Land Use Committee

All right, I now call this meeting of the Land Use Committee to order. Please note that pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025, this meeting of the City Council Committee will be conducted via remote participation. We will post an audio recording, audio-video recording, transcript, or other comprehensive record of these proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the City of Somerville website. Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

This is roll call. Councillor Davis? Here. Councillor Sait? Here. Councillor Wilson?

Present.

Councilor Ewen Campin?

Here.

And Councilor McLaughlin? Yeah. Four Councilors present and one absent. We have quorum.

We have just a couple items on the agenda today. I'd like to take up item number one and move for approval.

And on agenda item 125-1478, approval of the minutes of the Land Use Committee meeting of September 18th, 2025. Councilor Davis?

Yes.

Councilor Wilson?

Yes.

Sarah Silver, As are you in camping. Sarah Silver, Yes, cancer often. Sarah Silver, Yes, we're counselors in favor one absent, those are accepted.

PB, Jorge Boone. : All right, can you please read the other items.

PB, Lupita D Montoya, I just want to know them here I didn't hear my name for the. PB, Lupita D Montoya, dissolution form and also this time. Sarah Silver, apologies did not notice you had joined I will mark that down. And that brings us to agenda item 225 dash 0085 that the director of planning preservation and zoning draft an amendment to the zoning ordinances for transit oriented height and density bonuses for additional affordable housing other enumerated Community benefits.

All right, I believe our land use analyst method car has an update for us this car would you like to take it away.

Thank you, Chair. Just had a couple of brief slides with an update for folks of where we're at in the analysis process that I wanted to share. So if you could advance to the next slide, please. And the next slide as well. Okay, just to provide a status update based on our conversation two weeks ago in terms of a phased approach to the analysis. So we're currently closing out phase 1 of the feasibility analysis. We've completed the stage of reviewing both urban residential and mid-rise permitting data since 2019 to determine the average lot dimensions that would be feasible to facilitate construction on the lots. and I have some findings from that to share with folks today. In terms of the assessor's office memo, an attachment has been provided with a status update and I can let Legislative Liaison Rudassi speak to that further. Folks have questions, but the short update there is that the assessor's office is in the process of revaluations this year and should have more capacity to address substantial questions from the committee come the close of October to the beginning of November. And in terms of the fiscal impact analysis, this is currently in process and we're primarily going to be focusing on a fiscal impact scenario. Looking at the difference between neighborhood residential lots versus what the fiscal impacts would be in terms of conversion to urban residential on those parcels. And following this will be beginning phase two and are targeting to have some draft maps for folks to react to and have in conversation during our next meeting. You go to the next slide Thank you. So this is just a high level summary table of the urban residential admin rice permitting data. And really the goal of why we were looking more in depth into this data was in response to committee's feedback to ensure we weren't just upzoning for the sake of upzoning, but we were creating the conditions for development to occur on those lots. So with that in mind, we scraped through permitting data since 2019. We were able to look at about 20 different projects from the urban residential side and about 25 from the mid-rise. side to compile the averages for this data. We were looking at a couple of measurements, including unit count to see how many apartment units would be coming to market from these different types of projects, as well as some of these dimensional data, including the floor plate, building width, and lot coverage aspects. And this is primarily touching on two scenarios, one looking at do existing parcels Are they in conformance with the dimensions required to facilitate construction on these lots? And or when we're looking at the up zoning map, can we think about adjacent lots that might be consolidated to facilitate construction opportunities? And finally, we have commercial space estimates as well. And then the last thing was corner lots. Corner lots have some particular conditions when thinking about development. So we just had a quick count tracking those as well. And one anecdote from that is that a fair amount of the projects were occurring on corner lots that were observed during this time period. So that's just something to note there. And this is also broken down by building typology for the mid-rise classification. So looking at Apartment buildings solely residential use versus commercial building for solely commercial use versus general building where we're seeing the mixed use of commercial and residential space. There's a couple insights I wanted to draw out for folks that I've highlighted on the next slide from this data. So one is returning to our conversation we've had around urban residential as a tool to facilitate the delivery of new units to market. One thing we're seeing from the data is that urban residential buildings can yield a significant number of units. On average, they were returning 29 units to market. And in comparison, when we're looking at mid-rise three versus mid-rise four buildings, we're seeing an average for mid-rise three of 14 to 15 units and mid-rise four an average of 21 units. So in these instances, the urban residential buildings have been outperforming mid-rise three and mid-rise four in terms of number of residential units being delivered to market. In terms of the mid-rise categories, Mid-rise five and mid-rise six is where we were seeing the highest increase in the production of units within that typology. So in mid-rise five, there was a wide variance between general buildings that we were looking at. So the mixed use residential commercial versus solely residential builds for the apartment building typology. And this was producing a range of anywhere from 18 to 59 units per project for the mid-rise five buildings. And then mid-rise six closing out with the highest yield on units of an average of 81 units coming onto market. And then the last point I wanted to draw out was that these denser projects are requiring larger lot sizes. So for the mid-rise four and mid-rise five projects, we were seeing minimum building widths of around 48 feet and up to 117 feet building width for units. for those projects. Mid-rise six buildings are really looking at a larger lot size of around 200 feet per project. So these were just some of the key insights coming from the data. And where we're hoping to plug this into the draft maps is those two scenarios I highlighted previously. So one, seeing what lots are currently in conformance that would be ripe for redevelopment with upzoning in existing conditions. And in the second scenario, And seeing what up zoning could yield in terms of potential lot consolidation opportunities to unlock production of these different levels of housing. So that's the status update there, and I will say as well, if folks are interested in delving into some you know sample sample projects and what those dimensions could look like on a specific lot. Um, I'm happy to provide some slides that I can speak to that during our next check-in meeting.

