 Great, I think we have all of the board members with us now. So we will go ahead and reopen the continued public hearings for the 2020 special town meeting, the Warren Articles in front of us tonight. This open meeting of the Arlington Redevelopment Board is being conducted remotely, consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12th, 2020, due to the current state of emergency in the Commonwealth due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, we've been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings. And as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. For this meeting, the Arlington Redevelopment Board is convening via Zoom as posted on the town's website, identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and that some attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that other people may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. So we will take a roll call of the Arlington Redevelopment Board members before I move into some specific instructions about tonight's public hearing. So as I call your name, please announce that you are here. Kim Lau. Present. David Watson. Present. Eugene Benson. Present. Katie Levine Einstein. Present. And I'm Rachel Zembery. We have two staff members joining us this evening from the Department of Planning. Jenny Reid. Here. And also there's another staff person as well. Fantastic. Erin Zwerko. Here. And who else do we have joining us this evening? I'm sorry, I can't see all the names here. Kelly Linema. Wonderful. Here. Kelly, thank you. All right. So the subject of tonight's public hearing are the Warren Articles for the 2020 Special Town Meeting. Tonight is the second night of hearings, the first being last Thursday evening and the third being on Wednesday the 28th for a total of six one articles. Consistent with the past, the Arlington Redevelopment Board will be hearing from the applicants and the public wishing to speak on each of these articles is scheduled. The board will pose any questions to the applicants but will reserve discussion and voting on each article on recommended action until the last night of the hearings which is Wednesday the 28th. So a few items of note for anyone wishing to speak at the Zoning Warren Article public hearings tonight. The subject matter of the hearings were posted on the agenda. Any person wishing to address the Redevelopment Board on the subject matter of the agenda item shall signify their desire to speak by raising their hand when the chair announces consideration of each item. To raise your hand and zoom on your computer go to the participant section and select raise hand or on your phone press star six to unmute yourself. After being recognized to speak by the chair such persons will preface their comments by giving their first and last name and their street address. Anyone wishing to address the board on the subject matter of the agenda item shall limit their remarks to three minutes and may be allowed to speak more than once at the discretion of the chair. To do so, please raise your hand again using the participant section of zoom. The board may receive any oral or written evidence but such evidence is restricted to the subject matter of the agenda item. Immaterial or unduly repetitious evidence may be excluded. People present at the public hearing are requested not to applaud or otherwise express approval or disapproval of any statements made or action taking at the hearing. Hearing participants shall refrain from interrupting other speakers and conduct themselves in a civil courteous manner. Speakers should address questions through the chair and speakers should not attempt to engage in debate or dialogue with the Redevelopment Board members or other hearing participants. Questions may or may not be answered during the public hearing. And with that, we will move to the first article on our agenda, which is Article 19. First, I'd like to make sure that the, if Barbara Thornton is on the call, she is fantastic. Apologies, I have a large number of participants to scroll through so I appreciate you bearing with me. So the first article is a Zoning By-law Amendment for Accessory Dwelling Units. And first, I will turn this over to Jennifer Raitt with the Planning Department. Thank you, Rachel. It's Jennifer Raitt. I'm the Director of Planning and Community Development for the Town. And we have a memo that's been posted and submitted regarding both of the articles being heard this evening. The first of them is the Accessory Dwelling Unit By-law Proposal, which is inserted at the request of Barbara Thornton and other registered voters. And so what we're going to hear about is a warrant article that is not as similar as the one that we discussed last 2019 annual town meeting. This one differs pretty significantly from that zoning amendment in a couple of different ways, which I've enumerated in my memo. The first of them is that our proposal had been limited to our zero and our one zoning districts. This proposal is for all residential zoning districts. The second big difference is that our proposal with special permit, this proposal is for by-right. And the applicant of the applicant, the proponent will describe the reasons for those changes and how that relates substantially to the proposal that has been submitted to us and why they believe that it's important to allow accessory dwelling units in a variety of residential districts, not just limited to those two that were discussed at the last town meeting in 2019. And so I won't run through every single reason why to allow accessory dwelling units, but I will say that it is a common practice to allow accessory dwelling units throughout the Metro Boston area and in many other states and all different types of jurisdictions allow accessory dwelling units of different kinds in different places in the primary house, in accessory buildings, and there can be a lot of different options, different sizes and scales, limited to certain numbers of people and ideally not limited at all because it's meant to be a way in which jurisdictions create more opportunities for housing as well as create an opportunity for a property owner who may have different needs. For example, they may have a need for generating additional income, they may have a need for additional caretakers and they may have other changing household generational issues that need to be addressed and that are best accommodated with this type of accessory unit. There's lots of different ways in which these are created in zoning bylaws throughout this particular region. The bylaw that is presented this evening looks similar to some of those other zoning bylaws. In terms of what we think would be the best approach, we have a couple of recommendations of how this could be amended including the originally proposed definition which embedded basically dimensional requirements and things that we've talked about in prior meetings and as well as public hearings, which is to take that information and put it into a different section of the bylaw. We've also talked about how this relates to the housing production plan, which is it is a way of encouraging and creating benefits to property owners by allowing this additional space in their homes. And as I've already noted to different, serving different needs. So I think that with that, that is all I'm going to talk about in terms of accessory dwelling units and I'm going to stop sharing my screen and Barbara is here and she can speak to her article more specifically, thank you. Great, thank you, Jenny. Barbara, we'll turn this over to you. Great, thank you very much. First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you this evening and I'm going to read as quickly as I can to tell you why I am here. My name is Barbara Thornton. My address is 223 Park Avenue in Arlington. I am a town meeting member in precinct 16. Article 19 proposes to allow accessory dwelling units as of right in each of the residential districts in Arlington in order to create more affordable housing opportunities. Why is this zoning legislation important? I'm going to go through five categories and this is the first one. Arlington is losing the diversity it once had. It has become increasingly difficult for residents who have grown up and grown old in the town to remain here. This will only become more difficult if the effects of tax increases to support the new schools, including the high school, rolled into the tax bills for lower income residents and senior citizens on a fixed income. For young adults raised in Arlington, the price of a home to buy or to rent is also increasingly out of reach. So who benefits from ADUs? Families who need flexibility is their needs change over time. Older adults who need support and or income to stay in their own homes, households with disabled persons, residents who value a diversity of housing choices in the town, people needing a non-subsidized form of housing that is generally less costly and more affordable than similar units in multifamily dwellings. People concerned about climate change who want more sustainable living opportunities in town. And what authority and established policy is this ADU built on? Arlington's master plan is the foundational document establishing the validity and mission for pursuing the zoning change that will allow accessory dwelling units. Under the introduction in part five, housing and residential development, the master plan states, and I quote, Arlington's master plan provides a framework for addressing key issues such as affordability, transit-oriented residential development and aging in place. The master plan states that the American Community Survey reports Arlington's housing units are slightly larger than those in other inner suburbs and small cities. In Arlington, the median number of rooms per unit is 5.7. There is a great deal of difference in density and housing size among the different Arlington neighborhoods. The generally larger size of homes makes it easier to contemplate a successful move to encourage ADUs. So what do other municipalities do? To be successful, they minimize the restrictive requirements for ADU approval. According to a 2017 study by Alexandra Levering Tufts University, 65 out of 101 municipalities in the greater Boston region allowed accessory dwelling units either by right or by special permit. But unfortunately, too often municipalities overlook the roadblocks their current zoning creates for achieving the goal of more housing. Even in the midst of a housing crisis in this region, according to Amy Dane, housing expert in her 2018 report for Pioneer Institute, she said most municipalities still have zoning laws that restrict single-family homeowners from creating more affordable housing. Her report very strongly favored accessory dwelling units. Three, unfortunately, municipalities also ignore that most citizens want ADUs. Citizens want more ADUs according to a bankers and tradesmen's article in March 10th, 2020, talking about the Boston region. 63% of people in the MAPC region approved of ADUs. California has recently passed strong pro-ADU legislation and a study by Zillow further corroborated this strong interest in communities across the US, including our region. Last, why is it important to avoid additional requirements and instead respect the existing administration of building codes and life safety codes by town government professionals? State and local building codes are administered by town professional staff in the Inspectional Services Department. State and federal life safety codes are administered by town professional staff in the fire department. The wide range of housing styles, types, and ages will almost certainly require the homeowner to hire a professional contractor to bring their property into code compliance for adding an ADU. The professional contractor will work closely with the town professionals on a case-by-case basis to make sure each property is in compliance before it can be certified for occupancy. Compliance with building and life safety codes already will make this a complicated process. If Arlington wants more housing diversity for the missing middle, now is the time to move forward with the approval of the accessory dwelling unit's article by amending the zoning code with the proposed Article 19. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Barbara Horton. So we will run through the list of the pre-development board members for any questions that they'd like to pose about this article. Please remember that discussion and any further voting on this article will happen on Wednesday night's meeting. So we'll start off with Ken Lau. Hi. Just one quick question for you, Barbara. Besides just a change from not requiring a special permit, all the other rules you had in place before still apply, right? There's no outside changes, no additional parking such as we talked about before. Yeah, this is a strange situation to be in because you and I can talk about this when we were expecting to have a hearing on it in March and it's now October. Yes. So are you referring to that conversation? Yes. And it has changed a little bit and it's changed to make it as of right across the board in all of the districts. That I understand, but as far as dimensional requirements, setbacks, bump-outs, nothing. Not, no, no change. Okay, I'm all set for now, Rachel. Thank you. Great, thank you, Ken. Jean Benson. Thank you. Barbara, thank you for filing the warrant article and for your very informative and helpful presentation this evening. As you know, and as I think most people know, the Redevelopment Board submitted a different AD warrant article that got more than 60% of the vote in favor at last town meeting, but failed to pass because it needed 66% in favor to pass, so it failed by a few votes. I have a few questions about some of the concepts in the warrant articles that I don't quite understand. In the zoning bylaw, distinctions made between two-family dwelling and duplex dwelling. Two-family dwelling is defined as two units that have at least part of them on top of each other, and a duplex is basically a two-family dwelling that are side-by-side with none on top. What you have here is to allow accessory dwellings in single-family and two-family dwellings. Did you tend to also include duplex dwellings in that? Because duplex are technically under the bylaw a different definition than two-family. I would want the broadest interpretation possible, and my default is to go take the building inspector and the fire inspector and stand in front of the building and say, can we make it legal to conform to life safety and building codes in this building? All right, so in other words, it sounds like this would say in single-family dwellings, two-family dwellings and duplex dwellings was your intention, and not to omit duplex dwellings