Land Use Committee

Welcome, everybody. I'll call this meeting of the Land Use Committee to order. It is Thursday, April 2nd at 6.02. Will the clerk please call the roll?

This is roll call. Councilor Davis?

Here.

Councilor Clingan?

Present.

Sait. Here. Councilor McLaughlin is absent. Councilor Ewen-Campen.

Here.

Before Councilor is present, we have quorum.

Excellent. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting is being conducted via remote participation and we will post. Audio, video, recording, and comprehensive record of the proceeding as soon as possible on the City of Somerville website and local cable access government channels. Colleagues, we have one item on our agenda tonight, which is discussion of item 26024, requesting ordainment of an amendment to section 202. 8.1 of the zoning ordinance to provide for larger buildings, additional dimensional flexibility, and fewer use restrictions for affordable housing projects. We had a public hearing on this item two weeks ago, and now it is time for the committee to start discussing it, ask questions, etc. I believe that we're joined by A member of the Planning, Preservation, and Zoning staff, is that correct?

Yes, hello. I'm here for DeMartino, new deputy director for PPZ. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you and welcome aboard. Thank you. A more detailed comparison of the existing affordable housing overlay and what's proposed. Is it possible to get that on our screen?

Is this the document you're referring to? This is the handout. I do not have any other documents.

Let me make sure that you have the document I'm thinking of and so it can be attached. I believe this was sent by email a few days ago. Bear with us. Public. Yeah, Director Bartman, who drafted this along with staff, explained that for kind of drafting reasons, it was hard to Display clearly every single thing that's changed. So he created a number of kind of... Easier to understand documents for the committee. I'm just making sure that the clerk has these so we can share them. Sorry, my computer seems to be grinding to a halt.

Director Nagim Williams, can you please forward these to the clerk?

Mr. Chair, yes, I can do that.

Thank you.

Mr. Chair? Yes, Councillor Davis. I believe that both of the documents that were sent are also attached to the agenda. There's a link at least, not attached, but there's a link that I was able to find them at least. Mugby, Sierra.

The document that was attached to Legistar, is this not what you're referring to?

There should be two.

Is it the presentation?

Yes.

Okay, then that's right here. Sorry about that.

No worries. Thank you. All right, Deputy Director, you want to take it away?

Actually, I do believe that Director Bartman is just having a tech issue, but he should be signing on in just a moment. So I may, if you don't mind, give him just a second. Okay. and just see if it doesn't hop on in the next couple of minutes then I'm happy to do the takeover okay about the delay understood

Well, I'll just take this opportunity to share with the...

He's saying he's in the waiting room.

Oh.

There is no waiting room. If he's an attendee, there is no attendee. in there so once he pops in as attendee I can make view he's here

Oh, there he is. Director Bartman, welcome.

All right, can you see me also? You. Okay, thank you. Sorry for the technical difficulties.

No worries at all. Please take it away. We've got the presentation up.

Sure, thank you. So members of the Land Use Committee, thanks for having us again tonight. This is actually a reprisal of our previous presentation that I gave last time. I've added some slides to provide some additional clarity, hopefully, compared to the version we gave last time. So go ahead to slide. You can actually get to slide four before the presentation changes with new content. So here, that slide right there with the red line, This is what the red line actually looks like of that entire table. And one of the reasons we presented the way we did last time is because this hides things that are actually staying the same because it's a red line of the table in the code in that specific page. Not a difference on what the overlay district does compared to the base zoning districts. So it actually hides things that are staying the same if you just look at a red line. This is one of the challenges of editing overlay districts and why the information kind of got confusing.

So on the following pages, we provided a breakout of each section of this same table. Yeah, so one page at a time. This shows you all of the existing standards for the MR3, 4, 5, and 6 zoning districts. which the affordable housing overlay is laid on top of along with the existing affordable housing overlay standards. If you remember the former table, both had some sections that were superseding, some sections that were supplementing. and some dimensions you actually kept from your base zoning district. So anybody that was developing an affordable housing building actually kind of like assembled their dimensions from across the zoning ordinance. That's one of the reasons that we found ourselves facing a request to make the table simpler and just have one overriding table. So this page has some of the most changes related to it.

So you can see the comparison of the revised affordable housing overlay which is what's All the way in the right hand column shows you the difference between some of the standards of the MR345 and 6th district. So you can see we pulled forward the 100% lot coverage. from the MR6 zoning district and decreased the open space requirement. It maximizes the amount of building footprint And in doing that, we actually kept the green score requirement from the MR3 and MR4 districts, which is higher than in MR6. We were decreasing the space available but trying to up the quality requirement. because we knew we were impacting the green score. But that's a review of the changes for that specific section related to law and standards.