Thank you. Uh, do we have any questions or comments from the committee? Council of Wilson.

Yeah, thanks, Chair. I appreciate that checklist we saw earlier of where we are and the different things. One thing I might just want to flag is, you know, we saw the engineering stuff with the sewer capacity. We also should probably just look at catchment areas and enrollment numbers for schools as well, just because if we're going to be, you know, looking into the future, just making sure that... you know, we hopefully potentially keeping families in Somerville too, and want to be thinking about impacts on enrollments in our K through eights. That's all I had. Thanks.

Any other thoughts from the committee? Seeing none, I just have a couple of questions. Thank you for the presentation and hope people don't mind having a meeting, even if it's short. I just think it's value in having consistent meetings and knowing to reserve every other Thursday for these conversations. So through myself, I guess, to Ms. Carr and Mr. Bartman, if you had any opinions on this. So we talk about the lot size. I remember talking to Dan years ago when we upzoned East Broadway. And one of the things I said at the time is, why don't we just zone the building for what it's actually capable of doing? So instead of zoning it for six stories when we know it would only fit four or five, just zone it for four or five, knowing that's what we can get. Because we discussed that in order for it to really build, they would have to get the adjacent properties in order to actually build it deeper. So my question is, well, one is, Dan was around for that conversation is, do we still feel that's the best policy? And then also this concept of adjacency bonuses, we talked about the concept where if a developer buys the property next to it, that say like you have a NR property right next to a MR6 property. And they buy that property. Now the NR property can be MR6. Is that a concept? I'll ask Ms. Carr if she's familiar with this and if that's something we could or should explore. And Mr. Bartman, the same thing is, you know, is this something that might be worthwhile to check out?