from this, okay. It wasn't clear to me about that. In some of the, Jenny, can you go to the previous page? Thank you. Why did you include four or more rooms? What would be the problem with three rooms as the accessory dwelling? Jean, I would prefer three rooms. I think I was trying to be, I'm not sure, just be a little bit more conservative but I have lived in many happily in three-room apartments and see no reason why. In fact, I don't even know that we need to count the number of rooms as long as it has a bathroom and a kitchen facility and a sleeping facility. Okay, thank you, that's helpful. Jenny, can you go to the next page again? Thank you. I think there was some wording in the initial explanation that you sent us in some places that seemed to limit this to one-family dwellings. I'm assuming that was not your intention. That's correct. At that point to limit it to that. And the other question I have is, is your intention that it would be in the existing building or could they put it in another building on the property assuming that the property would allow the construction of another building as the accessory dwelling unit? Because there are some places where accessory dwelling units are actually separate freestanding buildings. So I'm wondering what your intention is. My intention is to make it, is to default to the most flexible based on the circumstances. And so yes, I would like to see it. I can conceive of, I'm envisioning a place in Arlington Heights that has a house and a very large backyard and a big garage that could be an accessory dwelling unit. Yeah, and I've seen at least one. A huge garage get built in my neighborhood that I haven't been inside, but it certainly has the appearance from the outside of having an apartment on the second floor of the garage. So your intention would be to allow that also? Yes. Okay. Okay, those are my questions. Thank you very much, Barbara. Thank you. Thank you, Jean. David Blanton. Thank you, Barbara, for bringing this forward discussion and for your presentation. I have at least a couple of questions. The first is I shared Jean's confusion about why the number of rooms was relevant to the discussion. And I share it too. Okay. So I don't think we need to discuss that further. So just following up on Jean's question about whether an ADU could be a separate structure. The proposal that went to town meeting last year limited ADUs to the existing building envelope. And as I take it and as I think you've described your intention is to allow them in the existing building envelope as an addition to the existing building or as a separate structure on the property. That's right. So is one scenario you would envision would that be the conversion of an existing detached garage into an ADU? Could be. Yes. I think the only, I'll go ahead. So is there anything, is there, I'm just trying to navigate how this would interact with our existing, with our other zoning roles and the dimensional requirements because it's often the case that the detached garages in Arlington are within the required setbacks. So if that garage were converted to a residential use then you'd have a residential use that's in the setback of the property and potentially very close to abutting properties. Is there anything that would prevent that from happening? Do you see that as desirable, undesirable? More housing is my goal. And if it's within that setback, it doesn't, for me, it is desirable, yes. But again, I think when it's important to keep in mind that every circumstance, every request is going to be unique. And I think when the, I think that the decision point for the people who initiate this is gonna be the homeowner and the homeowner is going to say, yes, I'm going forward or no, I'm not when he sits down with the inspectors and then he perhaps goes the next step and hires a contractor and the contractor says, you know, it's gonna cost you this much money to go forward. So I think it's the cost and I want to limit the cost as much as possible and make it as feasible as possible to bring these opportunities forward. Yeah, well, I agree with you that the approach you're taking is much simpler than the one that was proposed last year. I'm working through how I feel about not having the process that was laid out in the previous proposal, which was largely responsive to concerns that had been raised by the Residential Study Group and by members of the public as we were vetting that proposal during the hearing process. And I'm just thinking about, whether those concerns would potentially arise again with this proposal, for instance, without any specific restrictions that would prevent somebody from not, from essentially converting a house to a two family and not actually using part of it as their primary residence because that requirement's not in here anymore or the issue with people being concerned about short-term rentals like Airbnb and is there a need to address issues like that in an ADU proposal? I don't believe so. I spoke extensively because we were last time in a last town meeting. There was a lot of accusation about Airbnb and that the sole reason for ADUs were going to be people flooding the office of Michael Byrne demanding that they get permission to build an accessory dwelling unit so they could rent it out for Airbnb and I no longer think that's valid. And I've come to that conclusion after extensive discussions with Doug Hyme. I guess my last question is, since the prior proposal did actually get a significant amount of support and I think with more education of the public and town meeting members and more time to think about it, I think has the potential to pass if it were offered again in the future, why not take that intermediate step and see how it works with a process and then potentially open it up more broadly after we have some experience with it? I would prefer to open it broadly and then narrow it if we need to. What happened in Lexington was that they created an accessory dwelling unit by-law and then they had to revisit it because they realized that the restrictions that they had put on it were too tight and so they, I thought it was 2016, they went back and they redid the bill to loosen it so the goal has always been, as I look at all of the articles across the state, it's been too much, too tight restrictions too soon, I mean too soon in the process and that's why the average for such a long time has been, I think 2.7, an average of 2.7 ADUs per year, per municipality. Now that adds up if you get decades or centuries but it's not what we want and so I would prefer that we open the door, make it easy, super easy for homeowners to understand and let them know you just, you know, get a contractor, see if it's doable, doable, meet the codes and go forward and then if we find out that there are problems like many other things we go back and we adjust for what the problems are when we know what the problems are, not guessing at them now. Jenny, maybe you can remind me last year when we were talking about the ADU proposal, there was, I think an estimate that there would be only a handful created in Arlington on an annual basis and was that estimate dependent on the process and restrictions that we were proposing or was that independent of the details of the proposal? It was related to the restrictions that we were placing on how they would be created and it was also based upon research that had been conducted which was referenced by Barbara in her report out as well which is the research by Amy Dane from the Pioneer Institute and the combination of those two which was how we drew that conclusion. So how many are we expecting might be built annually in Arlington under this proposal? Are you asking me, Barbara? Well, whoever might know the answer. I'll take it. I waited too long to try and reach out given the COVID circumstances to Lexington but I think Lexington would be a valid place to do that question because they've now opened it more and I think they now have, is it 66 or 75 ADUs in Lexington, that's not per year but it's certainly a big increase for what they were originally hitting which was like that three a year number. So I think to be able to, I've got a call into them, I haven't heard back but that would be the best, the most valid source right now I think. Those are my questions for the moment. Thank you. Rachel, can I speak up and try to answer maybe Dave and Jean's question earlier? Sure, go ahead, Ken. I believe if the structures are independent of each other not connected, each structure would have its own setbacks. So if a garage was stand by itself it cannot be in the setback. It has to be outside the setback if it's, I believe, if it's not connected. I'll accept, in East Arlington for instance where I am there are a lot of very old detached garages that are right up against the property line. No, yes, I agree with David. And I don't disagree with that. I think that's existing. I think new. That's what I was talking about, David. I agree with you for new. I was thinking more about converting existing structures. Okay, that's they are ready. I'm just thinking if it was new, it will not create anything new. That's what I'm trying to say. That's what I'm trying to say. Okay. I just, I just want to say that if, if we, when we have our discussion, decide to make a positive recommendation along the lines that Barbara has suggested, I think that four things that we will need to think about and figure out whether and if so, whether or not we need to make a positive recommendation is something about short term rentals, something about whether the owner needs to live on the property, something about setbacks and something about open space requirements because it may be different. Whether you're building on top of a garage or a new structure. It may be different. But if we're going to have to make a positive recommendation, that's something to town meeting. I think those are four things that we should probably need to think about and decide whether and if so, how to incorporate them into this. Thank you, Jean. I'd also like to give Katie living in Einstein. An opportunity to ask any questions before we circle back to any of those questions. Thank you to Barbara. And also to Jenny rate for really informative presentations that outlined this article in great detail and also tell us sort of contextually why it's really important. So my question for you and Barbara, I know this is something you've thought a bit about is our town capacity to manage these applications. You know, you already, I think I've raised the point that we're not exactly going to have the market get flooded with ADU applications, you know, but I think that's a good point. I mean, I'm not sure if you've heard of the idea of the city of Washington as any example to go by, but to, yeah, I know this was an issue when the ADU article came up last time. To what extent do you think the town is sort of prepared to handle this? Have you talked to the officials about this, sort of how, how can that, how can those capacity issues be addressed? I'm Katie. Me or Jenny. And it's been a few Barbara, because I know you've thought about this. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. I, I have spoken extensively to, to Mike, well, extensively in person for over an hour in least once, and then on the phone and exchanging phone messages, et cetera, and, and with the fire chief and both of them say they are, they are, they are not concerned about capacity, their capacity to respond to this. That's their job. Both of them were terrific. They said that's, that's our job. That's what we do. That's why we're here. I think that if we start getting like 50 a year, you know, we may want to revisit a budget line for, for additional staff, but I don't foresee that neither do they. This is a very similar to the kind of building inspection that we're looking at. And that's the kind of advice that he does now throughout the town. And just to clarify, because I think my connection may have cut out for a minute in the case of top, but anyone else, you talked to the building inspector and the fire chief about this. That was both of their perspectives. Great. Thank you. Yes. That's all for me. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. Any other questions from members of the board before we turn this over to the public comment. I had one other question, Rachel. I'm going to go back to the next page. I just saw that go by Barbara in a section 5.4.2. Where it says not exceed 50% of the floor area of the principal dwelling. Just to clarify, does that mean that after the ADU. Is added. That it could be 50% of the floor area of the entire. Dwelling unit. No. Structure or that it would be more than a third. It's a third. Okay. And to refer back to your, to your earlier question, David, regarding a garage, for example, 50, the garage, if there's garage were within that 50% of the existing dwelling unit, it would comply according to this rule. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, David. Any other questions from the board before I. Turn this over for public comment. Okay. Seeing none. We will open this up for public comment. I remind people to please use the raise hand function in the participants. Section of zoom. And if you are not able to do so, please unmute yourself. If you have any questions or comments, please call you in the order in which the hands were raised. Please state your name and your address. And as a reminder, you will have three minutes for any comments. So the first speaker will be John warden. You're, you're muted. Mr. Warden, we can hear you. Yes. We can hear you. Oh, good. Thank you. But I'm still. No, we can hear you again. Okay. All right. My first question is I'm still invisible. Is that your intention? Hello. Yes. You would need to turn your video on. Yes, you would, you would need to turn your video on if you would like to be visible. Oh, there I am. All right. Well, not to send a great improvement to the screen, but. I wish. Madam chair person. If, if you could. Allow. When he'll Evans. To speak and then come back to me. She has filed. I think we, we hope you all got copies of it. And a substitute motion. Which she, she will explain. And. And if you would give us that courtesy, it would be appreciated. And I hope she will be given as much time as Mrs. Thornton was to, to, to explain the, the proposed substitute motion, which actually deals with a lot of the issues that the board members have discussed. I'd be happy to give you an opportunity to speak again. If you'd like to use the raised hand function. I do see YNL Evans in my list coming up shortly. So if you'd like to, Mr. Warden hit the raise hand button again, you'll be back in the queue following YNL Adams or Evans. Excuse me. I can figure out how to do that. Okay. I will write you down. So I will definitely come back to you. If you're not able to do so. Okay. Thank you. So the next slide. My name is Patrick Hanlon. I live at 20 Park street. And I'm a town member from the precinct. I was on the residential study group as a representative of the zoning board of appeals. And was involved last year. At town meeting in favor of the. Proposal that was being made then. And I was somewhat spooked at the RSG meeting. By the statement of Mr. Burn that he would not be able to enforce it. And so I was opposed to it then. Now, I think Barbara has taken this beyond that. I think it's really important. To decide whether or not you believe as Barbara does. 80 us are an important part. An important strategy or tactic. In trying to address our housing problems generally. Or whether we think of them as a kind of escape valve for people who have some special need that. Need to be cabined in with as many restrictions as possible. And so I was opposed to it then. Now I think Barbara has taken this beyond that. I think it's really important to decide whether or not you believe as many restrictions as possible. So that they are rarely used and then only in the most compelling circumstances. And it seems to me the policy that we've taken already. In the housing production plan and elsewhere is the former that you should be a part of the strategy for affordable housing. When you think of it that way, first of all, I only can congratulate Barbara for not making this a special permit. I could see how adding in a different building. It might be a different situation. But generally speaking, by putting everything into special permits and proliferating the bureaucracy that is built around all of this. The effect of that is to do what has happened in almost all of the jurisdictions around us is that we have it on paper, but we don't have accelerates. We don't have these units in practice. And it seems to me that, that we really ought to be working that the other way around. I don't think it's important not to limit this to our zero and our one districts. There are plenty of single family houses in our two districts and some in other districts as well. And if this meets all of the other kind of zoning requirements, I don't see why it should be limited to any particular zoning district. And third is I, when I will talk a little bit to her substitute, which is based a lot of what we had last year. But in reading over it, I think it's important to be aware of that. Because it reminded me of all of the complexity and frankly, the impossibility of enforcement that largely was focused on all of that extra stuff about principle, making sure that the person didn't sell the house and so on and so forth. And it seems to me that, that if this is all going to work from the zoning point of view, that I care a lot less about the ownership point of view. I think it's important to be aware of that. I think it's important to be aware of that. I think it's important to be aware of what's where. And it doesn't have to do with controlling this or that kind of owner or this or that kind of resident. But for all those reasons, I think, I think that this is a stronger. A stronger. Proposal than the proposal we had last year. It's a simpler proposal. It's a proposal that I think is more likely to get more support rather than less than was last year. And I'd encourage you to try to at least stay within the same framework for the next year. So I think, I think that's a really good point. I'll be back to you the opposite one. Thank you. The next speaker. We'll be Patricia. Yes, we can hear you. Can you see me? I did. I did. I did you. It's a loud. We can see you. Yep, we can see you and hear you. My video is. Okay. Madam chair. Patricia Gordon. 27 Jason Street. Article 19 is a disgrace and I strongly oppose it. There is so much that needs to be said about this article that it is impossible to do so in the available time. I strongly oppose the article it has zero affordability requirements which ignores the needs of people of low and moderate income of all races, color and age. As you know at this time without any article promoting ADUs, homeowners can legally do everything or the changes necessary to construct an ADU except that they cannot install a built-in stove. They can construct an extra bathroom, additional entrance, washer and dryer, refrigerator, microwave, George Freeman grill, whatever and many of us have already done so. To accommodate needy family members or caretakers in this fashion, the incorporation of accessory dwelling units into the zoning file is just going to promote a bonanza for developers. That the planning director is promoting it when it is totally lacking in affordability requirements, zero affordability, that is unconscionable. The planning director is and the planning department is opposing the needs and desires of residents of Arlington in this article. The development officials should instead be appealing to brokers to make listings of older homes being sold available to the public and to the town of Arlington rather than to developers to fuel the teardown industry. They are ignoring, the planning department is ignoring the urgent needs for affordability emphasized in Arlington's master plan. The proposed article is simply a vehicle for enabling teardowns and so eliminated affordable homes and replacing them with a greater number of much more expensive homes and luxury units. It is also the case in article 18, they are enabling increased school expenses and much higher residential taxes. The planning department should be ashamed of it. Ms. Warden, you are at time. Thank you very much. The next speaker is Wynell Evans. Thank you. Good evening everybody. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Thank you. Thank you. I'm also speaking tonight as a former member of the residential study group. We had one discussion about ADUs but unfortunately the group was disbanded before we could really get into it. However, I did my own research based on the 2018 Amy Dain authored paper for the pioneer institute which Barbara mentioned and found that communities nearby to Arlington that allow ADUs do in fact have a significant number of requirements. They are mainly by special permit. They are on lots at minimum size is significantly larger than Arlington's. They are required to be within the existing footprint. They prohibit lodgers. They have the requirement that one unit must be owner occupied. The ARB's 2019 version which was so narrowly defeated contained these requirements but the current article 19 that is before you while I believe it's very well intentioned it lacks these protections and it purports to enable the creation of additional affordable housing in town but it offers no mechanisms by which to do this. So the substitute motion which I have submitted is based largely upon the 2019 version with the additional clarification and safeguard which by the way address many of the concerns that people had then and concerns raised by board members tonight. It is also in line with ADU bylaws in other communities and I believe that it comes much closer to being a consensus version that can be supported by most Arlington residents. My own personal feelings are that if ADUs are used to house family members or to provide small affordable units then I see great benefits and most of the people who spoke in 2019 at town meeting were also talking about housing family members and as people have pointed out in communities where they're allowed there's not suddenly a huge explosion there are not you know thousands of units created but this is partly because they are not inexpensive to build. Most of them will cost over $100,000 per the estimate of members of our inspectional services. So this makes it quite likely that a homeowner who goes to that expense is going to want to rent their ADU for the highest rent they can get or they're going to want to put it on the short-term rental market which I hope even the article's proponents understand could be less than desirable for neighbors. So let's craft an article that makes them serve their purported intent by requiring affordable rents by prohibiting short-term rentals and by requiring owner residents in the main unit among other safeguards contained in our substitute motion. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak I appreciate it. Thank you very much. The next speaker will be Steve Revolak. Thank you Madam Chair. My name is Steve Revolak and I live at 111 Sunnyside Avenue. I'd like to voice general support for this article you know and to take a bit of a trip back in history namely to 1988. So back in the late 80s housing costs in Arlington were also rather high. The town had a fair housing committee at the time and they commissioned a report on with some you know to provide some suggestions on how to address you know what were you know high housing costs then mainly you know in high interest well they couldn't address a high interest rates and fortunately we don't have that problem anymore but two of the recommendations that came out of that report were excess redwelling units you know which we're hearing about tonight and another was real estate transfer fees which unfortunately did not make it onto this town meetings warrant. So I'm happy to see that we continue to try to find a way to allow ADUs and that we're still you know that we're still looking at them and still considering them. If two different groups of people at completely different times come to the same conclusion there's probably some merit to it. I appreciate the straightforwardness of Ms. Thornton's article. To me it seems like it's designed to actually you know promote the construction of accessory apartments rather than to impose a lot of restrictions so that yeah you got a law on the on the books but it will rarely be used and finally I would like to concur with some of the board members in that you know in allowing ADUs of less than four rooms. I lived in a three room studio for quite a while and I thought it was a rather nice arrangement. Thank you. Thank you very much. The next speaker on the list next speaker on the list is Dawn Seltzer. Thank you Madam Chair. Dawn Seltzer Irving Street. Last year the head of Inspectional Services spoke in some detail about the difficulties of enforcing an ADU by law. In a candid moment he declared that his department could not enforce it and would not enforce it. That is an exact quote. The department cannot even control illegal ADUs today. For instance, some years ago the owners of a very large house in my immediate neighborhood went to the Board of Appeals for a variance to build a two-story garage on the rear property line. They said the second floor was meant to be just a simple artist studio, two rooms and a cleanup sink. The board was pretty skeptical at the time but granted a variance with the strict provision that it be just a studio with no living spaces. But once they had the variance the owners tossed the original plans and went to Inspectional Services with a new set of plans. Two bedrooms, a full tile bathroom, a living room and a fully equipped eating kitchen. No one at Inspectional Services noticed or even cared either at the time of submittal or during the various onsite inspections during construction that an illegal cottage was being built in a backyard right on the property line overlooking the neighboring property. It only came to public attention when the property was sold and the realtor advertised it as having a separate inlaw Airbnb unit. The building inspector was reluctant to get involved and said that there was really very little he could do other than require them to disconnect the built-in stove. It's a near certainty that this bylaw as framed will be abused and exploited to build units that are far from what its intent is. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker will be Steve Moore. Yes, Steve Moore, 64 Piedmont Street. I'm going to speak right now as a citizen first. Ms. Evans stole most of my thunder. I was going to speak to her concerns and I think her substitute lotion probably would make sense to me. I think there's a some significant reasons why towns move quite slowly here. Not just the not in my backyard syndrome, but also concerns about potential abuses. The previous speaker that just proceeded me spoke to that. I'm glad that we're thinking this through. I think one of the reasons it was ADUs were focused on R0 and R1 was because those lots are sizable enough to perhaps deal with the separate unit or an expansion of an existing dwelling to house such an item. And if we expand that to R2, so many of the R2 lots are so much smaller that I'm not sure that those lots would accept as well any additional building that was outside the envelope. Plus it would definitely increase density in some neighborhoods that are already pretty dense as it is. And so I do have some concerns. My understanding of the 2019 discussions was that there was some significant concerns and the planning board was not the redevelopment board company was not planning to move forward until town meeting 2021. 2020 town meeting of course was well, we don't know what it was. And this sort of precedes that in a much more open way than was offered in 2019, which had restrictions, which I think as Ms. Evans said, addressed a lot of the concerns that this particular article being proposed does not. It opens a potential floodgate much wider. Secondly, now as a member of the Arlington Tree Committee, which I'm a member of, I know sustainability was quoted. Additional buildings in town and additional building of open space almost necessarily means taking trees down and trees are a resource which the town generally supports. And we're trying to make sure we forest or restore the canopy in town. And I'm not sure this is in line at all with that. I think that needs to be considered as well for building outside the envelope of existing structures because that truly would help some sustainability. Anyhow, thank you much. Thank you very much. The next speaker on the list is Alex Bagnell. Thank you, Madam Chair. Alex Bagnell, YMN Street. I support the ADO article as proposed by Barbara Thornton. We need to do everything we can to increase housing options in town. Many of the same issues of systemic inequality and exclusion with single family zoning are present in this question also. Our goal should be to encourage the creation of ADUs, not to make them theoretically possible, but next to impossible in reality. More housing units will help with the constant upward pressure on housing prices due to demand far outstripping supply. People desperately need more choices about where they can live, not a maintenance of the status quo. To encumber the ADU process with additional restrictions and the onerous special permit process will ensure that few of them ever get built. To encumber it with additional restrictions, I urge the board to support the article and encourage greater housing choice in town. