrumental in putting this report together. And it's just me and Emily was also a key partner. on my team was the key driver of putting all this together so we can try to represent a little bit of what we've heard and what's been provided just by the Historical Commission, but we can't speak directly for them, but maybe that's a conversation we could have at some point in the future. Okay, so if there's nothing else, we can get right into it, and we'll talk about all of those issues more as we get into the details. So this is, again, what's happened. in 2025 and we've also you know we've all kind of gone into 2026 into the present day because the idea here is the way I've described it is to get your head into it imagine yourself standing

at one point in time and looking down the road. And what do we see coming down that road? So it's not exactly... You know, a timeline, but it's more, you know, what do we anticipate, even though we're not sure exactly when we're going to get there. We talk about new proposals that have come our way as of 2025. We also look back in some cases to proposals that are older, that came before 2025, but haven't yet gone into construction. So we're trying to kind of provide a complete picture because There is an awful lot of housing development that has been permitted in some way, shape, or form. It has been in place before all of these zoning changes, which is part of that overall picture.

These projects don't necessarily all have building permits yet, so I'll just kind of reiterate that again and again. and it was really hard for us to try to figure out how to how to present all this information because we focused we realized we focused just on building permits we weren't going to capture all the proposals that we've seen and all the things that people have heard about but at the same time We do want to get to just focusing on building permits because many of these projects are Some of these projects will not move forward. Some of them we know are not going to move forward in the form that we've seen them already because there have been changes that have taken place. Some of the projects are probably going to change. Some of them will have a different number of units, a different type of unit being provided. So we can't take this section as a

A perfectly precise prediction of what's going to happen in the future, but it's just kind of a sense and an overview of what we see coming, and it all is subject to change. I won't read this whole list, but this is an overview of what's covered. I'm going to go section by section. In order to kind of fill this section out, we chose different types of review processes that are either mandated by zoning or by other ordinances in the case of the historical commission review. It's a combination of binding and non-binding review procedures. All of these have different purposes and functions. We're not going to talk about the purpose of all these reviews and what they're for. The board is familiar with a lot of them. But we're just using this as a way to kind of structure the report and to come up with a set of proposals that we can really look at more closely.

So we start with planning board special permits. Some of these are not directly based on the multifamily zoning in two cases. the 745 Concord Ave project which was reviewed in in early in 2025 and the Health Peak PUD which the board is going to be reviewing later in April are part of the previous alewife zoning that was adopted or they're based on the alewife zoning that was adopted. The 745 Concord Ave received its special permit. At this point, it doesn't seem to be moving forward, but that permit is still valid. and so forth.

The first proposal the planning board we expected we'll see at some point in the not too distant future is a proposal on Bird Street and Bay State Road in a C1A district. They've done their community engagement. and their next step would be submitting an application to the planning board. So this is one that would exceed the new special permit threshold for project review. and here are all of the sort of older planning board special permit cases that have not gone into construction yet a lot of these you know will be familiar to many board members you know PUD development in the case of North Point or Cambridge Crossing. That one has already built a lot of its housing, but there's a lot more housing yet to be built. The Volpe site development is yet to enter its residential phases. as is the case with Cambridge side.

75 First Street is one where the building permit is now, it was slowed for a period of time, but the building permit is now under review. So that's one we expect will be going into construction in the not too distant future. And then there are some other cases that receive a special permit that they may be are not going to be moving forward. But again, those are all potential redevelopment sites and redevelopment opportunities. They were all permitted before the multifamily zoning changes. in one case before the changes to the Mass Ave zoning. So there may be some reformulation of what's planned to happen on some of those sites. I'm not going to read through all the takeaways because mostly these are things I've already reviewed looking at the slides, but the key thing here to note is when you look at just sheer number of units, the three PUD proposals, the one that

has not been reviewed yet and the two that have already been permitted those those make up a pretty substantial part of that market housing pipeline as we look to the long term. But in many cases, those proposals are going to take a very long time to build out. So this is the category that the planning board is probably most familiar with, apart from the special permits, which is the planning board advisory consultations. In previous zoning, This is a process that applied only to affordable housing overlay development and only from the multifamily zoning. Did the planning board sort of take jurisdiction over some

Thank you for joining us. Many of the affordable housing overlay developments that have come through over the past year. There's the 1740 Mass Ave. Development, which the planning board had its first consultation session for. That's the first one that the planning board has reviewed, the first market rate Project that the board has reviewed under the planning board advisory consultation. It'll be coming back for its second review session in the not too distant future. Porter Street, 1628 Porter Street was one that had been planned for a consultation. We now know because it's been announced that the site is under control of the Cambridge Housing Authority, so we expect that that will be rethought and will likely be

coming forward as an affordable housing proposal it previously was was being conceived as a market rate with inclusionary proposal but so that's one that You know, it'll still be on that list somewhere, but it'll be a different, I guess, different color because we've kind of, we've coded some of the affordable housing overlay developments to make them easier to see in the chart. and there are a couple of affordable housing overlay projects that went through review previously in 2024. and both of those we expect to be going into the construction phase in the near future. Those are kind of in that in-between phase that I mentioned between completing the design review and then getting their funding secured so that they can and then move forward.

So the broad point here is that while or one of the broad points here if you were paying attention to the zoning districts is that Some of these larger proposals are coming forward in residency one districts and sort of the neighborhood districts, which were the focus of a lot of the multifamily discussion. But we're also seeing proposals in many other zoning districts and kind of scattered through different parts of the city. This is something we've actually always had. We sort of renamed it as part of the multifamily zoning, but this is a process that a staff review that has always kind of applied in some Way to projects that are 25 to 50,000 square feet. And we've seen several of them come through the review process since 2025. They are, again, in different parts of the city, East Cambridge and West Cambridge and in the middle.

Some of them have Most of them are on sites with no existing units or one existing unit. So they're pretty substantial changes to the number of units for that particular site. and a couple of them are already in the building permit review phase. So those are ones that could be going into construction soon. But this review process, the staff advisory review process, is one that seems to be moving proposals through the process fairly efficiently. The one case that we saw of a public advisory consultation. So again, this is a pre-existing process, which applies to nearly all New construction or substantial additions in what we call areas of special planning concern.

So in this case, both of 322 Prospect Street, both Prospect Street and Now Cambridge Street are considered areas of special planning concern. That was one of the changes that was part of the... So this is a proposal which under normal circumstances, a proposal of nine units wouldn't undergo... All of this again is advisory and non-binding and this is also Now in the building permit review phase. So in this sort of range of sizes we are still seeing or scale of development, we are still seeing interest. One of the reflections that we've had is that having some contact with staff for proposals that don't otherwise have to go to the planning board or go through a discretionary review process.

