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Date: 12/8/2021
EASTHAMPTON – The City Council’s Ordinance Committee and the Planning Board will host a public hearing on Dec. 14 to discuss changes to language regarding the city’s Smart Growth Overlay District.
This special zoning district, permitted by Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40R, is designed to encourage the development of and access to deed-restricted affordable housing. Essentially an incentive program, 40R allows a developer to create more housing than zoning would normally permit provided at least 20 percent of the units are affordable.
The city’s current 40R district includes the Pleasant Street Mills, Main Street, Union Street and Cottage Street. At issue at the public hearing will be the expansion of this district to include the Center-Pepin Elementary School property and a significant portion of the Highway Business district on Northampton Street.
The proposed changes would also include amendments to the existing language to add flexibility.
“Part of what we’re doing here is about updating the overlay map itself and another part is making a couple tweaks to the guidelines about what sort of developments could benefit from the overlay district,” District 3 City Councilor Thomas Peake, a member of the Ordinance Committee who has been working on this proposal, told Reminder Publishing.
The hearing is part of a process through which the Planning Board will determine a recommendation to the City Council. The council will make the final determination on whether to implement the changes.
According to City Planner Jeff Bagg, the portion of the proposal involving the Highway Business District would essentially restore the initial plan for the city’s 40R district. He explained the Highway Business district was originally part of the plan but ultimately removed when the 40R plan was first established by the City Council in 2009.
“In 2009, [the state] already approved this overlay going over these parcels. What happened was as the process was unfolding in Easthampton, at the City Council public hearing, there was a motion made to remove the entire Highway Business section and that vote passed. That whole area got removed from the proposal,” he said. “What we are doing is resurrecting that same proposal.”
Peake added the city was approached by the owner of the Tasty Top property on Northampton Street, which is within the Highway Business district. The owner, he said, indicated they were interested in exploring a housing development that would include affordable units and felt they would benefit from being in the 40R overlay district.
“I’m not a big fan of spot zoning, but it did turn out that there was a plan for the Highway Business district to be zoned 40R when we initially started talking about smart growth, long before my time on the council, so we decided to take a second look at that,” he said.
Regarding the school buildings, Peake explained the city is in the process of determining future use for the Center and Pepin Elementary School buildings, located across the street from each other on Park Street. The buildings will become vacant when students move into the new Mountain View School next year.
“There is a thought that a lot of people have that it would be great if they could be affordable housing,” he said, adding 40R could give a developer more flexibility with regard to density and parking, among other considerations.
Peake added one of the changes to the zoning regulations would be the removal of a cap on the number of affordable units in a development. According to the current requirements, no less than 20 percent and no more than 50 percent of the total number of units must be considered affordable housing under the state’s standards. If the amendment to the regulation passes, the 50 percent cap would be removed. The 20 percent minimum would remain. Some developers who had considered the school buildings for affordable housing, for example, found the current cap restrictive, he said.
“One-hundred percent affordable projects will be allowed, which is important because I think there’s a lot of interest in seeing something like that – maybe senior affordable housing or just general affordable housing – in those school buildings or on those properties,” he said.
The proposal would also add flexibility to allow smaller developments to take advantage of the 40R district’s benefits.
“Let’s just say you had a little shop and you wanted to do two apartments above it. You would not be required to have one of those be deed-restricted affordable housing,” Peake said. “We’re basically saying for larger projects, that 20 percent [minimum requirement] will be there, but for smaller projects, that requirement would be waived.”
Bagg said expanding the 40R district is in line with the city’s recent efforts to identify opportunities to develop more housing options.
“We’ve just completed the Housing Production Plan, which is the document that outlines the steps to create affordable housing and it comes up in there – it suggests we should be changing the zoning to make the creation of affordable housing easier,” he said. “Our Housing Production Plan says we should be adding 38 affordable housing units every year to keep up with the demand.”
Bagg noted the Housing Production Plan would fulfill “just a fraction” of the needed affordable housing as the development of 100 housing units would only yield a minimum of 20 affordable units.
Peake said his feeling is Easthampton and the region is experiencing a housing crunch, regardless of socio-economic status.
“I think there are a lot more people who want to live in Easthampton right now than there are housing units. That creates this demand exceeds supply, price goes up type situation. By the way, this isn’t unique to Easthampton,” he said. He explained his employer, the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute, had developed a housing report on Greater Springfield that indicated the region as a whole was short on housing. “That’s leading to prices rising very quickly and there’s a host of other economic problems that come along with that.”
The 40R district amendments and expansion is not the only way the city has attempted to address the problem, Peake noted, pointing to recent changes to accessory dwelling zoning that made adding an in-law apartment or similar addition easier as another example. That change, he said, has had an immediate impact.
“I don’t have the numbers, but we have had a number of applications and a number of projects started since then,” he said.
Peake said if properly implemented, Easthampton’s solutions could provide a model for neighboring communities.
“There’s nothing we can do as a city that is going to solve the entire region’s problems, but we can do our part and if that becomes a success story, we can hope that that inspires other people to do the same,” he said.
The hearing will take place remotely at 6 p.m. The agenda, which includes instructions for accessing the meeting, is available on the city’s website, easthamptonma.gov.
Additional information on the 40R proposal is on the website under “Zoning Amendments” in the “Current Projects” section of the Planning Department’s page.