Just on this page, Director, how do you go above 100%? There's an asterisk.

Oh, I was just calling attention that it's only related to three of the districts that MR6 is keeping that the same. Got it. You'll see some color coding come up on the next pages where we're trying to indicate where things stayed the same and that's the green blocks. Sorry, just on that page, I see Councilor Davis.

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. And I'm happy to wait for the full presentation or I can, if you want to go, you asked a question on the page, so I... How would you like to proceed? So can you, just for everyone's understanding, explain how if we have 100% lot coverage, how someone has 10% open space, how do those two actually work in practice together?

They're just permitted to have up to 100% lock coverage, but open space is allowed to also be on the upper floor, the roof of the building. So that's where it could be, but it doesn't mean that that's where it's located. They have the option. Go ahead on to the next page. So this slide correlates with the first column of all the building type tables throughout the code. This second page correlates with the second column, which is building placement, and it covers where the setbacks are. in the ordinance and you can see the real thing that's changing is we allow three more feet of maximum front setback in the revised affordable housing overlay compared to what it was previously because it was drawing from the base districts so that's different from MR3 and then we that the bottom one is actually

an error in my green coloring those 10 feet is all the same and so we kept that at 10 feet so sorry about that one that should be a green block so the only change actually on this one is that we add three more feet if you're in the MR3 district and you were to use the affordable housing overlay everything else is kept similar and just to be clear here this means

um a building could have a zero foot front setback be right up on the sidewalk or previously it could be 15 feet a maximum of 15 feet from the sidewalk now it can be 15. Now it could be 15, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously it could be 12 in MR3.

Yep. And our two-foot setback that is really... an effort to try and allow buildings to have features that project forward but don't necessarily cross into the right of way because then you have to get an insurance policy to cover whatever's projecting in there so we give people a little bit of space to deal with. People also put sandwich board signs and stuff like that in that two foot area. It also tends to be an expanded sidewalk. If the sidewalk is not required to be Any more than 12 feet, that's still something that is achievable compared to some of our high rise or our... uh master plan development overlay districts which require that sidewalk to be 18 feet so we felt that that was still achievable even with those front setbacks providing some adjustment okay on to the next slide

This one correlates with the building massing, or I'm sorry, this is the parking setbacks at the bottom of the second column, really just drawing attention that these are primarily the same 30 feet for surface parking and structured parking in all of the districts for the primary setback. We do allow a little bit more flexibility in MR3 and MR4 on the secondary side. But these buildings tend to be in the middle of our squares, higher density districts, so we just went with the 30 feet and maintained that from the two MR5 and MR6 examples.

Director, can you explain what this measure actually means? What is a parking setback?

Any parking spaces that are designed for a car have to be behind an imaginary line from either front lot line. So the primary front lot line is the lot line that the building is oriented to the front door faces that way that it's addressed on that side of the property secondary front setback would be a corner lot that would have a another front lot line So parking has to be set back 30 feet from the front lot line, whether or not it's inside a building, surface parking in a garage, etc. so that makes sure that there's habitable space in our buildings and not a parking first floor like you might see kind of like at the beach. So it's really making sure that parking doesn't encroach forward in our buildings or on our lots.

Okay, I have an additional question around this that we can take up later. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. I guess through you to Director Bartman, can you explain the kind of the logic in MR3 and MR4 if this is a, you know, a Market rate building, we were looking at 10 foot for surface and two feet for setback. Why with affordable housing should there be a bigger setback in those structures? Why for affordable housing? Well, right, so you're saying that if it's an affordable building, using this overlay, those setbacks need to be 30 feet, right? Yeah, I mean... What's the rationale for...

The parking setback tends to be one that is needed more for speculative development, more market rate development, because sometimes they favor where the cars are on the lot more than usable interior space. More than an affordable housing building. So this is one of the ones that we could have considered just zeroing out and letting the developer of an affordable housing building decide where they wanted to put the parking and if we wanted to provide them like maximum flexibility and along the lines towards where you would provide in the MR3 and MR4 area. There aren't many MR3 sites that an affordable housing project is gonna manifest on. They're most likely gonna acquire a couple Side by side, there aren't large groupings of MR3 either. So if somebody was to build a market rate building, that's why that flexibility is in there.