It's helping developers understand what the zoning requirements are. for a project of that scale. And that's, you know, for example, there are projects at this scale that are subject to green building requirements or in some cases they're, in fact, in all cases, even for smaller development, they're subject to green factor requirements. and it's been helpful to cover these issues before it gets into the building permit review step and that seems to be helping resolve some issues and smooth out the process as the projects get down the road. And so now we're shifting a little bit to historical review. So this is totally separate from zoning. But one of the things that we found is that proposals that are subject to historical commission review have tended to start their process at the historical commission. So in many cases, these proposals haven't yet made it into zoning review.

And in some cases, they wouldn't be subject to additional zoning review for the smaller scale development. But for some of these larger scale developments, we expect they'll have to go through One of the review process that we've already mentioned, whether it's staff review or planning board advisory review or the special permit process. I don't know that any of these exceed the project review special permit threshold. So this particular list looks at housing proposals that have gone through demolition review. So these are We'll talk about this more a little bit later, but these are proposals where the demolition of the existing building was deemed significant enough that the Historical Commission had to review it. and all of these are actually in residency one which is which is somewhat interesting all of the proposals or most of the proposals are relatively small with the exception of one proposal on Western Avenue which is larger and that's that's a

That was a notable proposal that went through historical commission review. We don't know the exact size of the project, again, because it hasn't gone through zoning review. There's a lot of detail that hasn't been provided in terms of like gross floor area and other dimensional details. characteristics, but it will likely need to go through at that scale either a planning board advisory consultation or some other kind of review before it gets to the building permit phase. And there's also some proposals that are required to go through a review and approval process based on being in either historic districts or neighborhood conservation districts. and one that board members were paying attention, probably aware,

that there were three different proposals that were relatively close to each other in mid-Cambridge that went through review by the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Conservation District Commission. In addition to those there were some proposals in or near Harvard Square, including one proposal that was a combination of a residential building and a hotel. These proposals similarly have not gone through any of the applicable zoning mandated reviews, so there's a lot of details we're not sure about, but some of these will go through some of those review processes, the planning board or staff review. and some of these projects have been larger and some of them were smaller. Because these cases were subject to public hearings and binding review,

The Historical Commission and the NCDCs received a substantial amount of public testimony on these cases. There were concerns raised on a number of different issues. Some of it was around compatibility with The surrounding areas, which were things that the Historical Commission could work with the proposals to try to improve the design. And they did work through a lot of these proposals to improve the design in some cases. encouraging a shift away from a demolition and reconstruction to a preservation and addition type of approach to development. But there were also comments at the Historical Commission and the NCDCs about other kinds of development impacts that aren't squarely in the purview of the city's Historical Commission having to do with things like parking and and Greenspace.

So I mentioned earlier one of the additions for the multifamily zoning, and this was one that I'm not sure that the planning board was very involved because this came late or later in the multifamily zoning hearing process. It was something that the council asked to be introduced. And this is a neighborhood notification process. It applies only in Residency 1 District. So I didn't break this down by zoning district. It's all Residency 1. And it's only for proposals above three stories. And what the requirement says is that the applicant needs to notify immediate abutters and hold a meeting to answer questions and get feedback about the proposal. This was intended as kind of a lower lift engagement effort The council wanted to simply make sure that a developer was talking to the neighbors before proceeding with the development. It's all non-binding review.

CDD is notified when a meeting is scheduled and advertised so that we can post on our webpage, but otherwise we're not really directly involved. There's no staff advisory review. That's part of these unless it otherwise triggers staff advisory review. And so far we've seen 27 of these neighbor notification cases. Most of these are relatively small. Almost all Thank you for joining us. just under half of these proposals are now in construction and the others are still kind of in the in the review process and the majority of them sort of by about a two to one margin are on lots that are less than 5,000 square feet, so relatively small sites.

and there is some overlap with these with the proposals that were reviewed by historical so there are some cases where there was historical commission review or demolition review or they were conservation district review, but they also had to do the neighborhood notification under zoning. So here's a summary from the previous slides just giving us an idea of what the future pipeline of development might look like. We deliberately didn't create a total on these because, as I mentioned, there's a little bit of overlap, but also as I noted at the beginning, we don't have a guarantee that all these projects will move forward in their current form and they're all kind of on different potential timelines. So there's really not much We can do to create a clear kind of aggregate picture, but we can kind of compare what the numbers look like in each of these different categories to get a sense of how the proposals of different

types and different scales line up with each other as far as the number of units that are expected. And finally, just looking at how these map across the city, they're pretty spread out east to west. There are some neighborhoods that have more proposals than others. Not necessarily a pattern that's attributable to anything that I can tell, but maybe more due to where redevelopment opportunities have appeared. If there were, for example, one entity owning multiple sites that that then came on the market at a similar time as we look at this in future years we might be able to learn more about geographic patterns but at this point it's still fairly dispersed and Some of the big takeaways before I take another pause, six-story proposals are a thing now, you know, under the zoning.

A lot of the zoning was built around this idea of the six-story multifamily proposal being one of the more kind of economically advantageous approaches to building housing units. So we've seen a number of proposals, not all of them in the residency one district, and not necessarily all but most below that special permit threshold. So we think that the setting of the special permit threshold and only having advisory review below that threshold is having an effect on how developers are approaching, looking at what can be built on a particular site or what to move forward with for a particular site. And again, most of these have not proceeded the building permit stage. but some proposals of that scale sometimes take a little bit more time as we saw with the affordable housing overlay. It takes a little bit of time for proposals to move from the design phase into the construction phase.

I guess the final point is that although the future is always uncertain, it seems like for now the pipeline of affordable housing development that was set up following the affordable housing overlay is not slowing down. So while we've been seeing more come through in the way of market development, we're also seeing, continue to see a lot of proposals come through in the affordable. We're even seeing some proposals that could have been market rate shifting to affordable. So I'll go back to the map and maybe pause here to see if there's any questions, just because it's a nice picture. Oh, and I'll let the chair facilitate the questions, probably because I can't necessarily see all the hands the way I have my screens.

We'll do, Jeff. Ted.

Jeff, I have a couple of questions that probably were outside the purview of the study and the report, but you've been touching on things around them. When we were doing the multifamily housing reviews, there was a lot of concern about it may be used to enlarge existing homes and get McMansions. And I was wondering from the review of building permits, do you see that as occurring or it's not happening at all?

Thanks for the question, Tan. We'll probably get into that in the next section when we get into building permits. So this is, yeah, sorry to say this isn't the end. This is just kind of pausing on proposals that have come through the review process but not necessarily into the building permit process when we get in and most of this is you know larger scale for the most part When we get into building permits, we'll see a lot of the building permits are dealing with some of those smaller scale site developments and improvements, and we'll get very directly into that question.