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker will be Carl Wagner. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Yes, I can. Thank you. Carl Wagner, 30 Edge Hill Road in Arlington. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I'm pleased to speak after Mr. Bagnell because I think he's incorrect in what he hopes will happen. And I'm pleased that the proponent of the article is concerned about affordability and the issues that go along with diversity. She's also mistaken in this article. The original article in 2019 was rejected by a town meeting even with many more protections partially because of a lot of problems that would have occurred even with those protections. But to me, speaking about diversity and affordability, not speaking about just making more units, which of course this will do, for affordability and diversity, let's talk about those. There's no affordability requirement of these units. The only way that the town and this ARB should accept an ADU proposal is if the units that are created are more affordable than the units that already exist in the town. Furthermore, if we allow rampant two-family apartments in the one-family zone, and as Ms. Thornton wants to do, allow building apartments into the other residential zones, those are going to go in at higher rates than market. Arlington will be less diverse. People of color and people of limited and middle incomes, including the elderly, will not be able to afford it. So I highly encourage that this be rejected right here by the ARB unless it has an affordability clause that really makes affordable units and really makes us diverse. Secondly, I'd like to point out that this is not an article that can go forward at this time because of a two-year requirement in town meeting if the plan department will say no to it. I hope the planning department will say no to it because it is much, much worse for the neighbors and the town than the 2019 proposal was. I'd like to say to the planning department, you work for the people of Arlington, the residents and the businesses of Arlington. If you act to support Ms. Thornton's article in this fashion, which is worse, coming less than two years, you will be acting against the people of Arlington. We have no way to say anything to you except to ask our select board who we elect to change your mission, but we'll have to do that through voting for the select board. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker is Zaved. Hello, thank you. I'm Zaved Pretzer. I live at 44 Grove Street in Arlington. I just want to say that I support this article. I think it's very important to allow the creation of ADUs with a minimum of barriers because it's important to create additional housing and smaller and more diverse units to combat housing prices. I think, for example, here, allowing ADUs by right instead of the owner's special permit process would allow many more to be created. While I definitely support restricted affordable housing and efforts to create more of that, I think it's plain that there just isn't enough money for subsidized affordable housing to address all of Arlington's housing needs. Creation of additional housing that's not subsidized and restricted affordable housing will nevertheless bring overall housing prices down and give more options for my neighbors and relatives who are worried about whether they're going to be able to continue to afford to live here. I'll give them more chances to be able to live in Arlington and stay in the communities that they love. I hope that we are able to increase Arlington's housing with a measure like this. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, this is Patricia Warden. John Warden wants going to seek out a winner of Athens. Yes, Ms. Warden. He's actually next on the list. I asked him to raise his hand and he is next in the queue. So John Warden, you may go ahead and speak now. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Thank you and that's for the better words you can see me. We can see you as well. Okay. Thank you for recognizing me. Finally, the need for housing as mentioned by several of the speakers is a little overblown. The need is for and the only Arlington is already the second densest town in the state. It's the 12th densest out of 351 communities in the state. We are number 12 in the density. We really don't need any more people as the finance committee chairman, former chairman has reminded us. The only thing we should be doing out of justice is to provide affordable housing and the AGU article which was proposed and discussed briefly by Ms. Evans does that. It is modeled on something which is pointed out, got a lot of votes in last year's town meeting. It picks up, but it adds a very important element that the rental of the AGU must be affordable and that way it deals with the issue of justice providing more affordable housing, adding to our inventory of affordable housing. If some, the housing implementation people talk about that getting to a 10% goal, you're not going to get it by adopting the Thornton article which is basically an invitation to developers to come into any zone, tear down the house, put up a mega house with two luxury units in it. It's going to be exactly the same thing because there are no regulations. They're already doing that throughout the two family zones and now under this proposal they could do it in every zone and that is inimical to the interest of the town of Ireland. It doesn't provide any affordability. It just makes things worse. So we urge you to take a good look at what the materials we have submitted for a substitute motion which includes valuable protections and you know it said well we shouldn't put too many restrictions. It'll keep people doing things. The whole element of zoning, the safeguards, the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Warden, you're at time if you could wrap up please. Zoning is something that protects the interest of people who are invested in this community and it is it would be wrong and indeed evil to say to those people you know your protection is gone. You thought you bought a single family house in a single family zone. No we're going to fix that for you. We're going to put somebody new in your garage. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. The next speaker please is Philip Tedesco. My name is Philip Tedesco. I live at 74 Park Street and I wanted to speak in support of the proposal. I think it's really great and very important and I think it really speaks to important values about Arlington that we all share which are about inclusion and creating, allowing for more people of all types to live here. I think when people talk about affordability it's important that we keep in mind there's you know income restricted affordability which is one thing but there's also just the fact that people are getting really priced out of town. You know our family can could barely afford to live here. We fear that we may not be able to continue and certainly that our kids can't won't be able to live here. I think this is a really really modest, really simple, really elegant proposal to allow very simply for a lot more housing of you know to to exist into town in a way that is really quite modest. Thank you. Thank you very much. The next speaker will be Joanne Preston. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Good. What happened to my video? There it is. Wow. I'm going to speak. I'm sorry could you state your name and address for the record please? Yes. I'm Joanne Preston 42 Mystical Lake Drive town meeting member precinct 9 and I live in the webcam at neighborhood which is important for my next talk but I just couldn't let this go by. People have I don't know what they're doing in economics 101 these days but building more housing in Arlington is not going to make the price of housing go down. We live in a regional housing market that goes up to southern New Hampshire, Framingham, Drake, it just it hasn't so far and it will not in the future. So I think it's important and I feel badly for people who are hoping that prices will go down if they build all these ADUs they will not. There isn't one economic study that shows in one town if they make this change that prices will go down and I really think it's important for people to understand that they will not be more affordable and also as we know with all sorts of new building when more people move to town they send their children to the school system and taxes go up making everything less affordable so if I could just please email me if you want the articles on or go to the the Harvard division on the study of housing we're in a regional market just putting ADUs in front with in all of these different houses unless there's a stipulation that the ADUs must be affordable by our current standards of affordability and why people who claim this is going to make housing more affordable in Arlington won't agree to this stipulation should tell you right away that these units are not going to be that affordable. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker will be Chris Loretty. Thank you Madam Chair Chris Loretty 56 Adams Street. Can you hear me okay? Yes we can thank you. Thank you. First I want to thank the proponent for the map that she supplied in her supporting documentation because what it shows is the communities around Boston and their take on accessory dwelling units and what you see is for the intercourse cities all of them either prohibit them outright or require a special permit before one is allowed and I would suggest that if these were to go forward in Arlington the special permit process is absolutely necessary and frankly it's not that hard to get. I think we have a couple ZBA members the zoning board of appeals members they can tell you the vast majority of applications are approved and you need this simply because as a couple people have already expressed the inspectional services department is incapable of adequately enforcing the zoning bylaw. Mr. Benson noted that in his neighborhood Mr. Felser did in his I can give you an example in mine where a large garage was being built with an accessory unit on top they claimed it was for the business it was very likely an apartment it did not have the proper setbacks which brings me to the next point about garages being converted into accessory dwelling units it does not matter whether it's a new garage or an old garage you can build it right up to the property line if it meets the fire code and I think it's totally unacceptable that you have two dwelling units with no setbacks between them you know being constructed or allowed under this under this bylaw change. The other thing I want to comment on is on the process essentially what you're doing is allowing one family districts become two family two family to become three family to become four family this this bylaw proposal as written is not restricted to one and two family dwelling units. Second I think the ARB should be putting forward its own article for for accessory dwelling units if it really wants to put one forward and not glomming on to a citizen's article you mentioned in the spring you weren't going to do any significant articles this year and now because a citizen's group has put one forward you seem to be adopting it as your own I think that's inappropriate and I think you ought to be taking the leadership and frankly the public outreach needed before you go forward with a change like this as of right now I haven't received the warrant in the mail and I presume nobody in Arlington has I don't even know how many people know about this hearing or know about the proposed change and and frankly that kind of public engagement is something the board should be doing as the planning board before changes like this occur so I would strongly suggest you do not support the article it's submitted by Ms. Thornton if you submit any ADU article at all it should be the version that Ms. Evans has put forward that has the protections in it that other communities have thank you very much Madam Chair thank you are the any other members of the public wishing to speak on this article okay seeing none I will ask Ms. Thornton if she has any additional items that she would like to discuss with the board thank you for the opportunity no great good discussion thank you great thank you before we move on to the next article are there any additional questions for Ms. Thornton from the board members okay seeing none we will move to oh I'm sorry Dean I missed your okay we'll do Jean first then you can well this isn't a question but I do want to respond to one thing that a lot of the commenters said and that is about the folks who said these need to be income restricted for affordable units and the ARB had that discussion last year and decided that was inappropriate for a number of reasons and I don't won't go through all of them but I would allow a couple and ask people to consider them number one it was something Ms. Evans brought up which I think is correct it's going to be pretty expensive in most cases to create an ADU unit up to code and if we expect people to do that they're going to have to be able to rent it for what they can get to try to make back the cost so by putting an affordability requirement in it pretty much has the effect of making it theoretical but not really to have ADUs in most cases second is this is not only about affordability it's about an older person sharing his or her home with someone else it's about bringing in another person to help meet the costs of a place maybe some of the units will be less than market rate but if we require income restricted affordability it effectively means we're going to have few if no ADUs there are a lot of other things that people said and I'm sure the board will discuss them when we discuss what to do about the article but I would really ask you all to reconsider that because I think it's basically would kill ADUs thank you thank you gene kin I think gene basically said what I was going to say and I was gonna say we will have a chance to discuss this later on I don't think we should all I think we should listen out and then discuss this after we end public comment great thank you Ken okay so we will now move on to the next article on our agenda which is the public hearing for article 18 which is the zoning bylaw amendment slash improving residential inclusiveness sustainability and afford about affordability by ending single family zoning so I'm going to turn this over to Jenny Rates thank you Rachel I'm going to be very brief in my comments so the the memo again that I submitted to the board has a lot more material in it I also have Aaron Swarco and Kelly