But affordable housing building is going to naturally produce a larger unit count that will likely consume the neighboring lot of most of our MR3 parcels. That's because the financing programs are tailored to specific outcomes. And so they tend to produce a range of units at certain thresholds. So really, A way that I could summarize where we landed on our dimensions is that We were instigated to pursue an eight-story building. And then we asked, okay, if we were going to allow eight-story buildings using this overlay, what dimensions would we want to provide as the maximum? that somebody could build using the affordable housing overlay and we landed primarily on the MR6 district. That's because most sites that are in MR3 and MR4 are little lots and small groupings of those that aren't the size of an affordable housing building. and so it would likely either aggregate into a larger

amount of land that would want a floor plate like an MR5 or MR6 or it would look for an MR5 or MR6 lot that exists out there in the world today. and that's because of those unit counts and size of building that really is efficient for the financial investment in all these affordable housing programs. They're looking for a return on investment that is maximizing value And so they would tend to not build on a very small, inefficiently shaped MR3 parcel, right? That's why that... parking flexibility was in those lots and not the larger ones, which is where you find MR5 and MR6 traditionally on our zoning map.

Follow up, Mr. Chair? Yeah, please. Thank you. So thank you, Dr. Bartman. I mean, I understand that in terms of, you know, what's more likely to be built and all that, but I guess I'm still not clear as to why. you know if if if this is a market rate MR3 and MR4 and you know that so This table contemplates that that might happen. Maybe it won't, but we have a table here that says if it does, that says what happens if there is an MR3 or an MR4, right? So we're not talking about an MR5 or MR6. We're talking about MR3 or MR4. and we have on its face it appears to have to allow more flexibility for for including parking in a market rate building than it does in an affordable building. And that might be the right answer. Or it might be that we're effectively making it impossible to build parking on an affordable

Thank you so much for joining us. You need a lot where you can have a 30-foot setback or you can't include parking. I just want to understand the thing.

Because through the chair, we kept the standards of our MR6 model building. And we can certainly change the dimension for parking setbacks on the proposal to whatever the Land Use Committee sees appropriate. We're happy to adjust that dimension. That's why I brought up the first point was that if we wanted to provide maximum flexibility, we could add, you know, change the 30 foot to what is in MR3 or MR4 or even zero that one out. It depends what we want to do and what we think is a risk. We are not focusing on hypothetical MR3 parcels and MR4 parcels. We're looking at where these actually might manifest and how they might use an MR3 or MR4 parcel. If they're gonna find an MR3 site and put up an affordable housing building, they're gonna look for something that is large enough

to produce a floor plate that is larger than, or that is more like an MR5 or MR6 building. I'm talking about increments of 5,000 square feet for the floor plate. which means more to them in acquiring enough space to put up a building that efficiently provides units for the cost that they're building. So while certainly the standards apply to a single MR3 parcel and hypothetically somebody could use that, these buildings are not going to actually be produced on an undersized parcel when they cannot get a return on investment that's worth their money.

Okay, we'll sit on that for now.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Davis. Councilor Clingan?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Through you, I just want to apply this to a scenario, say, for instance, how this would affect the 297 Medford Street project, which is, I believe, four stories, but with the They're seeking relief for seven stories. This is the Justice Start, 100% affordable housing. It's on a corner lot, but it also abuts the community path. Where would this leave them in terms of any parking at all if they wanted to build parking? Or what constraints would they be under as far as with these numbers here?

There would be a parking step back of 30 feet from both sides. I'd have to go see how that would impact their floor plan. I'm not sure how their parking lays out on the first floor of that building. Okay, so it'd be 30 each side? This is also a hypothetical example. This would not impact the actual building going up there because it has a building permit already. If that's what you were asking, but if it was a, like, what if that building was presenting itself now, we would have to consider a 30-foot setback for parking from both lot lines.

Director, just to clarify, this is one that's not permitted or built. And I get part of the question I heard from Councilor Clingan is the community path, does that count as a frontage for a building?

Oh, I misunderstood the address. The community path is not a... We've been debating whether or not we should include the community path as a formal right-of-way for identifying a front lot line. We are certainly encouraging buildings to front on the community path because that would add eyes on the path and increase inherent safety. and further beautify some of the back of the parcels that are fronting onto the community path. But that's not something that's required by ordinance at the moment.

Thank you for the follow-up, Councilor Ewen-Campen. Thank you. Yeah, that's all.

I do want to get through the rest of this but I'll just I want to thank Councilor Davis, Councilor Clingan for flagging this is the one part that sticks out to me is this is the only thing that I see that is like Everything else makes it easier to build affordable housing. This is like an additional standard. So it goes in the opposite direction. So I think that's certainly worthy of additional discussion. So let's proceed, please.

