More Housing Means a Stronger Haven

Let's start by encouraging incremental growth in our established neighborhoods

Super-Sizing By the Sea

I’ve been hearing more of my neighbors complain recently about the noticeable trend of people buying up perfectly serviceable single-family homes here, tearing them down, and building much larger single-family homes. My neighbors complain about the sheer size of these new homes and some of their architectural features. In a town with a marvelous variety of beautiful old homes, it’s understandable that people aren’t thrilled with the vibe of the new entrants. Some of them blame the builders and owners for their poor taste. Others gripe about over-zealous realtors recasting the Haven as a precious seaside paradise and driving up prices.

My concern with this recent pattern of ranch to mansion is not about aesthetics. One person’s dream home is another’s McMansion. Nor do I have any particular truck with buyers doing as they wish with their property or realtors selling the town. The issue for me is that this overall trend is unproductive for our town. Like-for-like single-family replacements yield no net increase in households per property. That’s bad if you want to see more housing of all types and at all levels of affordability here (and you should!)

Anyone concerned about housing availability and affordability should be advocating for a Haven where there’s fewer like-for-like replacements and more +1’s and multiplication. In a region where housing of all types and at all levels continues to be in short supply, the property updates and enhancements we want to see are those that thicken up our neighborhoods. We should be actively working to increase the number of households per neighborhood overall while providing for a greater variety of housing options of all types. This kind of productivity benefits everyone on the socioeconomic ladder, and it’s critical for people in lower income brackets, for whom the ability to find an affordable place can be make or break. I won’t get into the broader discussion of housing affordability here, but generally speaking, having more options of all types in a region is good!

Thicker is Stronger

Adding more households per lot makes us thicker. A thicker Haven is a stronger Haven. A greater number of households per property means increased revenue for the town. At the same time, adding households to our existing residential areas is more financially sustainable than building new developments further out from the heart of town. That’s in part because additional dwellings in established neighborhoods require few if any infrastructure investments on the part of the town. Infrastructure like roads and pipes are not only expensive to build out, the maintenance costs of any new infrastructure will burden the town far beyond your or my lifetime.

In addition, having more people—and more ages and types of people, including families— in our existing residential core would improve the quality of life for the all of us. Want to live in a 15-minute town  with nice businesses nearby that you can walk or bike to? More neighbors mean more business and more business means better businesses. Want the benefits of living in a diverse, multigenerational place? You need to have housing options of all types integrated throughout the neighborhood. In a previous post I argued that increasing active transportation to school would benefit everyone, including people without kids in school. For similar reasons, thickening up our existing neighborhoods provides net benefits to everyone, not only for those property owners who directly profit from increased values.

How Do We Thicken Up?

We get thick through incremental growth. By incremental growth, I mean allowing existing properties to be developed to the next increment of development. Some people might add an ADU to their single-family lot. The three-family across the street from me, currently restricted to allow for only two families, could be fully rented out to allow for an additional family. The Center and Benoit Square might see more Charleston-style development, adding to housing and commercial space while enhancing the Haven’s charm and historic character. The advantage of this type of growth is that you end up with neighborhoods built by people with a stake in the community. Local capital, local labor, and local profit.

In addition, neighborhoods that are built by many hands are more adaptable and resilient. No single player is setting rents or calling all the shots for the community. That leaves the neighborhood less prone to the major risks that come from being at the whims of the few, who may not have the same love for the Haven that you and I share. Likewise, incremental growth naturally staggers the rate of decline of our neighborhoods, meaning that costs for maintenance— both those borne by the town and those borne by property owners— are spread out over time in a way that makes them more sustainable.

What’s Holding Us Back?

Instead of the increased vibrancy and distributed wealth generated by incremental development, why do we have to settle for watching useable homes be swapped out for mansions? One primary obstacle is likely the Haven’s restrictive zoning laws. Ironically, some of my same neighbors who lament the rise of the McMansions support these rules. Like so many other U.S. towns, the Haven adopted increasingly restrictive zoning over time to “preserve the character” of our town. These restrictions make it so that the only economically viable path for many of our residential lots is to replace moderately-sized single-family homes with much larger (out of character?) ones. Meanwhile, our restrictive zoning essentially outlaws the kind of thickening that incremental growth could bring about. Heck, it even prevents us from reproducing the types of homes that have already served us well here. My house is an example of this:

Chez Gardner sits on a tenth of an acre lot. This is more than enough space to accommodate our 3BR house, neighborhood s’more zone, and bike shed. Under the Haven’s current zoning code, however, it would be illegal to build a home on our lot. In fact, you’d need over three times the land that our home sits on in order to legally build a new home here. Likewise, the beautiful multifamily across the street from us, lovingly restored by a neighbor, would also be illegal to build in our neighborhood today— both because of its smaller lot size and because town zoning restricts multifamily dwellings in most zones. Further restrictions which ostensibly serve to preserve our neighborhoods, including setback and maximum lot coverage requirements, further limit options for creating more housing here. This isn’t just a Haven issue. Check out this study that shows that basically all of Somerville is illegal! We are fortunate in that we have a zoning board who (from what I’ve seen) are eminently reasonable. They regularly approve variances to reduce these restrictions. But even the need to seek a variance is in many cases a high enough barrier to discourage the type of incremental development that our neighborhoods need.

