May 21, 2025 - Tonight is a ZBA meeting at 7pm regarding the development of the property at Washington and Swanton. It is an "in person" event with coverage provided by WinCom on the government channel.
Precinct 8 town meeting member Diab Jurius helped by providing the following thoughts:
Hi Folks,
First, a small clarification.
While the email subject reads “Planning Board”, the PB is (just) an advisory body on this development.
The true power lies with the ZBA, which is the “Special Permit Granting Authority” (SPGA) for that project. All of the action will be at the ZBA hearings. It may be enlightening to view the discussion by the other Boards when the development comes before them, but input from any other Board (except, perhaps from the ConCom, if they have jurisdiction) is purely advisory.
I haven’t looked at the new plans, so am not sure how what’s being proposed differs from the previous ideas that were floated (none have made it to this stage).
One key thing to keep in mind is that Town Meeting voted to amend the original motion (to seize the property under eminent domain) to require that all of the units be Subsidized Housing Inventory eligible. What this means in reality is that these units must be rental units. For those who wonder why the project can’t have fewer units, this is the reason.
Explanatory sidebar:
Under the provisions of M.G.L 40B (or in this case, a Local Initiative Project) 25% of the units must be deeded Affordable at at most 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI).
To achieve 100% SHI eligibility for a condo development is economically unfeasible, as every unit would have to be sold at less than market value.
In contrast, for a 100% rental development, if only 25% of the units are deeded Affordable, the state will list all 100% of the units as SHI eligible. This means that the eventual property manager can offset the lower rents of the Affordable units with the market rate rents of the other units.
The state does not allow mixing condo and rental in the same project.
(Apart from economics, there are social considerations for having a mix of incomes in the units, but that’s not relevant here.)
The requirement that all units be rental affects the financing of the project as well as how it is built. For condos, the developer can sell units as they are built (maybe even before? dunno, not a realtor), which allows for an income stream during development. This often happens when developing multiple free-standing units (e.g. Winning Farm); for one large building, this consideration might not be as relevant.
For rental units; the developer needs to finish the project before they see any income, and typically the developer hands the project off to a management company (some of the big 40B developers retain ownership and hire management companies, I’m not sure what the smaller ones do).
Also, unlike for condos, where in a mixed market rate / deeded Affordable development the individual deeded units need not have quite the level of finish (appliances, etc) as the market rate ones, in 40B rental developments any unit may be rented out as an affordable unit (depending upon vacancy and availability) so all of the units are essentially the same. From a financial perspective, this means you can’t bump up the finish on some units to get higher rental rates to offset the loss of income from the affordable units.
I hope I got all of this correct. There are a lot of things like this which force projects onto particular design paths, so when considering why things are as they are presented, it’s good to look at the external constraints.
Of course, one should never take anything at face value. Everyone at the table has an agenda (no judgement here, that’s just how our species works). In particular, I hope we get a look at the financial pro forma, which provides an insight into development costs and the overall profit margin.
For LIP’s on private land, this need not be provided unless the ZBA asks for it (at least according to what happened with the Cross St LIP; for a proper 40B these are public documents). As the Town owns this land and is selling it to the developer, it’s possible that the sale might include a requirement to publish the pro forma. Again, I haven’t looked at this closely.
If that’s not the case, I’m not exactly sure under which circumstances the ZBA could ask for those, but that’s certainly something that should be brought up during discussion.
Cheers,
Diab
Additional material related to this topic:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/15n7VR_Dw6vk6AXOlU-AFvQXrZAphIkOGM47SWLAT8JE/edit?usp=sharing]
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1atZ843_5szr6RuU-Om1itFnyyrIicJSgfaOB4ePuGH4/edit?tab=t.0]
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0zXbSxVALDZfaDq4dxORJVUQ5AT4baEbPeLt265HIo/edit?usp=sharing]