So the next slide correlates with the third column of our building type tables in the ordinance, which is about massing and height. And so we do the same exercise here, except that I do identify that we do not regulate certain dimensions any longer in the overlay, in the proposed overlay. Those are things like building width and facade build out, floor plate total size, Ground story elevation height for an apartment building. We've heard many complaints about that from an accessibility standpoint. Individual story height. And then the first one that we started adjusting is the number of stories. So I don't know if there's any questions about the dimensions that we're not regulating anymore, The original affordable housing overlay was calling on the base district for all of these dimensions.

What we found is that most of these are in the ordinance about controlling size when things are too big. and I brought up those inflection points that exist related to the funding that is available. We have never seen essentially an affordable housing building that's built outside of a 40B that we've considered too big for Somerville's uh sites they tend to actually come in undersized from what some of the market rate buildings are and more uh appropriately scaled floor plates for some of the existing buildings in our existing urban fabric. So where we fell was that we were not as concerned about regulating these dimensions when it isn't a 100% affordable housing building. We consider it less of a risk

um compared to how market rate buildings uh try to produce efficiency uh by going longer bigger those aren't the same motivations for An affordable housing building. They have other limitations they're facing. Of course, the amendment began with an additional proposed one story. for the height of buildings which was originally at seven so that changes to eight although the minimum expectation is that you would build a four-story building that's kept the same The building height in feet was a superseding dimension for the original affordable housing overlay. That's kept the same for the... All other lots got a little bit of a bump because they can go up to eight stories now. We also no longer propose to have an upper story step back.

From our interviews with affordable housing developers, really what that was costing the city was additional units or additional bedrooms. If you can think about what many of the goals are of our affordable housing program is to maximize units and to maximize units that are available for families. and so that real standard was kind of infringing on both of those desired goals and through discussions in inside OSPCD we felt that those units or bedrooms are more valuable Thank you for watching! And the next slide.

My hard hand. Oh, yeah, Councilor Davis. On that slide, thank you. Just so I'm clear though, do I not recall that there are still effectively step-back requirements depending on what the abiding parcel is zoned as elsewhere in the system? Document, is that correct, through you, Mr. Chair?

Through the Chair, you are correctly remembering setbacks that still adjust from MR3, or from NR. So we do have a setback that it still moves the building because there will be an eight-story building or potentially an eight-story building. We kept that setback in there. It's not an upper story. Okay, thank you through you, Mr.

Chair. I guess... That setback does change at different heights.

Do you want to flip back to that page? I think it's on page three.

Is that the table?

Yeah, a step back is different than a setback. And that's one of the term differences. A step back is from the wall of the building. A setback is from the side lot line. so if you look at the setbacks they are pushing the first couple floors of the building away from that lot and then the upper story is further away it visually creates that same situation same impact okay yeah yeah

So that's, thank you, that's what I was asking. I mean, it's effectively the same thing if you're a buddy in an hour, there's the upper stories are going to be blank back, whatever you want to call it. They'll be further back against an hour based on how this is. So just, you know, I just don't want folks to get the wrong impression based on the other exhibition. And then back to the slide that you were on, if I may, Mr. Chair, one additional question.

Wait, sorry, before we proceed, just so everybody following this is on the same page, the entire building will be moved back when it's a budding NR, but the top of the building can be at the same distance as the bottom of the building, correct? Director? Director?

No, if you could go to the setbacks slide. Go ahead forward one. It's easier to read. One more. You see the upper story side setback? First through third floor, fourth through XX. It's 10 feet away from the first three floors because the NR zoning district only has three-story buildings in it. So it has a 10-foot... Side lot setback so that it maintains kind of a third three-story projection towards the NR district. And then it has a 30-foot setback from that same lot line. depending on the lot's width or depth and it depends how that which lot line is oriented towards the other and whether or not it's determined as width and depth but it has the same effect where it

has an adjustment related to that I'm glad that everyone else understands this clearly I'm still working my way through it Can you describe it one more time?

What is changing? So the change is that there's a 20-foot setback. Let me explain the existing and the change. So the existing is the 10 feet for stories one through three. And then above that is 30 feet. What we changed to is 20 feet. and 30 feet depending on what the lot depth is, which is just a distance away from the lot line for all floors. I was describing, I thought you were asking about what the existing condition and how that functioned. That's what I was just describing.

No, I think the part that I'm not quite understanding is I thought the feedback we heard from affordable housing developers is that the upper story set step backs take away bedrooms. So we're getting rid of those.

Yep, and if you look the lot width, these are meant to be just a step back, or sorry, a setback based on lot width. so that the building is projecting sideways. So it's meant to apply to the entire side setback.

Okay, I think I'm following.