Back to the rise of the McMansions: if the land underneath a modest home is worth significantly more than the building, it creates economic pressure for the landowner to develop the land to the highest and best use allowable. Due to restrictive zoning, the only use allowable for that land is another single-family home, albeit one with significantly more value. Reducing some of our zoning restrictions would allow for more options, meaning that not every modest house in this appreciating market would have to become a less modest house. If you’re someone who cares about the character of the neighborhood (however you might define that), you should at the very least want it to be legal to build houses like the majority of the ones already here!

The Gatekeeper

I imagine some of my neighbors worry that easing some of these zoning restrictions would lead to the destruction of our neighborhoods, Dollar Generals replacing quaint saltboxes, towering apartment buildings blocking views of the harbor, human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

My response to this would be to quote planning experts 38 Special:

Just hold on loosely

But don’t let go

If you cling too tightly

You’re gonna lose control

Tightly restricting the more natural, incremental development of our existing residential neighborhoods makes them less vibrant and liveable in the long run. Keeping too tight a lid on our neighborhoods also creates a kind of development pressure that can release in more sudden ways elsewhere in town with various impacts on all of us. With our neighborhoods frozen, both the town’s push to grow and the market’s demands (as well as state-enforced demands, which I’ll get into another time) will channel all new development outside our core neighborhoods. Growth is certainly better than no growth when it comes to housing. But how we get there does matter for the long-term financial sustainability and livability of the town.

Why Pushing New Development Outward is Riskier

So what’s wrong with freezing our existing neighborhoods and pushing all new development outside of them? Doesn’t that mean, at least from the perspective of some of my neighbors, that we get to keep our current neighborhoods as they are and still see growth around the edges? The challenge with this scenario is that it neglects to see the Haven as one interconnected system. The pressure that releases elsewhere when we hold the lid down on our existing neighborhoods will likely impact our neighborhoods in less predictable ways than if we were to allow natural incremental growth in them.

Outward development, whether through greenfield projects or redevelopment, tends to invite large, well-capitalized developers who are able to build large-scale projects quickly. They’re the ones who can make leveraged bets in unproven areas. I have nothing against large developers. I have friends in the biz and the ones I know are not the greedy operators the word developer sometimes conjures. But giving larger developers the sole right to build the Haven of the future is bad risk management. When big (for this town) projects are the only projects going forward, it makes each of them very high stakes for the town. Incidentally, if you’re excited about the idea of big projects outside of our existing neighborhoods, then you want them to be lower stakes. That’s because lower stakes generally means lower barriers, fewer delays, and lower costs for any particular project.

The impact of bigger projects here will be hard to predict. Given their size and scope, we won’t have much feedback on whether they’re successful (in economic or quality-of-life terms) for decades. What we can predict is that building outside of our existing neighborhoods will necessitate new infrastructure (with its lifetime liability). And if we point new development further out before we’ve allowed our existing neighborhoods to thicken, we’ll be spreading out the town, forcing people into their cars and making our town less walkable and bikeable and therefore less affordable to live in. As I’ll share in a subsequent post, our existing historic downtown areas are, despite what some may think, our most productive acres of real estate. The more we invest in these areas (and the neighborhoods surrounding them) the more we sustainably build on our economic strengths.

Why Thickening Should Come First

Even if you disagree with me about the risks of pushing new development outside of our existing core, you should be open to the suggestion that this type of development would be lower risk and higher reward for the town if it followed, rather than supplanted, incremental growth in our existing neighborhoods. The more we’re able to make many small bets throughout the town, the more we learn about what works and can adapt accordingly. A more adaptable, resilient Haven is one in a better position to take some of the kinds of larger bets that are required by large, outward development. If some of the small bets fail, it’s no great loss to the town and we can learn and adapt based on the needs of the community. Even if all of them fail (highly unlikely), the downside for the town is minimal. This doesn’t mean that this process has to be slow. Those small bets can happen in large numbers and, with the right ecosystem in place, they can move forward quickly. The difference is that our neighborhoods can adjust and adapt to the change as it happens.

Conversely, frontloading our growth with large bets (however well-intentioned, community-inputted and incentivized by the state) runs the risk of failure of the kind that then reduces our ability to invest in other ways. This kind of thing already happened when the Haven, like so many towns in the U.S., rolled out the red carpet for strip malls and big box stores, investing in what Charles Marohn likens to a Ponzi scheme while at the same time applying restrictive zoning to our core neighborhoods. Unlike in many towns, however, our valuable downtowns have survived, albeit in a diminished capacity (more on our downtowns to come!).

One of Fairhaven’s original big box stores, the Mammoth is now extinct.

Need to See It?

If the idea of loosening restrictive zoning in our current neighborhoods still scares you, stay tuned. In my next post, I’ll show how, unlike large bets elsewhere in town, the kind of thickening brought about by incremental development is low-risk, eminently doable, and, unlike holding tightly, would have a net positive impact on the character of the community. I’m also aware there’s a lot of nuance missing in all of my discussions here. I’m sure I’ve ruffled a few feathers. I haven’t discussed the proposed Chapter 40R overlay zoning (I’m a member of that working group) or Chapter 40B. Those are important topics that are being actively discussed in town and that I may get to here at some point. I also realize this all feels somewhat removed from the posts about kids biking to school. We can connect the dots in the weeks to come and I promise more updates on the biking soon!

Testing…

This substack isn’t public yet. I’m just testing it with a group of you who I know won’t eviscerate me for it. That said, I’d love your feedback and ideas! Drop me a line or leave a comment. And feel free to share it with friends— I can approve new subscribers and we’ve already started to grow organically that way.