Learning about zoning post-election
A reality of elections is that, in terms of required skills, the campaign has very little to do with the job itself. In a campaign, I learned a lot about constituent concerns and the needs of the city at a pretty granular level, but a campaign doesn't require the candidate to write ordinances or learn Robert's rules. The inauguration happens in early January, so the two-month period between the election and then is mostly learning.
In the two weeks since being named a councilor-elect, I’ve been to a lot of meetings. Some of these were self-inflicted — I reached out to anyone I knew could tell me something about affordable housing policy and tried to get myself on their calendar. Otherwise, the two new councilors-elect and I have been pretty busy meeting with staff and department heads, particularly in the Office of Planning, Development, and Sustainability. One of the most important tasks facing the council is re-zoning, since that's the key area that the city council can help with in encouraging affordable housing development, and the city planning staff is full of personnel with master's degrees and years of experience in this area. I’ve spent around four hours total in meetings with people from that department.
Most of the information I learned in those meetings is public, and I’ve spent more time reading the various plans the city has released in the past few years — the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, the Housing Production Plan, the Capital Improvement Plan, and the Medford Comprehensive Plan. Most of these lay out a number of tasks in the immediate future that the city council needs to act on, so earning my salary means at least being familiar with the several-hundred-pages worth of content contained in these plans.
The one that I've prioritized studying so far is the Housing Production Plan, which is a wealth of information on numbers related to housing, incomes, and demographics in Medford. (I went to a Staples last week to get spiral binding for a printed copy.) An excellent summary of Medford’s overall housing situation can be seen on page 9:
In terms of specific strategies for developing affordable housing, it repeats a few times that Medford's Accessible Dwelling Unit ordinance needs to be updated, and it talks about the need for infill zoning — basically if the space between two existing lots is too small to build a house under existing zoning, a smaller affordable unit can be placed there. (These are just two ideas that will come up in re-zoning.)
How will the process of re-zoning look? Bits and pieces can and often are changed by the city council as needs emerge. But a larger overhaul, which is desperately needed, is different. The problem with a councilor editing the zoning ordinance in this way, with zero prior experience and no outside help, is that, in most cases, it's a bad idea. Zoning is complicated; changing the rules willy-nilly can lead to bad downstream consequences. For instance, let's say I wanted to funnel more money into the City's Affordable Housing Trust (AHT), which it's now setting up. One mechanism for funding this, for example, is linkage fees: so, for each square foot of market-rate housing that a developer builds, they have to put $1 or $2 or $5 into the AHT. How much, exactly, should they contribute? Too little means that building market-rate units becomes super profitable for developers, the AHT has too few resources, and suddenly Medford becomes unaffordable; too much means that it becomes too expensive and developers are completely uninterested in building in Medford to begin with.
So a complete overhaul will need to be done with the help of an outside firm, and city council is in the process of selecting that firm right now, so things are still early-stage. As I see it, the overarching ideas that ought to be built into Medford’s new zoning is (1) mechanisms to fund the Affordable Housing Trust, since this is the foundation for virtually every affordable housing initiative that the city can pursue; (2) denser housing, since many of Medford’s areas are unnecessarily spread out, which is primarily due to historic reasons rather than practical ones; and (3) incentivizing developers to want to build affordable housing rather than only overpriced market-rate units, without making it so financially infeasible that they don’t build in Medford at all.