Councilor Davis, you had another point. Yeah, thank you. So I just wanted to ask, you know, and back to the massing slide, look, That's one forward. What is the potential impact of effectively removing all these master crimes? You talked about These are in place to sort of address buildings being potentially too big. Am I correct that by removing... All of these, including the minimum story height that an affordable housing developer. So is there any other is there some other regulation keeping them from building six and a half foot high ceilings?

Yes. Yes, through the chair. The building code has minimum standards related to health and safety. In the past, for example, we've watched Market rate developers provide inclusionary zoning units that are required by the zoning ordinance. with a lower ceiling height than they did their market rate units within the same building. That's the type of thing, for example, that we watch happen through speculative market rate development. That's not the type of behavior that we see happening with our affordable housing developers. They don't build at the minimums in the building code either. But they tend to not differentiate market rate units from inclusionary dwelling units in that manner, right? So that's why the minimum story height requirement is even in the zoning ordinance.

Not because it's an actual life safety thing like the building code would regulate, it's actually an equal protection type of thing in the housing produced by market rate developers. So a lot of our zoning ordinance and a lot of the cumulative impact of all of the dimensions we have is because of lessons learned from what market rate development will do and trying to maximize its return on investment rather than its return on unit value, which is really what people that are building affordable housing are doing. So there's different motivations that go in to producing either one of these buildings and that's why we're responding differently with regulations is because we don't see the same risk. Okay.

Through the chair, I guess that all sounds good, but what's the value of removing the minimum story height? somebody might come along and decide that they are going to build the absolute you know whatever the minimum of the building height you know the building code allows so we're either okay with that or if we're not why not just If we don't want all these affordable units to be a lower ceiling than they might otherwise be, why not keep the minimum story height?

In this situation, we're fine deferring to the producers of affordable dwelling units, affordable buildings, and the financing programs that demand quality of the units that are produced through their funding mechanisms. And that's the truth.

Okay, thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I'll stick that one in the same parking lot with the earlier question that I'm still not comfortable with. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, we have one more slide, right?

Did I hear a hand?

Is there a hand?

No. Okay.

Go ahead. Yep.

So this slide is the uses and features column of our building type tables. The main aspect of this is that we're trying to just efficiently provide one standard for fenestration on all floors, which we put at 15 and 50%. Although the other maximum is higher in some of the other zoning districts. I'm sorry, that's for the ground floor requirement when you see that 50% and 70%. Providing a little bit of flexibility in a lower percentage is both helpful for the fact that there's less commercial space requirements on these buildings if they happen to have a ground floor commercial. but also it tends to be more energy efficient actually the specialized stretch energy code is driving windows both to be more efficient but less of them in the glazing of our buildings so

Some of these numbers reflect our understanding of that. There's no blank wall requirement. That makes sure that there is an architectural feature within a 20-foot square foot area. or that there's not more than a blank flat 20 foot square foot area on other buildings again this is because we watch market rate development value engineer building design out. We have not experienced that with any of our affordable housing buildings. So that's why that flexibility is provided there. There is without the expectation that a ground floor might be lined by multiple commercial spaces if this happens to be a general building. There wasn't a need for a ground story entrance spacing requirement. We are

Councilor Davis actually took us into regulating ground floor commercial spaces. Previously, we tried to induce ground floor commercial spaces to come into existence through our ground story entrance spacing requirement. We actually believe that what we did with the small business overlay and actually regulating commercial spaces is producing better results. We've had some bad outcomes from the entrance spacing requirement on a couple buildings that needed variances as an outcome. So that's why we actually said that that shouldn't be required any longer. In a similar manner, we said that them, I'm sorry, an affordable housing developer Making up their own mind about the size of the commercial space is very important for them. I believe the testimony at the last hearing identified that they have specific limitations on how much space they can have and through certain funding programs.

but that they can provide some amount of commercial space so that's why we settled on requiring one of any size and then the That does not have a requirement to provide any amount of that commercial space as arts and creative enterprise floor space. talked about that last time and of course there's no density factor in the affordable housing overlay that's actually A limitation on the amount of dwelling units that could be produced on the site. So the affordable housing overlays always let an affordable housing developer propose however many units they can. and that would be the end of the table and again it's designed to be a superseding table happy to discuss any dimensions if the council would like to change any we would

certainly entertain that and we can produce another version or your clerk's office can actually make amendments on your behalf as well.

Thank you very much, Director. Councillor Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I apologize for sort of, you know, monopolizing the conversation here. I'm happy to defer to my colleagues if there's other questions, but... I'll keep plowing ahead until I'm told to shut up. So I had three questions when I reviewed this page. I think you addressed one of them, but I'll go through in order. So the first... I'm not sure I understand the rationale of the fenestration change, the change in the fenestration requirements. You know, if, and I listened to your explanation with interest that, you know, windows tend to be, By nature, less efficient. And okay, so that makes sense. But then why, if I'm looking at this right, we give...