Okay, great. I'll save my other question, which is just really totally off the wall in connection with this study. Well, that's a tease. That's a tease.

I'm really looking forward to that.

You probably just say it's too early to say you have no information on it.

Great. Dan, you had your hand up, but you've dropped it. You're okay? I'm okay. Great. Thank you. Mary?

Thank you. Yeah, I had a similar question to Ted's, and I did notice just under the demolition piece that there are two, the historic art review demolition, there are two anyway that are going from one demolition. There are at least examples right there that we know some of that is happening. My other question was in terms of the staff and public advisory consultations, you mentioned that it was helpful for staff to clarify for developers some of the requirements like the green building factor. I'm curious as to how folks are reacting to design guidelines and

and probably the discussion later on, I'm curious as to trying to find out a way to sort of accumulate the qualitative data because you know a big piece of these rezonings has been the changes in the review processes and in the permit and you know clearly It's helping to move the pipeline along, but I'd like to get a sense over time, and maybe it's a little too soon, but over time, just how is it starting to shape the built environment? So for now, if you could just give us a sense of how much time or focus is spent on design review on some of the smaller projects, that would be helpful.

Absolutely. So I can point out just for the board's sake or just as a reminder, these are all proposals, I guess with the exception of Porter Street, which hasn't really made it, proposals that came to the planning board. And so the planning board has some familiarity with the advisory review process and how it works with you know there's a lot of focus on design but ultimately it's non-binding so you know you you have a bit of a trade-off where you know you might be making comments to a developer and you know they you know you can see at the planning board you know you have a two hearing process or two meeting process so you can see the comments and you can see how that's shaping the proposal and I think you know just about every one of these proposals has been

has kind of gone in that direction of you know seeing some some substantial improvement you know as a result of the design feedback but maybe not you know maybe something's still not necessarily being resolved. And a lot of that may be having to do with the cost and other factors that are affecting the project. So I just point that out to note that at the staff review level. And we've seen here, these are the proposals we've seen at the staff level. It's a similar kind of process. We don't have two required in some cases we've had some you know usually you know one kind of formal meeting and then sometimes a little bit of back and forth follow-up so so in addition to talking over things like what are the green factor requirements and what's the process and how do you get through it, which I think is helpful.

you know the the urban design staff is involved in these reviews and they're giving their you know they're pointing to the guidelines we're giving them the guidelines you know before they um you know as soon as we hear from them really we're we're providing them with the guidelines and you know giving them a heads up of what we're looking at and so far we've seen the top two on here have, they've been through enough process where we've been able to see what came to us and then you know kind of how the project advanced through the building permit phase and you know we have been seeing improvements you know they've I think where developers are able to make changes without you know We've seen some improvements. The last two on the list we haven't fully seen yet. One we've commented on, but it hasn't It hasn't come back around to us to see how the design has evolved. And then there's one that we haven't really looked at yet.

So there's really not a lot of examples, but I think so far we're seeing a similar kind of trajectory to what the planning board has seen with advisory reviews that there's It's helpful. There are improvements that are being made, but it's not drastic changes to the design as a result. I think the developers are still, they kind of have their they have their pro forma, they've kind of figured out what they want to do. And so the design improvements are meaningful, but not dramatic.

Great, Diego.

This is probably a silly question, but can we go back to that slide that we were just on, 28? I don't know if I'm missing the context here, but is that correct, like the units to the gross floor area? Because it seems kind of A lot relative to the other addresses.

Yeah, so that's one thing I guess we'll see a little bit of as we get into the building permits, but you know, Yeah, the gross for area to unit ratio is a little bit more varied than maybe we're used to seeing. I think a lot of times we see things hovering right around that, You know, one unit for every 1,000 to maybe 1,100 to 1,200 square feet of gross floor area. But with some of these proposals we're seeing like, you know, for Sheridan Street, it's a, you know, it's a bigger Bigger floor area, but not quite as many units. And of course, we don't know what this is all just what's kind of proposed at the stage that we're seeing it. So these could always be transformed and adjusted as they get to the building permit phase. So that's sort of the caveat. But yeah, you can see there are some cases where the number of units is is relatively maybe a little lower compared to the gross floor area.

In some cases where the units are much higher compared to the gross floor area. So I think it just speaks to different approaches to the program of the development. Yeah, this is another one that's a little bit more kind of on par with what we're used to seeing.

Yeah. Great, sharp eye, Diego. Any other questions at this point? Otherwise, we'll have Jeff move to the third section of the slide deck. Great, Jeff, why don't you proceed?

All right, I'll get into it. This is sort of the interesting part because it's not It's the part where it's not necessarily what we are seeing on a day to day basis in CDD, but it's kind of pulling more precise data from The building permit application records in terms of what's actually being permitted and what's actually going into construction. So, you know, while the last section I talked about, you know, standing and looking down the road and what's coming in the future, this is more like a snapshot of just like a point in time, like taking a picture of like a point in time and what's coming at that specific point in time. One of the helpful things about doing this is that it allows us to build A year by year consistent tracking of data so that we can kind of see how trends emerge over time.

And where we could, we tried to compare this data to 2024. We realize that in some cases that 2024 data is a little bit harder to track down. But we're hoping that, you know, as we build this out in the future, we'll have a pretty robust time scale. We look at a couple other things too, which I'll kind of get to as we get into it, which are not exactly building permits, but are somewhat related. and the first one of those, we start with sort of the exception to the rule. We go back to the historical commission and before we get into actual permits, Before a proposal goes through a demolition permit review, it will get reviewed by the Historical Commission for significance. And this is any building that's 50 years old or more.

and what the historical commission does is they first the staff makes a determination of whether it's significant or not significant and then if it's considered significant it goes to the historical commission which makes a determination about whether it's and that's the section that we talked about in the previous section of the report. But what's sort of notable These determinations of significance is the really substantial increase in requests that staff has received. This is what we've kind of been hearing about this from the historical mission from the very beginning. and a lot of those requests are, you know, they're not necessarily in all cases a precursor to a demolition permit application. Sometimes it's just A request from a property owner or a prospective buyer to sort of understand, you know, what would the process be if we were going to, you know, sell the site or try to redevelop the site?

You know, what would we kind of have to go through with the historical commission? and so there was a significant you know increase in in that although when you get down to the number of the bottom line of the final number of Demolition Permit applications that were approved by Historical. It has also gone up from 2024 to 2025, but it's not the same scale of increase as the number of requests that have come through. When we look at demolition permits themselves and in terms of focusing on and these are the ones that are issued by ISD and this is a focus just on demolition permits that involve removal of residential units so not the you know no like accessory structure demolition or partial demolition or something this is where You know, units are being entirely removed. You know, the numbers overall are lower than the requests that go to historical commission.

but there has been an increase. If you look at just a percentage increase from 12 to 18 and the number of demolition permits issued and the number of units that are that were approved for demolition is substantially higher but um The majority of those units are attributable to the Riverview condominium building, 221 Mount Auburn Street, which is... you know one that's that's attracted a bit of attention and I think many on the board are familiar with that but that was 66 units that was you know in a building that was determined to be structurally unsound and had to be demolished so that's a A relatively unique case, you know, resulting in an atypically high number of units being demolished in last or permitted for demolition last year.