linema available should the board have specific questions about any of the material that was submitted in the memo as they helped to craft it I will just note that this is a proposal to amend the bylaw to expand the ability of property owners to create additional housing in the r0 and r1 by converting their homes by right to a two family and to also permit new if compliant with dimensional and density regulations two families in what are considered single family zones or lower density residential zoning districts the special permit is another option for creation of six plus units in a two family dwelling or if there's contiguous options on that parcel this I think in part relates to broader conversations that have happened both regionally and are continuing to happen regionally as well in other as in other communities and nationally about housing in general and equity in general there's a lot of potential for what this could mean in Arlington as outlined in the memo I won't go into every detail right now but we had conducted a report which was delivered and presented to this board as well as to the select board which was about replacement housing and in part came from conversations from the residential study group and that report helped us to better understand the capacity for turnover of housing and also what had already been replaced or torn down and replaced with a different type of dwelling whether it was two family or single family homes and so that has been the basis for how we have an understanding of what could potentially occur with this particular zoning bylaw amendment I think that the petitioners have a lot more to say about the reasoning behind this petition and it's probably best to turn it to them so that they can outline their goals thank you thank you jimmy so we will now turn this over to the petitioner Benjamin Rudick so madam chair this is Steve rebelack um mr. Rudick says sends his apologies for not being able to present this evening uh he was involved in a mountain biking accident over the weekend and is recovering from a a concussion so he has asked me yes um so he has asked if I may present in his place um I hope that would be okay with the board please do yes okay uh so um and I see the slides are up so thank you very much and uh I'll just go in so my name again is Steve rebelack and I live at uh 111 sunny side avenue and I worked with mr. Rudick on uh the proposal for article 18 so generally the proposal in a nutshell is to allow two family homes by right in all of our residential districts so currently 79 of our residential land is exclusively zoned for single family homes and you cannot build any other form of housing there so we're proposing to allow two families be built by right in these areas however we are not proposing any changes to heights to setbacks to open space to any dimensional regulations so to just be very clear we're not proposing an elimination of single family homes but we are proposing to eliminate the restriction that says single family homes are the only type of housing that can be built in 79 of our residential land so there are four reasons why we are bringing this back so we want to you know uh at least acknowledge and ideally address the history of housing policy as a source of discrimination I mean there have been a lot of layers to the way that was done in the 20th century and zoning is just one of them uh this will not make you know should article 18 past time meeting the problems would not go away it would merely be a step forward we want to you know we are interested in this as a measure for better sustainability for increasing housing choices for allowing you know less expensive new construction and also because you know frankly we do have a regional housing housing shortage this has already been done in a couple of different places across the U.S. for example Minneapolis and the state of Oregon and you know maybe we can be the first first municipality in Massachusetts to do it so next slide please so a little bit about the history of single family zoning so in 1917 there was a supreme court case called Warley versus Buchanan and this involved racially based zoning restrictions and the supreme court ruled them unconstitutional and specifically they determined that it was against it was a violation of someone's 14th amendment right if they could not sell their property to someone of their choosing now single family zoning came about in part as a sort of a solution to the Warley ruling one of the proponents was uh Herbert Hoover who is secretary of commerce at the time his department did a lot to encourage the adoption of single family homes um you know in the 1920s I mean there were also other you know you know we talk this we talk about here um non-racially based or raised blind means of discrimination but there were also ones that were you know very out front so for example uh racial covenants and deeds which I mean I know of two large farm subdivisions in Arlington that had them in the 1920s so you know we we were doing this just like everyone else now in the 1930s through the 1960s we had redlining we had the fair housing agencies practices of lending which were you know largely based on those redline maps and this also happens to be a time where the majority of houses or were a large part of Arlington this housing was built I mean my uh from the late 1940s ads for my own home in my own neighborhood were you know advertised at 100 20 year FHA mortgages which leads me to you know believe it was intended to be a sort of a restricted area for whites only and Arlington you know we we were at the time our maps were drawn up by the homeowner's loan corporation of America there there is no right on them they were drawn in 1947 in sorry 1937 in 1940 the census counted I think 35 black individuals living in Arlington out of a town of about 40 000 and that number didn't increase much in the following decades it went up to 39 individuals out of 40 000 in 1960 and by 1970 we were still a community that was 99% white so the idea of associating single family zoning with segregation this intent was I mean it was it was sort of coded back in the 20s but people I think knew what it meant so these are a collection of ads from real estate ads from the Boston area that ran in the 1920s they talk about you know a select location for single family homes in a refined and restricted community you know Arboretum Heights being a suitably restricted community for single family homes and you know the the the words single family and restricted community seem to go together quite a bit um then there's we have one from Newton hot debate under Newton's owning law class legislation is charged at meeting um this is you know this is but this is you know the 1920s a next slide please so the you know the these um you know this sort of language has still persisted here we have a few quotes of our president one you know talking about the affirmatively furthering fair housing regulations you know at the request of a great many Americans who live in the suburbs and others he is studying the AFFH housing regulations it's having a devastating impact on one's thriving urban areas and then you know this is from I think June of this past summer and then from July we have you know we have the president saying that Democrats want to eliminate single family zoning bringing who knows who into your suburbs so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down so it's you know he on the I mean I think the intent there is is rather clear next slide please so there are we see advantages to allowing more types of housing in in our single districts that are currently limited to single family to family zoning is better for the environment the buildings tend to have less needs in terms of heating and cooling they are more energy efficient and you know by allowing more housing in areas that are already built up like Arlington we are you know keeping people closer to jobs and reducing trip miles I mean the 20th century way of building housing was you take a very large chunk of land you lay down some roads you lay down some utilities and build a bunch of houses and give everyone a car and they spread things out enough that everyone has to drive every place you know this is not good from in terms of trip vehicle miles driven in terms of adding pervious surface in terms of clearing land and trees and so forth so two family zoning will increase housing choice you know it is a single family homes are great for some people they are in necessity for some people but not if you know one size does not fit all and one of the things that we'd like to see is to have more options available and we also think believe that this will improve affordability especially with respect to new construction going right for you know periodically homes in Arlington which are you know 50 80 100 years old are torn down and replaced with we're replaced with a new home so when this happens with a single family home it tends to be about a million and a half bucks the high end of you know new duplexes is about a million yes it is still expensive and but it is still not as expensive as a single family home further these units do get less expensive over time my 1947 half duplex was you know a luxury unit back in its day just asked the builder they they would be very straightforward and tell you that but you know after having 50 60 70 years on it it's you know it depreciates and it comes the price comes down next slide please so one of the things that you know when we were thinking about when putting this article together was the experience last year in 2019 with article 16 this was a an article that would have allowed more multi-family and mixed use construction along our commercial corridors Mass Ave and Broadway and we wanted to take some of the criticism criticisms that were raised during those hearings and you know try to address them and some of the some of those criticisms were you know article 16 last year would have allowed buildings that were taller and were concerned about increased building heights and shadows so in this proposal we are not changing any of the dimension regulations so height and shadows should be no more or less of a concern than they are today so another concern was that the article 16 would have concentrated new development to a relatively small area of town you know Mass Ave and Broadway and you know a few people at hearings suggested that perhaps this was an equity issue I'm you know I do I kind of agree with that in this case you know we would be spreading any develop any the new housing throughout you know 61% or so of the town's land area so it's not confined it's it's very dispersed there were also a number of concern number of displacement came up as another source of concern you know particularly if multi-family apartments along Mass Ave were developed so as of now in Arlington approximately 95% of single-family homes are owner occupied in which case they would not be converted or would not or could not be converted to two families without the owner being involved and we think that mitigates the you know the concern about displacement so we'd like to we believe that changes are going to be gradual so based on you know our studies of replacement homes we have about 27 of these a year average over the last 10 years if this were to so much as double under article 18 that's 54 a year which is I mean that's that's a very small number in terms of a town with you know 8,000 single-family homes and you know 40,000 people next slide so and here's where I go quick so this is the whirlwind photo tour of non-conforming two-family homes in single-family districts which is to just show I would what I want to do with this is to show you that these are already woven into the fabric fabric of several of our neighborhoods um and you know we see them every day even though we may not immediately realize them as non-conforming so next slide so this is summer street uh these are a pair of well actually two pairs of two-family homes along the north side the south side tends to be a mixture of you know a mixture of one and two-family districts but these are all non-conforming homes on summer street next slide so Westminster have the non-conforming house is a little gray one that's sort of infill tucked behind everything else um you know again it's a single-family neighborhood and this is a two-family home tucked in behind uh a bunch of single families next slide so park avenue this is actually a really cool pair pair of uh pair of shots I think so in the one on the in the photo on the left you see um you know there's a pair of a two-family in a building with a pair of condominiums and in the one in the right you have you know a pair of condominiums and a single-family home now on the slide the shot on the right notice that the two buildings are they look really really similar but the main difference is that one of them has two units in it and the other end is non-conforming and the one on the uh and you know the one further up the hill the blue one is a single family that is conforming next slide please hillside avenue uh so we have another pair of two-family homes you know sort of situated partway on down the street next slide watch us at avenue so near the bottom there's a whole pocket of two family and you know condominiums and uh two unit buildings next slide newport street we've another single family area we've got a series of three two-family homes pocketed down toward the bottom of the street next slide mount Vernon street this one's kind interesting so in the one on the left you have a two-family and another two-family the one in blue so the you could sort of see the part of a single family and then the slide on the right is the next house on the street but this is actually I thought this was a single family but it's actually three condominiums um in the middle of the single-family neighborhood it's um you know next slide so Irving street this is another two family uh near the intersection of Irving and Pleasant next slide Jason street Jason street has some really interesting two family homes like here are two of them and although one is sort of obscured by a tree the sort of the cool thing about these is that each side has its own uh covered porch and they're separated the entrances are on opposite sides of the building next slide more cool two-family homes from Jason street um I think these you know the windows on the third floor kind of look like eyes to me and you know just sort of stuck out and it looked like eyes in a happy face next slide and finally I think these are perhaps the most iconic pair of non-conforming uh two-family homes in a single-family district these are on Pleasant street they're in a really visible location right next to a traffic light I've driven or ridden by them all the