Market rate developments, more flexibility on the top end, 50 to 70% versus a max of 50 in affordable housing develops. I'm not sure I understand. and so on. If you're a lower percentage, so they can be more efficient too. So that's question one. I'll stop and I'm interested in your answer.

Through the chair, ground story commercial requires the 50 or 70% minimum. So we're actually allowing them a 20% break from the 70% requirement on the primary frontage. 50% is the expectation on a secondary frontage so what you see there is a 15% which is for the apartment building right sometimes we have two buildings in the consideration here so that first number is for the apartment building It's 15% slash no maximum. And then there's...

I'm sorry. I see. So the two numbers there aren't minimum, max. It's the apartment versus the general building. Yeah, and that's... That you had, the table has, okay, I'm sorry, I misread the tape, so okay. No, it's the internal... Those are all minimums. Those are the 50 or 70 are the minimums for each of those. And so we're effectively going with the lower minimum for, okay, thank you. That's my misread of that one. So, okay, thank you. The second question was the grounds for commercial spaces. So just to be clear, this is a minimum of one, but they could put Four, if they wanted to, if it made sense from a development standpoint. Okay. That's correct. I'm good with that. I was worried that we were limiting them to one. And as you know, I like more smaller spaces if that's what works. And then my last question is that this is more just sort of something I wanted to flag for my colleagues is that

at the very bottom there there's you know there's no we you know did away with all of the um the parameters it appears at least if i'm reading it right the parameters for um you know the roof mounted mechanical screening um the heights the the you know etc and you know i totally understand that from a giving affordable developers more flexibility and not more flexibility but you know less expense um to to have to do that stuff i just I just worry if that's a good place to continue with that theme because that could be a real impact on quality of life for For neighbors and given that we're being, I think, fairly aggressive and rightfully so in the dimensional requirements in allowing these bigger buildings in areas of the city. With smaller setbacks, fewer stepbacks, etc.

I want to kind of throw it out there to see how others feel because, you know, You're by nature putting these buildings closer to other folks, whether it's a commercial building or a residential building, and with good reason, but loud systems on the roof might really be... Like I said, it might impact folks' quality of life, and I'm curious as to how much of a financial impact or benefit that really has by not still requiring something. and let me start by hopefully I'm reading that right if not then you know but that that was just my thought on that one

One, through the chair, if I may, one thing I want to call attention to is that the requirement in base districts to screen the mechanicals is still there. This is a limitation on how tall Those mechanicals and their screening and the penthouse can be. So if an affordable housing building needs to put in an 11 foot tall penthouse or equipment or screening, We give them the flexibility to do that, but they are still rescreening those mechanicals.

Okay, through the chair. So the word height, that applies to all three of those, equipment, screening, and penthouse height. So it's the height of the equipment, the height of the screening, the height of the penthouse. Okay, thank you. So that's different than it appears. It's just the height of this. Okay, so my concern is still being addressed in terms of All the things that we'd still require in terms of things that might affect neighboring properties. Okay. Thank you then. No worries with a 12-foot fence.

I think it's frankly stunning that you weren't able to deduce that from this eminently self-explanatory table.

Hey, no shade on this table. This is an awesome break. This is a really helpful, awesome breakdown of the differences. Very, very grateful to Mr. Bartman and whoever else put the time into it.

I did have some help and it's still an imperfect table in my opinion. But it's hard to communicate actually the differences between the existing and the proposed.

Okay, so colleagues, please raise your hand if you have questions. I'll jump in while waiting. So, okay, a bunch of the feedback that we got in the public hearing. So there was one strand of comments which was... The details of this table are hard to follow or deceptive, not intentionally. In my opinion, the presentation tonight addresses that. I think a lot of this stuff, you do kind of have to be an expert to be able to unpack from the amendment itself. I certainly was not able to, but this, I think, hope for members of the public. We heard from a bunch of people who were kind of motivated to come by the fact that we're no longer proposing to require arts and creative space set aside as part of the commercial space.

you know I think big picture I totally support and understand this because I think that the financing for these projects is really strict and difficult and It's a kind of odd, I don't think a state program is necessarily going to support 5% of a commercial space going to artistic uses. They might, but they might not. And we don't want that to be a hang up. But I will say that members of the public who spoke said We can kind of swallow this, but what's going on with our other priorities, one of which has always been this in lieu payment. So we had a quick discussion via email. but I wonder if you could just kind of publicly give an explanation of where where the internal efforts are to so the idea here is for large larger developments that do have a arts and creative requirement

There's a lot of advocacy to say that we should allow in-lieu payments to build up a public fund that could then be used for whatever is needed, as opposed to some small amount of square footage that may or may not wind up really being useful.