I think I covered all these points. So this next chart is kind of a tricky one. It requires some explanation. I think it says a lot to some of the questions like the question that you were raising, Ted. So we tried to take all of the building permits and demolition permits and give a broader picture of what do redevelopment projects look like. Now, a redevelopment project on a site could involve multiple different permits. There could be a demolition permit. There could be multiple demolition permits. There could be one building permit. There could be multiple building permits. But we tried to kind of aggregate all of that for a site and give a sense of like just overall what's happening. You know, how can we describe what's happening on that site?

and again these are projects that result in new units being created so nothing that's just like a renovation or alteration that maybe changes the size of a building or the size of units but doesn't actually affect the number of units. And because we're looking at all of what's happening on a site, we can look at the net change in units. So this is where we're talking about, like I mentioned, net new units rather than just you know, pure new units being created. And there's a few different things to point out in this. There's some kind of obvious things to note. You know, one is that the number of units most, you know, pretty much due to that top line The number of units receiving building permits in 2024 compared to 2025 is much higher. That is attributable to 121 Broadway. So that was a project which the planning board reviewed in Kendall Square.

That's part of the MXD district development. That's the residential building, 439 residential units. which account for pretty much the entire difference in units permitted between 2024 and 2025. So that's an important point that a big multifamily development can really eclipse almost anything else that's happening in terms of building permits for housing in a given year. So that's one thing that's notable is just that sort of total number of units. As I mentioned, the number of redevelopment projects that received some building permit has changed, increased, but it's still kind of in the same ballpark just under 40 to just under 50, just over 50. And the types of projects are fairly consistent.

They're all very small numbers, so you can't really say anything that's statistically significant about them. But there has been somewhat increase in the number of projects that involve the demolition of a residential building and the construction of a new residential building. So there were 16 of those in 2025 compared to seven in 2024. We see the net number of units While in 2024, that was a net decrease in units resulting from those projects. It's been a net increase in units, although single digits. So it's not a very substantial change just in the number of units being created. where there has been a more substantial difference. If you look right in the middle of this chart, Talking about one of the things that the city council and the planning board had talked about a little bit is this idea of sort of down conversions versus up conversions when existing buildings are being altered.

are we seeing those altered in a way that reduces the number of units? Are we seeing them being altered in a way that increases the number of units? And we've seen a pretty substantial flip from 2024 to 2025, whereas In 2024, there were 17 additional alteration projects that decreased units and only one additional alteration project that increased units. In 2025, there was 19 that increased units and five that decreased units. So we've seen, again, a swing from a net decrease of, you know, 26 units from those sort of down conversion projects to a net increase of 25 units in Those projects that increase units. So the numbers we're talking about, again, compared to say a 439 unit

Thank you for joining us. Conversion of Non-Residential Structures. So those of you who've been on the planning board for a long time know there's a long history of how those conversion projects can be used to create units. I think there was a period of time when we weren't seeing as many of those proposals. In 2024, there were only two proposals resulting in a net Thank you for joining us. A lot of that, I think, was due to Lesley University and the sale of many of their buildings, their academic buildings and dormitories then being kind of rehabbed and converted into

Also the affordable housing project on 6th Street, which the planning board reviewed, the former convent rehab was also one of the projects that received a building permit. So I talked about all that. So in this one, we're looking just at, we're kind of taking all the demolition permits and putting them aside and just looking at building permits. So building permits for New Buildings and how many units are being created and we looked at those in terms of where They what zoning districts they're in both the current zoning district and also in residency one look at breaking it down by what used to be in a residence A1, A2 or B or C zoning district and

The changes we've seen here, the notable changes we've seen, apart from the ones I already talked about, more building permits in Residence B districts, which you would imagine, based on the fact that that was That was a major zoning change in those districts to go to Residency 1 and an increase in units. In Residency 1 districts, A decrease in the number of building permits and an increase in substantial increase in the number of housing units. And what's interesting about that, this is one where we had to look a little bit closer at the data to try to explain what's actually going on. and what we found was going on is that in in 2024 a lot of the building permits that were being issued were for multiple single family or two family buildings on a lot. So even though C1 allowed multifamily development, there were, you know, because of Dimensional restrictions and other requirements.

A lot of developers were choosing to build multiple buildings on a lot rather than building single multifamily buildings or townhouse buildings. And so under the 2025 zoning, we've seen a lot more multifamily and townhouse development. therefore smaller number of building permits issued but more units because there's more units per building, basically more units per building compared to before. and in other districts you know higher density residential districts or other districts similarly we've seen you know not much change but in other residential districts an increase in the again in the number of units per permit being issued and in non-residential districts, a decrease in the number of units based on the 121 Broadway building that I mentioned.

So this next piece we looked at is just again looking at and so forth. You've probably picked up that the totals are different in a lot of these charts and a lot of it has to do with really what's written at the top and that the universe of what we're looking at is slightly different in each case. So, you know, here again, 2024, there were, because there were in 2024, there were more alterations and additions that decrease the number of housing units, those come out of this. Thank you for joining us.

sort of figure out well what exactly does it mean that you're sort of that you're taking the existing building reducing number of units rather than increasing or building new construction So, you know, the biggest or the most significant change that you see in this data is in that multifamily three to five units. So in 2024, nothing. was built in that or nothing was built or increased to that three to five unit range and a more significant number of permits in 2025 issued. The rest of it is A little bit, you know, not much really to speak about in terms of the numbers that are shown in the comparison between 2024 and 2025.

And the final piece we looked at for building permits, again, looking at an even smaller set of building permits, just the building permits that are either new construction or increase the height of an existing building. So we wanted to understand How has the new zoning affected the height of buildings that people are proposing to build? Overall, the majority of building permits that are for new construction or increasing the height of buildings were still three stories, so we haven't seen a lot of movement from in building permits from the kind of three-story typical proposed height. We've seen that those two projects that are four stories are both permits that were issued for adding a fourth story onto a three-story building. So We've seen that happen. We haven't seen it a lot so far, but that is something that has happened a couple times.

