By Adam Swift
The city council’s committee of the whole will take up discussion of a proposed city housing production plan on Monday, Dec. 16.
The housing production plan, which has been in the works for over a year, aims to create housing for residents of all income levels as well as sustain the city’s current housing stock.
The city’s department of planning and economic development has been working on the plan alongside outside consultant JM Goldson.
At last week’s city council meeting, the draft plan, which is available online at revere.org, was presented to the council.
The council’s committee of the whole are holding a joint meeting on the housing production plan on Dec. 16 for further discussion before potentially bringing the plan back to the council proper for a vote on adoption.
“This has been about an 18 month process we have been working on this, and it has included a number of community meetings, an extensive community survey process … and feedback from residents about the creation of this housing production plan,” said Tom Skwierawski, the city’s director of planning and community development.
The ultimate goal of the housing production plan is to create a roadmap for building the right kind of housing in the right locations across all income spectrums in a way that can predictably help the city manage its growth as a community, Skwierawski said.
Noah Harper, a housing-focused planner from JM Goldson, said a housing production plan is a state-created program that, once it is approved by the state, can help mitigate 40B affordable housing projects in a community.
“If you have under 10 percent of subsidized housing inventory as affordable units, you can use this as a way to have a little more leeway in what projects are permitted in the city,” said Harper. “It is also a way to have a really constructive community conversation about what Revere should look like in the next five years.”
With the plan, Harper said stakeholders in the city can work together more collaboratively on strategies to improve the housing stock in the city and make housing more affordable for everyone.
Both Harper and Skwierawski spoke of the housing crunch and affordability issues across Revere and the entire region, with many people finding it hard to find affordable home ownership and rental opportunities.
“If we want to continue our upward trajectory as a city, if we want to continue to build new school buildings, we need to support teachers, police, firefighters, and if we want to continue to support our growing senior population, growth is necessary for all these things,” said Skwierawski.
A housing production plan can tie together residential needs and economic development, he added. Skwierawski pointed to the growth of the Shirley Avenue neighborhood over the past decade as an example of someplace where residential growth has helped the economic growth of new businesses.
The plan can also help to mitigate traffic, Skwierawski said, by providing housing opportunities for people who work in the community, rather than having them travel through the city from other areas.
“If we are looking at building the right housing in the right locations, we can help mitigate some of these traffic impacts, because Revere is a cut-through for a lot of people from parts north coming into Revere and through to Boston for jobs,” he said. “If we can do a better job of locating housing that is affordable for workers, we can mitigate some of these traffic issues.”
A housing production plan can also enhance economic competitiveness for the city and the region, Skwierawski added.
“We are losing our young people every day as they are leaving for jobs in more affordable parts of the country,” he said.
The goals addressed in the plan include preserving deed-restricted affordable housing in the city, providing stable housing for low- to moderate-income resident, providing wealth building through home ownership opportunities, preventing the displacement of low- to moderate-income residents by having stable market-rate units, increasing the supply of housing in the city, and building in the right locations.
Approving the plan will not enact any zoning changes, but it does recommend zoning reform to support housing production.
Some of those zoning reforms could include reducing the minimum lot size, allowing for two- and three-family homes by right in residential districts, and minimizing or eliminating off-street parking requirements near public transit, Skwierawski said.
He said the plan does call for a transportation demand management plan, which would include aggressive strategies to create an objective policy to provide transportation for residents.
“The majority of the parcels in our city are actually noncompliant with our zoning because they were built in a time before more restrictive zoning was in place in the city,” he said. “In order to allow that missing middle housing, we really need to be a little bit more aggressive in zoning reform.”
The housing production plan also calls for a future council vote on inclusionary zoning that would have more flexibility than a plan the council rejected several years ago.
In addition, the plan calls for adoption of the Community Preservation Act, a surcharge on property taxes that allows for funding of open space, historic preservation, and affordable housing projects.