Certainly. And in lieu of payment, An in-loop payment is one of the most complex things to build into the zoning ordinance. It has to have, although it's not the same as, for instance, a linkage payment, It almost has to pass just as much scrutiny. You have to make sure that you're requirement is for something that is within the world of zoning and land use in the first place and then also the payment that you're asking for one induces the outcome you're looking for mispriced mechanisms don't do anything they might actually produce the opposite outcome you're looking for And all of that needs balance from a legal perspective. So we just completed a financial analysis of what the dollar amount maybe could be.

And so now we're moving into the legal world to make sure that all of the language that we write, the situations where it's made available don't violate any law. and Massachusetts is very strict about that. We can't induce or create local taxes. We can't put fees related to the zoning impact fees. All of that is Thank you for watching. Things that zoning has been trying to produce for a long time. One commercial use over another is a whole different kind of legal world.

and there are constitutional protections about interstate commerce that we have to pay attention to so it's a little bit more complicated than just putting a number in the code and getting somebody to hoping that somebody will pay for it I will say one other policy question we've been exploring is if we introduce this, does the ASPACE requirement apply to all, should the ASPACE requirement apply to all districts, all districts that can produce commercial space? That would mean that the small developments, smaller districts are likely always buying that out because their dimensions are probably producing 100 square feet, 200 square feet. um whether or not whether or not we want a teeny tiny uh single studio in the in that amount of space is a open question or whether or not we'd like the a space requirement to produce you know a minimum threshold and then a

which under is where the payment would be allowed another place we've explored the payment being allowed is for our our overlay districts master plan development they tend to be allowed to move it around in the first place so we try to not We totally let them buy it out, but we did encode in the Arts and Innovation Overlay District the ability to move it off-site or buy it out. So we do intend to produce that number and put it into the ordinance. We're just making sure that it stands once we put it there and people might use it.

Okay, so just to summarize, it's... it's a complicated legal and practical question that is being worked on internally it's not that there is like a explicit and inherent permission that we need to get you know we don't need a home rule petition we don't think we don't need some legally mandated nexus study it's more that we're kind of trying to do something that we want to make sure we're on the strongest legal footing when we do it is that accurate That's correct. We're actually attempting to avoid putting ourselves in a situation where we end up in the home rule world. Right. Yep. And we feel optimistic that we're going to get there?

Yes.

Okay. Great. Councilor Clingan?

Yeah, thank you. Through you, Mr. Chair, to Director Bartman. And maybe I missed part of the conversation in previous iterations, but I'm just... I'm just curious, could you just speak a little bit about the ground story commercial space? Why would that exist? Why there's one there?

So the affordable housing overlay district augments a number of different base zoning districts in its functions. A group of those are our mid-rise districts. We have four of those, mid-rise three, four, five, and six. those districts permit three different building types they are an apartment building a general building and a commercial building affordable housing developers don't build commercial buildings so all we're left with in what we're discussing here is the apartment building and the general building Those same mid-rise districts are frequently mapped along our main streets. And so we also have a designation that's called pedestrian streets along many of those same main streets. The pedestrian street's designation prohibits the apartment building from fronting that street and so they would an affordable housing developer would still be required to produce a general building which is only required to have ground floor commercial.

The amount of ground floor commercial is a dimension that we have in the code and can control. but by definition the general building has ground floor commercial so because the pedestrian street designation would still require any one of these buildings to have ground floor commercial we asked ourselves how much and the ordinance is fairly um Thank you so much for joining us. gets put at the front of a building. But in this situation where they face limitations in the amount of commercial space they could provide, Reducing this down to just make sure there is one would make sure that it meets the definition still but remove all of the

standards about how much where it's located it would still front the building but it wouldn't be the full width of the building for example otherwise market rate development is required to provide that at the front

We don't have any specifications on how large of a space would be. It just indicates that there will be one. Correct. And will that be like a case-by-case basis or...

Yeah, through the chair, when we've been speaking with our prospective affordable housing developers, they've actually shared ideas. certain uses like financial education uses that would be along there in their opinions a good tenant fit for buildings like they're producing. It's not like it's gonna be an undersized ATM lobby in these situations. They're really looking for something that would benefit the tenants in the neighborhood. so we don't we don't expect undersized things that won't rent either is that is like they're going to be adamant about trying to have making sure that they have a tenant that wants to be there a long time also So we don't expect, even though it's only one and it has no dimensional requirements, we don't expect low quality to be produced. Okay, that's all, Mr. Tristan.