time but you know they are non-conforming so next slide so that's I mean that's the end of the photo tour but basically one of the you know one of the things that we're we'd like to get across is that you know there is a hiss single-family zoning brought up a history of discrimination um we have I think it's something we need to at least talk about and ideally something that we should address and finally you know the idea of having two-family homes and you know what are currently single-family districts it's it you know we kind of already do that and there are there are plenty of there are several hundred non-conforming ones so you know all we would like to do is you know see them become legal again thank you thank you Steve uh let's see we will open this up to questions uh from the board members um remember we will save discussion and voting for uh Wednesday evening of this week we'll start with uh Ken well thank you Steve for a very um precise and detailed presentation there that's much appreciative um at this point in time I'm going to hold back any questions I have until our discussion thank you Ken uh Gene thank you yeah also thank you Steve for the presentation and for the photos um it is interesting to see and I've seen it in my own neighborhood too which is our one district the number of um two-family homes and duplexes that are in the neighborhood most of them predating zoning so they've been um pre-existing non-conforming uses and they mostly fit in I think uh pretty well and I haven't stopped people from buying and selling the single-family homes next door for what I consider to sometimes be incredibly exorbitant prices um that was one question that I had for you Steve I don't know if you have found this is there any research about the impact on the ending of or allowing let's say two-family homes in single-family areas in Minneapolis or in Oregon on home values have you seen anything so I mean in terms of no I have not and in the case of Minneapolis uh their ordinance went into place only a couple of months ago and it does take time for um for these to sort of you know you know for the um you know for properties to be rebuilt altered etc uh Oregon if I'm not mistaken happened even more recently than Minneapolis so it's still it is still early okay thanks um I I'm just going to add very slightly to Steve's history of zoning so after Worley v. Buchanan where the Supreme Court said you couldn't have racial zoning it had to decide a few years later in what's called the Euclid case whether it would allow zoning at all and it it did and it said well because you have to separate industrial uses from houses so people don't live next to factories but they also had to contend with the fact that what Euclid Ohio did is what Arlington and lots of other places do they separated single-family areas from multifamily areas and the argument was well it makes sense to separate where you live from smokestacks but what why is it okay to separate single-family homes from others and the Supreme Court said it's okay to do that because people living in apartment buildings are parasites that's an exact quote from the case and that they will destroy single-family neighborhoods and of course we now know that that's not true but the legacy of that decision in Euclid lives on in single-family zoning um I had Steve I have a few suggested changes that I'd like to just make sure you're okay with in your proposed warrant article um so in um in the bottom of the page that's on the screen where it says R1 I think it should say um let me see where is it um can I can I ask you to um hold any suggested changes until after we allow for the for the public comment sure okay thank you yeah that's fine in that case please um continue but I'd love to get public comment in before we okay oh yeah I'll just save those for afterward then that's it thank you thank you very much I appreciate it uh let's see uh David well thanks Steve and uh to Ben as well for um for bringing this forward and for an informative presentation and uh please do convey our best wishes to Ben for his recovery I've had mountain bike crashes myself thank you um so I I do have a couple of questions right or thoughts anyway first of all I I do really appreciate um those four key reasons that you brought up and the intention behind um this proposal because I think there there are some systemic inequities um that we do need to address in in some way um and if I'm if I'm reading um the uh data that the planning department pulled together correctly it it appears that we already have about a thousand uh structures in the single family zones that are not single family which is about 15 percent of of the existing structures so uh I think we're to some extent are already living with with the condition that that you're proposing here of of having um more flexibility in the single family zones um I I think my my my real question uh is is one that my my colleagues have uh our gene has has already alluded to which is um this is this approach is uh very new uh and in in Minneapolis Seattle and Oregon it's all been adopted and come into effect only very recently and we we really don't have any data on what effect uh it actually has on uh either development generally or more specifically on on affordability in the single family zones uh or in the community as a whole after this is implemented in the single family homes uh zones so you know I'm I'm I'd be I'd be very interested to know if there's any more information to be found on that um you know whether it's from those three places that have adopted this or if there's some kind of analogy that can be drawn from someplace else that's had a longer experience with this um but that that's really my only question on this so I think the best example of um of this kind of thing and it is not directly comparable but it would come from Seattle and the information I'm uh drawing from is from a book called Randy uh it's a book called Generation Priced Out by an author named Randy Shaw who spends several chapters uh detailing the uh ways that Seattle and San Francisco responded to housing pressure so in San Francisco it was the tech boom in Seattle it was Amazon so you know Amazon's headquarters in Seattle is huge and you know for a while the city just could not build housing fast enough but they tried they really tried and after several years of doing that you know in Seattle versus San Francisco not doing anything or building very little housing the both were high priced areas but uh Seattle was you know considerably less was less expensive than um than um than San Francisco the other point of infirm the other point I would like to note is that you know as I think it was Joanne Preston's saying earlier that this is a regional problem and we will not be able to do this ourselves um however I think other communities communities town cities they pay attention to what each other is doing if we were to um you know go this way and other communities were to follow I think we do have a chance at you know making a dent in the regional problem thank you Steve David did you have any other questions before we turn it over to Katie no that was it thank you thank you Katie do you have any questions for Steve so I don't know if this is procedurally the right time to do this I can actually answer some of David and Jean's research um based questions about sort of studies they're interested so I can either do that now or I can wait till the 28th whatever is more appropriate so since those questions have been posed as questions as opposed to discussion items cool and I won't dig into sort of how I interpret the what my views are in this particular article since I want to hear from the public on their views before stating my own but just to answer their questions first recent evidence for Minneapolis tells us there has not been a massive permitting boom of triplexes in you know the places where they're not legal so I think in so far as we can take any evidence and you know Minneapolis as everyone has pointed out is still super recent it's January 2020 um where this really came into effect um but what I think we can take from that so far is that even in a big city like Minneapolis we don't get overwhelming immediate tear down and development pressure and massive overwhelming of permitting authorities um so that's sort of what we have so far the um I think really good um peer reviewed evidence that speaks to some of these more broad questions about price and sort of what happens when we have increased supply and what that might do to prices in an area um and what it might mean for displacement I think some of the public comment has raised this really important issue of displacement and we as a board should absolutely take that seriously when we have new construction what it seems to do and there's a couple economic studies have just come out of this and I'm happy to share them with the board and with the public if people are interested what they show is that there may be tiny price increases that happen in like the surrounding block but the overall effect of new development in study after study after study has been to reduce housing prices in places it may not be massive reductions um to the point that we can say that housing is affordable for everyone no one is claiming that increasing the supply alone will achieve that goal but it is unambiguously the case that when we increase the number of units we do improve affordability by reducing the housing prices in a community and we don't seem to spur widespread displacement when we have new construction so that's sort of what the recent state-of-the-art evidence suggests but again we don't have any precisely identified studies of what goes on with single family zoning because it's just happened what we do know unambiguously is that single family zoning has produced racial segregation that has been replicated in study after study so that's that's sort of where we are in the state-of-the-art um in zoning research and I'm happy to talk more about that on the 28th so I don't want to dominate um but thank you Steve for your um very detailed presentation um I don't have questions this time about the article and I look forward to talking about it more on the 28th great thank you Katie any other questions from the board before we uh turn it over to public comments and Jean I will come back after after the public speaks so that you can speak to your your proposed changes as well as any other comments from the board I can send them separately to Jenny so we all have them for the 28th okay great if some time thank you okay seeing none I will ask anyone who wishes to speak on uh article the proposed article 18 to please use the raised hand function um in the uh participant section of zoom I will call on you as in the order that hands have been raised we already have a large number speakers who have requested to speak on this so please remember that you will be allotted three minutes for any comments please state your name and your address before you begin speaking so the first person to speak on this will be John Warden if you hear me now I can hear you and we can see you too good all right now first I have I have a question I'm sorry Mr. Warden could you just state your name and address again for the record uh it's John Warden 27 Jason Street a little across some of those uh houses two family house that were built before we had any zoning built on very spacious lots I might add not 6 000 footers uh but I have a question for the board and the planning department um which is really central to this whole argument this whole discussion and it says I'm quoting uh when the petition for change the zoning map is filed the petition shall show that the petitioner has given copies of the proposed change by certified or registered mail to all butters of all land affected by the petition and I ask if that provision that's section uh article article two section uh five of the zoning recently recodified zoning bylaw I'm sorry maybe it's article one I guess one second so I asked if that information was provided when this article was filed and I'll turn that over to you for the procedural question this is posed as a zoning bylaw amendment so there was not a zoning map amendment request and so therefore it was not mailed to a butters um in any of these districts all right if there ever was a map change when you change the single family district into the two family district if that isn't a map change I don't know what is and I think if the board is going to go forward just ignoring that provision and going through saying it's just a a use change within a district you're striking out the whole the whole one family district and calling it something else how can that not be a map change I think you're you're laying the town open to litigation on that on that issue it's clear you know clears clears glass the um uh and so but and never I mean even if it were properly before the board I mean to to tell not to tell every single family home owner in town uh and not you know it slipped us by them at a meeting like this in the middle of the pandemic a virtual meeting it's not even a real meeting um and and deprive them of the single family status their neighborhood is a an abomination and it should not occur the uh the and the the fact that there are a lot of pre-existing non-conforming two-family uses I'm familiar with a lot of these when when those larger when those houses were built before zoning they were built on large lots uh and when when the zoning was recalified in 1975 the the the effort was not to redline not to squeeze anybody out it was to to try to make consistent to to zone each district with the predominant use in that district there was no evil intent I was part of that process no one else here was no one else may even remember it and there was no and redlining that just talked about you know this is some evil thing redlining was done by banks by brokers stuff like that it was not done by municipalities it was not done by zoning and and this in this idea that uh that that by right convert every single family house if you want into a two family house um this is this is the this is adu on steroids and and I I think this is the of you know I've been in town meeting for half a century this would have to be the worst most stupid and nimble to the values and interests of the people of this town that I've ever seen down the road in those 50 years thank you thank you the next speaker will be uh patricia warden can we can see you and hear you yes okay um and I'm sorry could you please state your name and address for the record thank you I strongly urge you to vote no on the proposed article and and actually I should mention that three of the two family houses on Jason street belong to friends of mine and are either a butters or removed