And the five and six story buildings are both, affordable housing developments that were under the AHO that received their building permits. And kind of segues into the next section, which is looking at affordability. So notably, because the projects that were permitted in 2025 were all smaller housing developments, none of them were subject to inclusionary, so there were no inclusionary units receiving building permits in 2025. but there were 71 affordable units receiving permits. for development under the affordable housing overlay. So just looking at those two projects against the other 50 some odd permits that were issued for smaller Market rate housing development in 2025, it still turns out to be about half of the units that were permitted or are permanently affordable units.

So we struggled a bit with how to present the data on this. At one point, we had a slide that showed how many permits were issued in 2025 that were subject to BZA variances or special permits. And we realized that that got confusing because a lot of the A lot of the building projects that received building permits in 2025. had been to the Board of Zoning Appeal in 2024 and in some cases actually kind of changed or modified their project after the zoning was So it got really messy and hard to keep track of. But what we thought was more salient was just in terms of total BZA applications. that were received in 2024 and 2025, there was a decrease of about 70%.

and you know the just anecdotally the you know the main motivation for that but this is all BZA applications for for everything not just for housing in this case but we know that the bulk of that decrease is due to the change to housing regulations and not having the same stream of of variance applications for residential buildings as we had seen in the past. So mapping now the building permits and where the building permits have been issued Again, there's not that much of a discernible pattern in where they were issued. You can see just based on the size of the dots that they're much smaller. Thank you for joining us. Oh, you can. Great.

So over here where I'm pointing, there's a bit of a cluster where, as I mentioned, Leslie University properties in the Baldwin neighborhood had kind of Many of those went up for sale and a lot of them then received permits to modify or convert to residential use. So we see a lot there, but otherwise it's kind of more dispersed in different neighborhoods of the city. And also, just as you can see in the chart of the districts, many of the permits that were issued were resident C-1 districts. Many of them had been formerly been other You can see a lot of the building permits are either on some of the mixed use corridors or in some cases close to some of the mixed use corridors. So the last few pieces of this section are getting a little bit into the analysis that we said we weren't really going to do as part of the annual housing report, but

because there were a few things that the council and the planning board had questions or concerns about during the multifamily zoning and because we had data that were accessible to us. We decided to show some of this data, try to find a way to represent some of this data. We can't draw many conclusions, but it allows us to kind of keep track of some of this information over time. and one of the questions as Ted brought up is, you know, are we seeing larger units as a result of this zoning? And, you know, It's hard to get really at unit sizes specifically. The council asked us about this. Could we look at bedroom count and other things, which kind of makes sense to people, and we realize that the data on that is a little bit hard to to get in a comprehensive and consistent way. But we can look at this metric of gross floor area per unit. It's kind of a proxy for the average unit size that we've been seeing. It doesn't track directly one to one

The gross flow rate per unit isn't exactly the same as unit size. and we did see a pretty wide range across building permits that were issued from, you know, 730 square feet of grocery per unit to almost 5,000 square feet per unit. But the median tends to fall around what we find to be typical in Cambridge. So we've done previous studies where we found that this average gross floor area per unit tends to hover around 1,000 to 1,500 square feet. for multifamily, a bit skews a bit larger for single family and two family housing. One of the caveats here is that basement space is excluded So we do have some projects like particularly single family, two family, and townhouse.

If they include a lot of usable basement space, which a lot of housing development these days does, the unit sizes might actually skew a bit larger than that gross floor area per unit metric would indicate. So this is something we'll continue to have to kind of look at and track and dig into a little bit more as we analyze it over time. And we do, kind of as Diego pointed out, just to the point here, because a lot of that pipeline development, those are larger multifamily development has a lot of variation in We similarly expect to see those metrics change quite a bit as we see larger buildings go into construction. So the other thing we pulled some information from was from our green factor reviews.

So CDD is responsible for reviewing developments for conformance with the green factor requirements. Most of the board, I think, is familiar with how those requirements work. The reviews cover not just building permits, but proposals at design review, building permit, and certificate of occupancy. So we're tracking these metrics at all of those different points. The cool score is kind of, I think of as sort of a ratio that has to do with the quality of site design. So there's the quantity of open space, just like the percentage of lot area that's covered by open space, but then there's also The cool factor gives you an indication of you know how much of that is trees and you know high plantings versus low plantings and you know other features that promote a

Thank you for joining us today. What we've seen is that proposals, as we get into the new zoning and start seeing the new zoning shape new developments, proposals are still meeting the Cool Score requirement. which is a minimum of 1.0 but we are seeing in many cases the proposals are coming closer to the minimum requirement in the past many proposals sort of exceeded that minimum requirement just by virtue of the fact that in some cases in some zoning districts the open space requirement was much higher and you know residents A1 and A2 districts it used to be a 50% open space requirement now it's a 30% open space requirement so we're seeing some differences in in approach We can't really draw firm conclusions from this again because we

We don't have enough information and we haven't really been able to do deep analysis on this, but it does track some of the differences in numbers track with the shifts that we've seen that I mentioned before where there's not as much We're seeing not as much single-family, two-family development on new sites. We're seeing more multifamily and townhouse development, which is occupying a larger building footprint. and one of the things that the green factor review tells us a little bit about is tree canopy or sorry canopy tree preservation and new canopy tree planting so both of those earn points under the cool score rubric we don't have direct data on tree removal from Green Factor that obviously doesn't earn points.

Under the Green Factor, but we pulled in some of the data on tree removal permits that seem to be associated with sites where Green Factor review took place. So we tried to use that to give a little bit of a comparison. We would note it's not entirely an apples to apples comparison and it's hard to get a clear sense from this because there are some There are some tree removal permits that are not for green factor projects and there's some green factor projects that don't involve tree removal permits. I think this is another area where we need to build out the data a little bit more and do a little bit of deeper analysis. But we included the information that we had because we know it's a concern for many on council in the community. So that's a lot. I'll just do a quick wrap up and then we can go back to do questions on any of the report.

First of all, we can always go back to this map, but this is just combining the two things we talked about of where all the, both the building permits, the demolition permits, and Thank you. Thank you. as we talk about it. And the big takeaways, there is, I think, a great deal of interest in multifamily development in the past year. We've seen many proposals come forward. The more sizable proposals haven't yet made it into the construction phase at this point. The projects that have gone into construction phase and have received building permits in the past year have been mostly smaller scale projects, although we've seen that shift that I mentioned away from single family and two family construction to

More multifamily and townhouse construction across the city. We've also seen a shift away from alterations and additions to existing buildings that reduce the number of units. We've seen a shift towards alterations and additions that increase the number of units, which is one of the things we talked about quite a bit. and finally you know we're seeing more interest in in market rate housing production as a result of this but also continuing to see a strong pipeline of all affordable development at this stage. So those are the big takeaways and I guess I'll turn it back over to the chair and we can talk about it as long as you like because it's the last item on the agenda.

