City Launches Pilot Programs to Foster Middle-Income Housing

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh hopes to add 20,000 middle-income housing units in the city by 2030.

BOSTON—In a far reaching speech before the Boston Municipal Research Bureau that covered everything from GE’s move to the city, education spending and the North Avenue Bridge to name a few, Mayor Martin Walsh reported the city is setting up pilot programs to help spur additional middle-income housing availability in the city. Mayor Walsh in his appearance at the Seaport Boston Hotel on Tuesday said that the city, in partnership with the Housing Innovation Lab , will launch four new pilot programs this spring to help increase the availability and development of middle-income housing in the city. The mayor noted that the programs will enable policy makers to measure the success or failure of each of the programs and thus determine if the measures should be scaled back or institutionalized citywide. The programs will be launched in the next three months and are scheduled to end in 12 months. The Housing Innovation Lab, launched last year thanks to a $1.3-million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation Team , is co-managed by Susan Nguyen and Marcy Ostberg . The pilots will include a density bonus policy that will reduce building costs by establishing a new policy in strategic planning areas in the city to incentivize developers to build more affordable units by allowing additional density. Another pilot entitled “compact living” will reduce  costs by using city-owned land to launch a “Housing Innovation Competition” that will be focused on compact living, to inspire architects and developers to build homes that are well designed, efficient, and affordable. The city will also create community land trusts that will help reduce the cost to buy and own housing through a new technical assistance program that will help communities set up housing trusts for housing preservation. The pilot program will be conducted in collaboration with the Greater Boston Community Land Trust Network . The fourth pilot program will be the creation of a home buying portal in collaboration with Cambridge Financial that will provide personalized information about resources for first-time homebuyers onto a single platform. The four experimental pilot programs came as the result of more than 100 one-on-one meetings; 25 large-scale community engagements; and conversations about best practices with 15 cities, city officials state. “Solving the middle income housing challenge is among the biggest challenges we face today,” said Mayor Walsh. “The Housing Innovation Lab is bringing a new way of thinking about these issues to the city… Being able to test new approaches to this issue before solidifying them in policy is a unique approach, and one that we will continue to use to solve new challenges as well.” The mayor also stressed the need for the City Council to re-authorize the city’s urban renewal authorization, which expires at the end of next month. “If we don’t meet this deadline, we risk losing powerful tools for positive community development. Projects at key sites, such as Tremont Crossing in Roxbury and the Bunker Hill housing development in Charlestown, hang in the balance,” he warned. The mayor reported that thus far there have been built or in the pipeline 30,500 units of housing, which calculates out to 58% of his goal of reaching 53,000 units by 2030. The mayor’s housing plan called for the creation of 20,000 units of middle-income housing by 2030. In 2015, Boston permitted 4,194 middle-income units. The mayor signed an executive order in December 2015 that increased affordable housing requirements and hiked fees under its Inclusionary Development Policy for builders who choose not to include affordable units in their multifamily projects or build those units elsewhere. “Under our new Inclusionary Development Policy, we are poised to go even further: to provide more affordable units, and also incentivize the middle-market that is so vital to our workforce,” he told attendees of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau session.