just by one house and they are in very large knots which can accommodate a two family house comfortably um on the basis of my efforts for 40 years in town government and on many committees studying affordable housing and the importance of open space and trees to health of residents and sustainability of our residents environment I want to say that this is the worst article I have ever seen it is shocking and exclusionary and racist and racist and in that it will raise housing costs so much that it will limit the housing availability for low income moderate and low income persons of all races and colors and ages um it is shameful that the planning department is presenting and promoting this racist and irresponsible material the article encourages much greater residential density and zero zero affordable units zero affordability for those of low and moderate income of all races the article is a disgrace it ignores and is totally irresponsible about oriental's greatest housing need which is for affordability it facilitates turdance of affordable units and replaces them with more expensive more numerous market rate and luxury units it represents the ultimate it represents the ultimate hypocrisy irresponsibility and greed sought by fellow the money developers in the real estate industry the town of our interest should not be retaining planning officials promoting such articles which are so antithetical to oriental's desires and needs we need to protect the community please reject this proposed vote thank you thank you the next speaker will be molly brad excuse me molly brady hi thank you um so my name is moraine brady my nickname is molly i live in most heavy release street um in arlington uh so i'm going to pick up where i think this revlock left off so i'm a land use and property law professor my specialty is the history of land use regulation my next paper actually deals with the ways that nuisance deed restrictions and the law of zoning changed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries to turn people by virtue of poverty or the circumstances in which they live into undesirable nuisances that could be kept out of neighborhoods so this concerns the subject it is very dear to my heart and i want to go back to redlining maps of arlington which i know earlier speakers have to talk about how little has changed in my current neighborhood and i want to say one other thing which is there may not have been intent to cause this there certainly are effects and there's a reason that the u.s constitution reaches both effects and intent in its consideration of discrimination so the redline report for my district in 1938 which you can readily find at a website called mapping inequality lists me as in district benign in arlington heights although then most of the houses were new population to describe this overwhelmingly white and white collar its main drawback is described as hilliness which i can attest having become a runner in quarantine it remains hilly uh but i believe that nearly a hundred years after this racist and classist report that marked my neighborhood as a good neighborhood and most of neighboring Cambridge as low class and unworthy of the extension of mortgage loans this neighborhood looks much the same both physically and demographically with the extension of constantly expanding uh single family renovations pertinent to some earlier comments i should mention i'm a recent transplant i moved here from charlottesville virginia 15 months ago although i formerly lived in boston in water town so i'm a terrible driver don't worry i turned 34 yesterday and i'm an extremely fortunate person to be a homeowner and a professor at this age my husband and i were shell shocked by prices in arlington i want to have the opportunity to raise a family here with lots of company from other young people and young families from a range of backgrounds low income middle and otherwise i fear that won't be possible with the trend in housing prices and undoing single families only is the only way to make this a reality let me tell you also this as a historian the reasons that are given against allowing more housing and particularly multi-family housing are old and manipulable they are fire danger traffic noise trees decrease school quality increased habits etc etc even in the aftermath of the 1918 flu disease and the risks of congestion this is a shell game uh in addition to just saying we can't permit any housing because it's not affordable housing the next time a proposal comes in for an affordable housing unit there will be just as much opposition to it so i think it's a shell game we've been doing this for 100 years one way by banning housing and hoping something changes it is not so i say for the hope that arlington will not be unaffordable and exclude families and people similar to my age please do thing you can to increase the supply of housing and prevent entrenched interests from keeping newcomers out thank you very very much thank you our next speaker will be uh winnell evans thank you winnell evans orchard place uh another well-intended article which i'm afraid is going to have the opposite effect from its stated intent of providing more relatively affordable housing in arlington and thus making it more welcoming to black minority and other lower income residents a few points on this article by dispersing more housing throughout town this article counters our master plan metropolitan area planning council intent and most current urban urban planning recommendations for allowing density near transportation corridors and nodes this article would actually increase the likelihood that people would drive to get to other transportation second the example steven ben show of non-conforming two families in single family districts are lovely but they were all built in the early to mid 1900s and are very different from the vinyl clad side by side duplexes with garage under which are prevalent today generic in design and which replaced front yards with asphalt driveways third giving builders the option to replace single families with two fat families will drive up land values and the value of surrounding houses this article contains no incentive to build affordable units builders are in business to make a profit and will always want to sell their housing for the highest possible price as they should for profit builders cannot be expected to take on the societal task of creating affordable housing for we have evidence right here in arlington about how replacing single families with two families is working through a few examples i'm going to give you all completed within the last five years many of which involved the clear cutting of lots and loss of matured trees in the r2 districts 18 harvard a single family sold for 630 000 it was replaced by two condos which went for over a million each nine creston hill a 500 000 single family replaced by two condos at 759 000 each 33 cutter hill a 7 717 000 single family replaced by two condos at over 900 000 each 18 norse a 630 000 single family replaced by two condos at over 900 000 each in the r0 district 27 oldham was demolished that sold for 875 000 it was replaced by a 1.3 million dollar house that lot was divided and a 1.2 million house built on the other half the average price of condos built in 2018 is 940 000 there is also a good deal of current research which i'd be happy to share that indicates that yes additional housing lowers prices but at the upper levels only and not at the middle and lower price points so ending single family zoning in arlington will not bring more relatively affordable housing to us it will not enable more black minority and lower income residents to come here it will in fact remove what remaining relatively affordable housing we have from the market thank you thank you the next speaker is uh zavid hi i'm zavid pretzer at 44 grove street in arlington and i am broadly in favor of this i think several people have mentioned concerns around trees but this article doesn't change the dimensional aspects of this if we're concerned about tree coverage i think we should enact tree predictions that also apply to single family uses today it is possible in these zones to expand a single family home in order to make it more expensive and potentially reduce trees and if we're going to be doing construction i think construction that makes more houses rather than construction that makes an existing house just more expensive is something that i'd like to encourage i definitely agree that this measure isn't sufficient to address affordable housing and uh measures to create subsidized affordable housing are very valuable as well but just because this measure doesn't solve um all of arlington's housing process um problems doesn't mean that it isn't a good positive step and i think this measure by concentrating on the r0 and r1 zones that already have more expensive housing it avoids displacement in our existing higher density areas which avoids negative impact on people who currently live in those higher density zones so i think this could be a positive step forward for housing in arlington thank you thank you the next speaker will be steve more yes steve more 64 piedmont street uh again first speaks as a citizen for the first part of what i have to say um i uh should know by now not to follow miss evans because she tends to tends to steal whatever thunder i have but uh anyway what i what i still want to say however is um i think mr revillac needs to remember well not just not just mature like it was a good it was a great presentation by the way um that that remind folks that correlation does not necessarily equal causality there's a lot of a lot of that being talked about right now and single family zoning does not necessarily rate directly to the uh the discriminatory aspects that have been referred to here um it now they may have had that effect yes that's true however it doesn't isn't necessarily true that single family zoning cause or is is the cause of discrimination or is necessarily discriminatory um price points is a pretty hard thing in arlington to deal with generally i understand um folks moved to arlington for lots and lots of reasons um recent people who moved here people who moved here 10 years five years 20 years ago or if they knew their whole lives they all have got different parts and pieces of arlington that they enjoy and prefer and and beckon to them when they when they came uh and they need to consider all those things not just the interest necessarily of folks who want to increase housing but also the conditions of the town open spaces green spaces trees single family multi-family homes all those things we need to uh move balance that out and zoning is one of the ways that that right now we kind of uh i don't know enumerate it and uh uh so so i'm hoping that we can continue to try and balance those various means and requirements of the citizens of the town um uh arlington is built out i don't think most folks would argue that if you turn all the r1 zones into uh r2 and above zones or whatever the town becomes even denser and i think we lose perhaps some key aspects of what makes arlington currently a place that people do want to move uh even and i know the housing is expensive but people still very much want to move here and we have to try and balance the needs of that against the needs of more more housing for for folks in general um i think it's important for the planning board development board to present an integrated plan again to the town not do this piecemeal like what we're hearing about tonight but and i know that it did not go well in 2019 but i think we still need to take an integrated approach that tries to balance the interest that i just mentioned the piecemeal approach i don't think will work and will have lots of unintended consequences and i don't think our desk is destined to success this is a problem to approach but it must be integrated fashion i don't believe these articles tonight represent that um and secondly as a as a member of the tree committee the gentleman spoke about more you're you're in three minutes um if you could wrap up you you certainly can raise your hand to speak again later than you know after we've gone through the other speakers if you'd like to uh okay well then this tree committee i will speak later thank you thank you see the next speaker we will have will be uh barbara thornton sorry hold there we go okay thank you very much i i have um barbara i'm sorry could you please state your your name i'm sorry barbara thornton 223 park af arlington and i'm going to do one further introduction and that is that i have been trained as a city planner and have a master's to prove it um when i was trained as a city planner i thought zoning was all about protecting noxious uses until i met people who lived in houston where they have no zoning and they all get along fine and they can't understand what zoning is such a big issue in so many other municipalities then i read the color of law by richard rostin and i understood the the really horrific effect that zoning has had on our population in this country and and i would like to see us remedy that however we possibly can um we're in a pandemic now and things are moving very quickly and and this is a time of rapid change in society in a lot of ways i'd like to think that arlington is good can take a look at itself and we can say who are we and what do we care about and that we will have the the courage and the bravery to be leaders for the future the kind of future that we would like to create the kind of future that's fair and equitable and we would be a model for other communities to follow us and not wait and see if the other municipalities around us have moving first toward something like this i support the article 18 that has been written by uh ben rudik and and stave revelac and i hope that we will not be bogged down in incremental change or further committee studies and that we will think of ourselves as being bold leaders and move forward with this thank you thank you the next speaker will be jennifer seuss uh thank you uh with your permission i'd like to speak to both of the articles um madam chair please um so i'm excited about the two articles before us today both would increase the amount of lower case affordable housing in orlington and the nice thing about these articles is that they would create um distributed this type of housing in a distributed threat town so not necessarily concentrated and that's not to say that we can't have further proposals to build more housing in near transit centers and in concentrated um these articles aren't the end of our zoning discussion they don't do everything um as lots of people pointed out um when looking at zoning changes are really any sort of policy decision we have to look at what our current trends