Jeff, thank you for taking us through all the detail. Really impressive summation. As I say, I think we've all felt it's really hard to draw firm conclusions at this point, but there's some Earls here that suggest that the ordinance is taking effect. I have one question, but I will wait to see if other board members have a question. Diego, thank you.

Yeah, first off, thanks for the report and the presentation. There's a lot of information. I think it's really well done. I think one of the questions or comments I've always sort of heard from, you know, people I talk to is parking. And I was wondering if there was any sort of talks about rolling some parking information to this, like... Units per street and how many parking spaces are on that street or something like that. Just wondering if that was ever considered.

Yeah, that is something we could do. I think we did a report last year on parking. where we looked at largely residential proposals and how many parking spaces were being proposed. and we can bring some of that into the scope of this as well. I think what we found there was just to kind of reflect on that a little bit is A number of multifamily projects that were in the planning stage at that point were not proposing parking, but there were also some proposals that were including parking, in some cases including More parking than the one per unit ratio. And it was hard to tell what the impact was because none of the projects had been completed yet.

But we were tracking that starting in 2022 when the development, when the parking minimum requirements were eliminated and We still get reports as a requirement of the zoning For most housing development, we get reports from the developers telling how many parking spaces are proposed and how they came about deciding how many parking spaces they were going to propose. So that's just off the head what I remember from that report. But we can incorporate that in the future.

Dan, I believe you were next.

Yeah, thank you very much, Tom. Jeff, an extraordinary amount of work, and I hope that this is setting good Good data collection and groundwork for this moving forward. I think we're all looking forward to a five-year report. But anyway, just acknowledging the huge amount of data collection and time you guys are putting into putting this together and trying to make sense of it and clearly this helps enormously. One piece that would help me again in looking at that kind of velocity question, one would be just and many more. neighborhood meeting, be it historic review, neighborhood review, special permit review, cumulatively, much like you showed on page 11, if that was shown for this.

The granular stuff helps enormously, but just sort of seeing the bigger picture of how many are kind of moving through the pipeline would be great. I think I'm also used to some of the data that I find from the city of Boston, which on their kind of approvals, whether it's special permit or others, lists, you know, kind of under construction. So if we had a kind of sense of, I think we're listing at what is in development, but there's a kind of squishy time during which Projects that have received permit are under construction and so there's a rough approximation of how many units are currently under construction would be an interesting data point as well as I think also helpful to synthesize. And then lastly, I remember

When the zoning was being proposed, planning had put together some kind of capacity predictions about what kinds of and amounts of housing might possibly be achieved in different zoning districts, right? I mean, they're kind of stacked bar charts that I recall. And it'd be interesting to see against that prediction, like how is that stacking up against housing production? So even though this is still really early, if you're laying that groundwork, it would be really great to see how actual housing production is matched up against those predictions of how are we doing against that? you know regional count of was it still 12,500 I'm not sure where we are these days but certainly putting those kinds of things in context of what was the zoning change and how are we you know making progress towards that would be super helpful.

Okay, good suggestions. Carolyn.

Thank you. One of the items that I noticed, and forgive me if you talked to this and I missed it, was the comment, that there were no inclusionary projects permitted in 2025. There were a number of AHL projects. And I know that there are inclusionary projects under review right now, but I'm curious if you have thoughts or context or kind of... theories about why And obviously there were some AHO projects, but why that's the case. It's a little, you know, I'd love to see more inclusion rather than less, of course. So I'm just curious to hear kind of your thoughts if you have them about that.

Yeah, we didn't get too deep into inclusionary because thinking about the inclusionary policy is another study that we have underway. So the city has... engaged in a periodic inclusionary housing study that we do where we go through all different aspects of the policy, including feasibility. We certainly have heard a lot from Some in the development community about the impact of inclusionary housing requirements on feasibility, but we've also seen that You know, large multifamily development in general has experienced, you know, just feasibility issues just due to economics. and we spoke to developers about this, where the inclusionary requirements have been perceived to have an impact.

We've also heard that even without inclusionary requirements, for multifamily housing to go forward. So I think it's in some ways hard to disentangle because when we talk about inclusionary development, we're also just talking about multifamily development and many more. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us. You know, affordable housing development with public subsidy and unique cases like 121 Broadway, which is

Great, thank you. Mary.

Thank you. Thank you for all the work. It is a lot of information. And I am, of course, I think like everyone kind of eager for ultimately the five year, which I think my understanding is that in some ways will continue. Thank you so much for joining us. were put together to help council and planning board make choices about policy about projecting. If you did this, how many units might you anticipate? It seems like even after a year, it's not too soon to put it into context, right? Just to help us, I think, assess. We made a lot of choices based on that, I would say. Are those bearing out?

So I think I would urge that maybe even in the year-to-year, I don't think it's too early to remind us of what we bought, right? And if it's paying off. And then the other kind of corollary to that is Not being within the regional housing field exactly, I was wondering if you might speak to broader regional housing trends, right? is the broader region also seeing similar trends with affordable housing or say with our AHO, are we doing something that other places are just not doing which we might intuit maybe the policy is doing something that's moving the needle or Similar. It's been obviously an odd year, right? A lot of unpredictability. So maybe just a little bit of that regional context too to understand. It was so helpful when you described that multifamily unit, right? 2024 to 25. I was like, what?

is this huge change something times one thing we'll throw it off but maybe I mean if it's possible now to speak a little bit to the broader trend I think Dan hit that 12,500 that's the number we're all thinking Are we on, if not on track regionally, how's the region doing with housing?

Yeah, I think, well, there are two things. One is I mean, I think the answer, we've already kind of established that over the time scale that we've been tracking housing unit production both at the and both locally at Cambridge and within what's called the Metro Mayors Coalition, which was a coalition of 15 Boston area cities and towns looking at its overall housing production, that those processes set goals For housing production, I would say Well, the Envision Cambridge study talked about that, set the goals in 2019, and then the Metro Mayor's Coalition set goals a little bit before that, that we're not really on track.

production and housing, again, for a variety of factors, having to do with how you disentangle the zoning and regulatory things from economic conditions is difficult to do. But we haven't been on track. And even the projections based on the zoning work that we've done show that we're not We're not going to hit a specific number by a specific point, but that doesn't really mean that we're not interested in housing production. I mean, the whole goal, a number at a particular time I would push back a little bit to say you know We can use one year of data to try to extrapolate out how we're getting there because, again, you kind of put your finger right on it.