Thank you, Chair. I guess I can hop in with a preliminary comment there. The adjacency bonus is something that I'd have to take a further look into to see some kind of peer comparators, but I'm happy to take a look into what's out there further to be able to respond in an informed manner to that comment there. I might open the floor for Dan to speak about the lot consolidation piece. I'm happy to add my thoughts afterwards as well.

uh can everyone hear me and see me in here and say okay thank you uh mr chair i do remember that conversation when uh back in uh 2019 when we were looking at the zoning of properties uh fronting on broadway uh the in in uh east at the east end of broadway um if you think about the library along Broadway and some of the blocks, I believe, further to the east, the lots are fairly shallow and then it immediately turns into houses behind it. The nature of that conversation that we had was that to effectively up zone those parcels because of how they're shallow, you would need to include the properties in the back if you actually expect development to happen because the front lot is not deep enough to actually build a building that would be worth the investment, let alone spatially fit an apartment building. And for reference, we are always thinking about what is typically called a double loaded corridor, which is just a hallway with apartments off of either side of that hallway. That comes with kind of predictable spatial dimensions. of like 65 or 70 feet in depth. So if you don't have a lot that is that deep already, you're not going to get an apartment building that has a double loaded corridor and that's the most efficient way for laying out an apartment building. That is also not including any kind of landscaping around the building or a driveway behind the building or anything else. So you actually need more than 65 feet in depth. So every parcel that we look at that is shallower than that we look at is like really not going to facilitate redevelopment and and thus we should question whether or not to include other land next to it in the up zoning if we are actually trying to induce redevelopment. All that does on our end is it gives the property owner the actual choice to be included or not when a development interest comes around. That does mean that those properties could be questioned by somebody who acquires the front property. that's looking to try and induce redevelopment. So there is an impact on including the houses behind a commercial building, for example. But we have been asking those questions. My team and Samantha have been meeting weekly and we are looking at the zoning map and asking those questions on lots that are too small. that happened to front the main streets. We are also asking that question for our project for the Central Broadway between Ball Square and Magoon. There are many properties there that have that similar condition. And you'll note, we can note that the Lindell's site has the properties behind it included. And Lindell's has a redevelopment proposal related to it. So I'm citing Lindell's just because everybody recognizes that more than the address. But in Ball Square, there's two lots behind that property that are included in the MR district and not the others. And it is facilitating redevelopment and the others are not. So it kind of is a real world example of what we had talked about. So I think we need to address that question, both in the potential upzoning at Gilman Square and the Broadway Corridor zoning study proposal that we're working on for this week, actually. Related to your second item, I do not know of a specific example of that functionality happening based on property ownership. And as like the trigger to cause entitlement to build on another property. The one thing that I do know is that in Massachusetts, a city council or whoever is authorized in a municipality to adopt zoning cannot give that ability to somebody else. So the functionality of changing the zoning map has to remain in your control. So there might be a hurdle there with just another scheme like that maybe working in another state. So if that's where that conversation might have come from, we always have to be careful about the legal construct that we're operating here in our state versus others. Because sometimes they have different a different setup and different freedoms for how zoning is applied. But certainly willing to look into that question, like Samantha said. Maybe there's examples of that that we don't know of.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, if you don't mind, Ms. Carr, if you could look into that. It's something I've read about and people have explained it to me, but I'm not an expert and I count on the experts to interpret it for me. It just seemed like something that if there was a possibility to get a six-story building without zoning a two-family house for six stories and dealing with all the other issues that we talked about around that, it would just be something that'd be interesting to me to both entice development, but also respect the property owner at the same time. So yeah, that's all I have on that. Does anyone else have any questions or comments tonight? Seeing none, I think I'd like to leave this item in committee. Thank you for the update. And I would, if anyone has objections, please let me know. Otherwise, I plan on just keep doing this every couple of weeks until we have something worth having a public hearing about and bringing it to the public. So seeing no further discussion, Council Wilson moves to adjourn.

And on adjournment, Councillor Davis?

Yes.

Councilor Sait? Yes. Councilor Wilson?

Yes, please.

Councilor Ewen-Campen?

Yes.

Councilor McLaughlin?

Yes.

We are adjourned.

Go Sox!