Thank you, Councilor. I'll just say overall, I'm thrilled about this. I'm very excited that we're Moving on this, the one part of this that I am opposed to is the parking stuff, the setbacks, and I think it's just worth saying because... I'm not a fan of building a lot of parking. That's not something that I really prioritize. I do think it's a little bit different with affordable housing buildings, specifically because the people who wind up living there, by and large, if not exclusively, come out of a lottery. Right, so we often talk about, you know, when we have what might be called strict parking policies, there's this built-in assumption of like, well, if you don't like the parking available at this location, go live somewhere else. There might be an apartment that's right for you with your needs. It's just a different case, right? When we have 100 people applying to be in one unit and they might be moving from somewhere, they might just have not a ton of choice about where they're going to live.

And a lot of these projects wind up building a certain amount of parking. I don't think they're overbuilding it. and I just I don't want us to accidentally get in a situation having heard the specific feedback from a few affordable housing developers where you know through good intention we're accidentally doing the opposite of what we meant to do so So that's my reason for, you know, I think I'm going to ask that we prepare an amendment to consider at our next meeting when we discuss this specifically around that. And obviously, I know a few other issues have been brought up tonight that I'm happy to discuss further, too. Clingan.

Yeah, Mr. Chair, through you and on that point about the parking, I'm just curious, you know, I know we have a number of 0 parking buildings, the whole city is no requirement, and so on. But when we do have situations where a building is a smaller size, and in the situation of perhaps 297 Broadway, Where does it intersect with ADA requirements or at least the fact that we may have a fully accessible unit? How would we accommodate a situation like that if this was a strict requirement?

Are you speaking to the on-street parking? When we have a transit oriented building or are you talking about just in general?

If they weren't allowed to put any parking in a place without having it then have to be The setbacks be such that it cuts into the building size altogether.

I mean, in that circumstance, certainly if there was some reason in design that they could only put parking in the 30-foot zone of the building or the lot, that could certainly present a problem. um we haven't we haven't found that um but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist i'd have to go look at some some scenarios to see if that might be the situation but if you didn't want that to potentially impact affordable housing developers, then you could certainly adjust that dimension so that that situation didn't happen. And that would provide them more flexibility on the ground floor for where they may or may not locate parking.

Thank you, Mr. Chee. I share some of your concerns on that issue. And I'd like to hear if we could drill down a little more on the art space issue as well. just in terms of you know what the what that would look like for an affordable housing developer like how could we still make you know Get something back for the artist community, but obviously not overburden the affordable housing developer. That's all.

Thank you. Are there other questions, comments that people want to discuss tonight? I'm certain that we will be taking this up at an upcoming meeting. And I would encourage counselors now that we've kind of been through this in detail to think about if there are amendments that people want to prepare. Director.

Yeah, just Mr. Chair, I'd like to call your attention to another item that we submitted for tonight's meeting. It's actually a replacement of the previous file. We provided the red line version of the table that you asked for. And also I edited that text that you just had there. Section A2 to be way more specific about what standards are being superseded in the base zoning districts because that was kind of the fundamental confusion. of that first meeting so we wanted to be way more specific and these are the same for every building type in every district the same a b c and d are always the same so i was able to reference those by their section names So just wanted to call this to your attention and any changes that you'd like to make to any of the dimensions, I would suggest using this table.

Okay, so the document that you submitted for tonight is in substance identical to what was there before, but is kind of clearer for the public to understand. There's the redline table that has all of the redline changes and some additional language in. A. Romanet 2. Yes. Clearer. Okay. Well, we can, you know, we're not in a hurry to take this up.

Yeah.

Tonight, so we can review this before we consider whether we want to replace what's before us as we normally would. Additional questions, comments? I found this extremely helpful. A couple of things that I was confused about I think I understand now. All right, excellent. So colleagues, our next meeting is a public hearing. It's going to be held hybrid, in person at City Hall and with a virtual option as well. There'll be a number of interesting items then. And if we have time, we'll take this up at the end of that meeting. and if we don't we'll do it at the next meeting with that we don't have any minutes to approve because this is our first discussion meeting of the year

We do have minutes. We do have the minutes.

I misspoke. Okay. Let's take up the minutes and adjournment in one vote, please.

Okay, and on approval of the minutes of the Land Use Committee meeting of December 4th, 2025, and adjournment, Councilor Davis?

Yes.

Councilor Clingan?

Yes.

Councilor Sait? Yes. Councilor McLaughlin is absent, and Councilor Ewen-Campen?

Yes.

We are adjourned.

Excellent. Thank you all. Appreciate it.