One year we have a 439-unit multifamily building, and the next year we don't. So how do you... How do you extrapolate from those two years any kind of larger trends? I think what we know, the lesson that we've learned, which we've already, I think one that we've already kind of internalized a bit is that When you're talking about sheer number of units being produced, it's the big developments that are going to make the biggest difference. And those usually are the number of projects you see at that scale, no matter what, whether you're talking about Cambridge or any other surrounding community, that the number of projects is going to be you know in the single digits you know you're going to be able to count the number of projects that are delivering hundreds of of you know units each so there's a there's a big difference that

We've looked at all of these things, you know, when you bar chart it out of, you know, You know, a trend like this, you see a thing that looks, you know, like that with different units being being brought online at different times. So, That's what we hope to do over a period of time. We don't know. We can trace that over time, but what we don't really know is The effect that the multifamily zoning, you know, that that zoning change has on all of that, in addition to the mass ab zoning and other things that were implemented or that were enacted more recently, but, you know, we've not seen proposals. Regionally, that's a good, I think it's a good point that looking at it regionally in the regional context makes sense. Although we didn't, you can,

I think there was a report on this that ended up in the Boston Globe that the Metro Mayor's Coalition releases its data and I think every community within that 15 community kind of block is experiencing very similar issues. It's not exact, you know, Some are seeing more housing unit production, some are seeing less, but we're all kind of in the same boat of not being on track to meet the targets that were set for a particular community.

Thank you, Jeff. Ashley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the staff for putting this together. I know it must have taken a lot of time. A lot of brainpower to think about how to put this all together. I have, and maybe this is more of a rhetorical question, but from looking at the data, it seems that the historical commission and Building Department, ISD, you know, had an increase in load, whereas for the planning board and for the zoning board, the load has gone down, and I was curious if Both ISD and historic commissions were adequately staffed or prepared. Ideally, they would get even more load in the future with

as you know we're still in the very beginning but you know thinking from a small developer's point of view if if um if these reviews take a long time it might be a deterrent and so I was just It's probably more of a rhetorical question, but I think it would be interesting to see between the multifamily zoning and I know a few years ago we had a change in dormers and then change in basement units. It's a lot to review for. both these and so hoping there's enough staffing capacity and that things aren't too backed up yeah thank you

Yeah, thanks for the question. It did come up at the Council discussion last week and each of the different departments kind of weighed in on that. We heard a little bit from the Historical Commission and a little bit from ISD. I think across the board, I think We all departments acknowledge that we've really been able to work through this by leaning on each other. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a lot more business than the Historical Commission and the neighborhood CDCs are used to. And they've had to deal with that. And in certain cases, they've had to do that.

you know without the the kind of support of having things be both at the planning board and you know being reviewed kind of simultaneously with with CDD staff I'm not sure it's been necessarily that much of a deterrent in terms of developers. I think partly that's borne out by the fact that there have been so many cases that this sort of commission One of the things that the Sorbonne Commission staff has pointed out, again, if you look at the demo, I won't put the chart back up, but the chart of Significance requests for demolition that they have shifted in some ways how they look at those questions and the proportion of Sobrinho-Wheeler, Tan, Watkins, Zern, Zusy, Cambridge, Councilor

you know what they really find to be most significant understanding that there's there's going to be this increase in in requests um And I think the Zorba Commission has handled the cases that they've seen very well. They've carried out their response just like the planning board does. They know what their assignment is and they They carry it out diligently, and these proposals have gone through a lot of improvements, and they've, in some cases, been kind of reshaped in order to meet the standards that the Historical Commission and the NCDC set. So we'll see over time. There's also some, there's maybe a bit of a phenomenon and we'll see this as we track data in future years of, Is there an initial wave of interest that then kind of settles out a little bit when some of the novelty wears off and when people start to understand a little bit better what can really happen and what's really feasible?

So yeah, that's all I can say about it. I think across departments, we do feel like we've been adequately prepared, and that's largely from working together and sharing information. and we'll keep working on it. We'll see how the trends evolve.

Well, Jeff, thanks to you and the staff for putting all this information together. It's really great. A question you conduct easily. I realize that It's too hard to extrapolate anything from just the one year and that there are so many other factors that going into it. But at some point in time, do you think we can have information about whether What we've been doing in Cambridge through zoning and other aspects of what the city is doing get to the impact it may be having on the cost of rent and the cost of home ownership in the city.

Yeah, that's a tough question. I think, again, in some ways, this is what the effort is all about. It's about addressing a shortage of housing that's been built over decades. So I don't think we're going to see on any kind of short-term timeframe, what the effects are. I think as a planner, when you look at that question, it's... It's hard because it's a moving target, right? It's not really about, it's not about where are we now and what can we do immediately to kind of bring housing costs down. It's about projecting What's the future gonna be like in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years? And as we get to that point in time, are we gonna see Are we gonna see affordability get worse?

Are we gonna see more shifting in terms of the population and less affordability for people across all You know, sides of the income spectrum, you know, which of course, to answer that question, you have to know, well, what's the income spectrum going to look like in 20 years? You know, we don't really know that either. but it's kind of about trying to triangulate that trajectory to say the world is heading in one direction and we want Cambridge to be heading in a way that when it meets the future we want to We want to try to make sure we're continuing to promote our values, among which are providing housing that's affordable to all the people who want and need to live here. So yeah, I don't know if that's ducking the question or not, but that's sort of the planning question.

I think that will bear out as we start to look to you know every 10 years how do you know we we when we look at this issue you know we look back in time we look you know all the way back to you know the 1950s and how the composition of Cambridge has changed and how like the housing stock has changed and how incomes have changed over that period of time so we're gonna that's I think the time scale that we're gonna would learn about that in 10-year increments. How has the population changed in the city? And how has the housing stock changed in the city? and try to figure out what's the relationship between one and the other.

I was hoping for a five-year horizon that there might be some information. I'm not sure I'm going to make it 10 years.

Yeah, unfortunately, that's the issue. It's a long-term issue, and personally, I don't think things can change that fast, no matter how Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jeff. Dan, forgive me. I'm going to give Mary a chance to take a swing at the plate here before you.

Thanks. Thank you. I'm just thinking about the projects that that the rehabs and the additions that don't affect the net change in housing. I'm sure there are some folks who are not necessarily demolishing their buildings, but are adding on because they can. And in many cases, that might be Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

That's one of the factors that needs to be sort of taken into consideration when we're looking at changes in pricing for both the cost of new housing and rents and sort of How does that play out over time? Is there a way to regulate the impact of that? I probably not, you probably can't allow one homeowner to add X number of square feet for two units versus one person adding it for just their own benefit. But it's just a, A curious question in my mind is how much of that is going on over time. It might not be a lot just yet, but... Anyway, if there's a way of adding it in to future reports, I think it would help us to at least understand the big picture.

Great.

Thank you. Dan.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I appreciate letting Mary go before me, but this is a follow-up actually on Ashley's comment. And I think, Jeff, it would be helpful to know in terms of Thank you. Thank you. or decreased. So there's a kind of sense about load and capacity just in terms of total and percentage of total volume, because we're just looking at net increase or change in housing permits. So that kind of puts things in context. And I think too, understanding, you know, overall duration of, you know, from hearing to approval or from permit application to release a permit also would be super helpful.

It just really talks about capacity and I think maybe to underscore my interest in philosophy.

Yeah, we'll talk about that with ISD. To your point, it's definitely true. And I think look about if you're The vast majority of permits that people are seeking are for redoing their bathroom, replacing their siding. There's so many things that are that are not really captured here that really are more like the bread and butter of inspectional services and the work that they do. And in terms of non-residential, I think There's a lot of that on the non-residential side too, but similar to the overall decrease in the large You know, multifamily residential building permits. You know, we're seeing similar kind of trends with larger commercial buildings, you know, right now. A lot of that having to do with

You know, there was a big, there was a boom in, you know, we almost kind of, it's almost just from having been here a while, it seems like we've gone through two cycles at different times, you know, kind of a boom in residential construction that then started to tail off. and then kind of a boom in commercial construction that sort of started while the residential was booming and then peaked a little bit later and is now back down as we've seen changes in you know that just the overall economics particularly in in life science so that's so yeah similar in terms of you know not as many large-scale Thanks for watching!

and many more.

Well, I have a few comments, less questions. First comment is how proud I am of the board tonight being engaged at this level with lots of really good suggestions, I think, and input on the on the massive report that you were able to share with us tonight. Jeff, thank you. I really find that idea that I think Dan had for a housing meter, kind of like a gas gauge. Okay, here's 1250, where are we? Where's the Needle Moving? Kind of intriguing. I had absolutely the same question that Carolyn had about inclusionary zoning. Is it dead on arrival? It's one year of data. It's probably not good to infer from that, but that is something that maybe needs adjustment here. And after all, the council could adjust I think the statistics are telling us something about that. Just like the Federal Reserve, you could lower the percentage and maybe that would

make the projects pencil out and we could move some of that opportunity forward. I suspect that's what's going on with a tight construction and financing market right now. I loved Ted's idea too. There was some way we could say, can we see if this is actually affecting the costs? And I don't know how you do that. And certainly you can't do that in one year. And I guess lastly, This huge amount of data, we're looking forward to multi-year review of this. It's critical because change in our community is difficult. We hear the voices here at the planning board and amongst our neighbors and neighborhoods. about concerns and fear of the zoning changes we've gone through as you described the biggest change in 100 years in our city and that's only natural and This is a terrific tool, right? This is going to give us some insight into is it working? Pain points real?

Are we doing too much damage to our trees? Those questions are all apparent in the data. It's just zoning. If we didn't get it right, and I suspect we didn't get it 100% right, We can make adjustments. We can simply change the zoning to address some things that perhaps we did not get right. And this data is going to give us insight hopefully into that future in time to do that. We were told as we went through this a year ago in February that the sky was going to fall when we put this in place. Maybe some people locally are feeling that. I don't see that in the data that the sky is falling. So we will continue to monitor it. I promise the community that. but there's some really good pearls here that suggest that it may be working so thank you for Thank you for putting this all together and thank you for making the city aware of how this is all working.

So I think it's all really, really good. So that's where I am at this point on this. I think there are a few community members. Some of our old friends I believe are dialed in. We'll see if any of the attendees would like to add anything to tonight's discussion. With that, let's do that, Jeff.

I'm sorry.

So I think we'll move to public comment. So any members of the public who wish to speak should now click the button that says raise hand if you'd like to speak. And if you're calling in by phone. you can raise your hand by pressing star 9 and as of 5 p.m. yesterday the board had received no written comments on the matter that was before us tonight so I'll ask Jeff to take us through the process to see if any of our that people who are listening in would like to raise a few points tonight.

Sure. I'm taking a look at it now. I don't see any hands raised. I know this is an item of general business. We didn't advertise this as a public hearing. So I don't know if folks were prepared to speak. If we don't see any hands, we could always, yeah, let's see. We've got some joining. So we do have one hand. We can go to Heather Hoffman. Begin with your name and address.

Hello, Heather Hoffman, 213 Hurley Street. I was waiting to find out whether there was going to be public comment before I hurriedly dialed my phone. Anyway, because crashing is always a bummer. I wanted to point out some things that I pointed out at the city council committee hearing because I imagine that at least one of you guys didn't attend that and didn't hear my pearls of wisdom. First off, I am really disappointed that there is no mention of the lawsuits

speaking to overturn inclusionary zoning precisely because of the changes that were made by the massive upzoning last year. no mention whatsoever if I were a developer I would certainly be waiting for that there's also no mention of the fact that the city was supposed to review inclusionary zoning several years ago and didn't. And that in a break from past precedent, never even initiated a study to see if this change A massive change was warranted. And then after the fact, all of a sudden the Nexus study was commissioned.

Again, if I were a developer, I'd be going nowhere until those things get resolved. I also point out that Jeff started out by saying that C-1 is the only residential zoning district, and then two sentences later, He makes it very clear that there are other residential zoning districts that actually allow more than C1. I'm really tired of that. It is not helpful. Thank you for watching.

also say that I do not see that the way that Envision was put through was somehow the magic number that lasts from now till the sun goes nova. Why we can't reconsider whether the huge changes that have happened in the past few years might encourage us to revisit that. And finally, all of those changes are obviously affecting what the cost is to do all of this.

Thank you. Any other hands, Jeff?

I don't see any hands raised. Certainly if anybody's tuned in or not on the Zoom and watching, we can except any written comment provide that to the planning board we'd be happy to do that if if some people didn't have their thoughts prepared but wanted to send something great okay

So at this point, I guess, and only full board members will act on it, is there a motion to conclude this item? Just remember to say your name if you're willing to make the motion to conclude tonight's discussion around the housing report.

This is Mary Lynn. So moved.

Great. Thank you, Mary. And a second? Ms. Ted, so second. Thank you, Ted. A roll call vote on that motion, please, Jeff.

On that motion, Ted Cohen. Yes. Mary Flynn.

Yes.

Mary Lydecker.

Yes.

Diego Macias. Yes. Ashley Tan.

Yes.

Carolyn Soren.

Yes.

Pomsenevich. Yes. Okay. That's all members voting in favor.

Thank you. So that concludes the business on our agenda. If I was in person I would have a conversation about Medellin with Ted where I just came back from. I know he raved about it. But we're not going to have that chance. And at 9 o'clock tonight is this terrific Thoreau documentary, so I'm anxious to jump onto GBH and see that. Any other business?

Well, since we concluded, I won't say much more, but just thank you for a great discussion on that topic. This is some really great insight. We'll definitely go over it carefully and it'll help us. as we move forward in the future, for sure.

Right. Okay. All right. With that, good night. Thank you very much. We're adjourned.

Good night, everyone.

Good night.