are and our current trends so what happens if we do nothing in our current trends we don't have the option to freeze our lieutenant in place we're losing natural affordability if a single family's um small cape comes on the market it doesn't remain affordable it doesn't remain small um it often gets torn down and a bigger house gets developed a single family house or if it remains small it doesn't stay affordable i mean if you look look at Palo Alto California for small dinky houses that are not affordable anymore or the neighborhood i frankly i grew up in in brooklyn my parents live in the same or my grandmother does the same dinky small house that they bought um 40 years ago which is not affordable anymore um so so if we do nothing under current trends we're losing natural affordability we're losing generational diversity especially for people under the age of 35 and those over the age of 65 who don't have an option to stay in earlington and we're losing economic diversity adding more housing doesn't solve the problem that adding these proposals doesn't solve the problem by itself but it can help mitigate the trends we can't earlington can't solve this regional housing crisis by itself um but that's not excuse for doing nothing i believe we have a moral responsibility frankly to mitigate the affordable crisis that we find ourselves in the greater Boston area um there are lots of really difficult and trans problems that are hard to solve but including um racial issues but it doesn't mean that we don't do anything we need to start a step up and do something um i'm very interested in people who talk about arlington being a leader we've often been a leader in problems so again we by ourselves are not going to solve this Boston and Somerville have ambitious housing production plans other communities haven't stepped up but by arlington stepping up and potentially there's discussion in Brookline by them stepping up we can sort of start this ball rolling that can again not instantly make everything affordable but just sort of mitigate the trends that we're currently going through and make things not be as bad as worse um proposal for accessory dwelling units is a win-win um on the proposal to eliminate single family zoning i have to admit that i was initially nervous about it um and i want to encourage you might up in time yeah and i and i yes we are and i neglected to ask you to state my address the record please yes sorry uh jennifer's to 45 teal street um if you do again though i'd you know be happy to have you raise your hand um we do have a couple people who have asked to speak again uh i'll raise my hand again i have yeah i i serve less coherence than i thought thank you thanks okay uh the next speaker will be don selzer thank you don selzer Irving street there's been a lot of speculation and conjecture tonight i only have a few facts to offer let's start with the petitioner estimating just one student for every um 17 new homes i believe fact in armington we actually have three public school students for every 10 households and that does not even include minuteman tech nor uh special private schooling that the town pays for we've also been told that we should be following the minneapolis model uh fact the town of arlington has a housing density that is 15 greater than the city of minneapolis we've also been told that our zoning is racist and a barrier to minorities wishing to move here last time that i checked we were not a gated community instead i see 1000 open doors fact we have a healthy turnover of housing units according to the census bureau nearly 1000 renters and buyers find a new home in arlington each year we've actually become a magnet for recent immigrants fact one in five current residents was born overseas now let's get to the core of the argument that ending single family zoning is going to result in cheaper duplex housing fact over a two-year period every tear down of either a single family or two family house in the r2 district resulted in a new duplex in which each unit costs more than the original house an average developer bought the property for about 750k and sold the new duplex for just under two million in not one instance was a new unit cheaper than the original single or two family home that was torn down the profit margins are such that the elimination of single single family zoning will open the floodgates to tearing down moderate cost single family homes to be replaced with more expensive duplexes this article is not a path to diversity and a wider range of housing but instead a highway to accelerated gentrification one final fact in each of these r2 developments all of the units were converted into condo ownership moderate rental units were eliminated and only those who can afford an average purchase price of nearly one billion could return this is not creating creating diversity nor more affordable housing thank you thank you the next speaker will be carl wagner thank you carl wagner 30 edge hill road in arlington can you hear me okay yes we can and we can see you thank you great thank you um the proponents spoke for about 10 minutes in in concerning historical terms about racism that has been a factor in our state and across the country and in this environment we are all very aware of that and many of us including myself and all the speakers here i'm sure are working to make things better unfortunately it was like a bait and switch discussion those 10 minutes the zoning we have is not a part of the problem it's actually a part of the solution believe it or not even though we don't like paying our mortgages and rents right now in arlington they are actually cheaper than all the surrounding communities that touch us except for medford and arlington already has inclusive anti-racist zoning that is we have inclusive inclusive rules about apartments that have to be affordable in quotes starting at the sixth department and unusual and a model for the rest of our commonwealth is that those inclusionary apartments are in the building forever they cannot go away eventually like some other towns additionally we're close to transport transit we have bike access additionally we have small lots we have large apartments we have two and multi-family apartments and we have single family in fact multi-family is 45 percent of the homes in arlington so the proponents of this article which is an extreme article and really should go to the whole town as mr warden said should not be up to the arb to to push forward or not on it the proponents are saying that they're addressing racism they say that they're addressing the environment they say that they're increasing housing choice and they say that they're allowing for more affordable homes well all of those four intentions are not going to happen they're all false or or incorrect in in mr benson's question earlier he asked if there was any research on the affordability that comes when the so-called upzoning or relaxing of zoning goes through in fact there is a lot i don't know what miss einstein has found but i can tell you the predominant body of the research which you can find on the arlington residents for responsible redevelopment page it's called our fur dot org a four dot our fur dot org all the research or predominantly all the research says when you do this change that the proponents want to make rents go up property taxes go up to deal with the services taken people are displaced those people include arlingtonians who are seniors arlingtonians on limited or middle incomes and that includes people of color however we should not be so racist to say that all people of color want to live in large apartment buildings or multifamily units i find that disgraceful in fact people deserve the diversity we have and we have much better ideas than this to make arlington affordable i hope you'll look at the our fur website for those and we'll discuss how to make arlington really affordable this will make us less diverse more expensive and not the place that people of color will be coming to thank you thank you the next speaker will be uh philip tedesco hi my name's philip tedesco i'm at 74 park street number two um i just want to support this article for the reasons stated by the others i thought it was most compelling you know to see the number of examples where we kind of have this already to kind of while i think people have called this radical and or whatever else it's actually not and it's quite fits in already kind with what we have in town but but i think what we want to do is have you know more housing for more families we live in a town now where every house is a total bidding war and that's only because it's this complete shortage of of housing people need more options um and more homes uh we're at a point where you know high-end white-collar professionals are are totally priced out of town young families are totally priced out of town unless they're you know privately wealthy or i don't i don't know what because i don't know how you could possibly otherwise afford housing prices today um i think for us we want to set an example and we're you know arlington i think we should be proud of the values we espouse uh both you know grassroots across town and in our official statements about inclusion about you know being progressive and we should uh you know be courageous and and and and do this on the one hand on the other hand recognize that what we're doing is actually not that radical um or that crazy um you know my family and i live in a uh duplex a unit of a duplex that was put here in place of a very old single family um i think there's two things to say about it one is we're very happy that the house was created for us and our family to live in and also provided a house for our neighbor and while i i'm i suspect that our unit did cost more than um the uh the builder paid for the single family um our unit certainly costs less than it would have for the um just to put a single family i think i think another people have spoken to that but i think it's important to to to make sure we have the right baseline to compare to so anyway thank you very much and um i support this thank you the next speaker on this topic will be uh joanne preston can you hear me now we can yes thank you okay thank you um joanne preston mystic lake drive town meeting member precinct nine i live in the webcow admit neighborhood um there's so much wrong with article 19 18 that i'm sorry i can only cover a few points um i'd like to say that um much data has been talked about but i think of my neighborhood as a living history museum to why this article is such a disaster um in my little neighborhood sound r2 we've already experienced a tear down of seven single family homes to build market rate duplexes by right so it's what is proposed and and we've learned firsthand the bad effects of all of these tear downs and building let me begin by using the latest tear down as an example the original four bedroom home with separate garage was built in the 1930s forum with the owner with many interesting unique architectural details mission style it remains in pristine condition until the relative of the original owner died and it was bought for eight hundred thousand dollars this has been said before but the developer clear cut the property of all trees in a record time built to luxury because that's what market rate is these days townhouses each sold for over million dollars and they've now been assessed for more than that um so there's a decrease in affordability no economist would claim that a proliferation of these homes all over arlington would drive down prices since it is a regional housing market i i feel sad that people think that if all this goes through suddenly all these young families will be buying houses in arlington it's just not true now there is also a decrease in the neighborhood of housing types and sizes which the planning department sites is desirable in a supporting materials page too as each duplex townhouse was built from virtually the same plan i got the architectural drawings where they crossed out one address and just put in another address as one neighbor told me i wouldn't mind if they were not all so alike and ugly nor is it true as a supporting material from the planning department sites communities will also see a greater range of housing sink costs since townhouses are cheaper to build page two this does not happen in the woodcow at neighborhood as the duplexes all of them cost significantly more than the originally well-built single family homes excuse me fast building homes like these all over harlington will not increase economic diversity more diversity in housing stock they all look alike the second point i'd like to work here at three minutes oh the environment will cutting down trees but i have one more important point um the proliferation i'm sorry to be consistent if you'd like to speak again on that last point you're more than welcome to to raise your hand and and i can call on you at the um at the when we're when we're through the queue thank you very much uh the next speaker will be alex bagnell thank you madam chair alex bagnell ten wyman street i enthusiastically support mr rudik's article and mr revelax excellent excellent explanation i own a single family house in a two family zone and i am here to say that i find my neighbors to be delightful even the ones that live in the vinyl clad two families with the garages underneath single family zoning is a significant contributor to systemic inequality and the economic wall we have built and continue to strengthen around our high opportunity community we cannot ignore that the origins of single family zoning do not lie solely in a preference for a specific housing type and that economic barriers are used as a proxy for racial barriers a nationwide study in 2015 found that more density regulations directly lead the concentrations of affluence and that increased local pressure to regulate land use is linked to higher rates of income and racial segregation given housing's intimate connection with our education system residential segregation is even more concerning and is a direct cause of some of the glaring educational equity gaps in our communities arlington is a desirable community adding market rate housing in neighborhoods with high demand alleviates competition for existing homes that would otherwise drive up prices there are also environmental benefits without measures like this sprawl will increase people will travel further to and from boston and employment opportunities increasing individual automobile dependence and resulting in greater emissions we must acknowledge that when our linton has overly restrictive housing policies housing is built in further flung communities often with great loss of trees and green space while we can only control what our town does and i wish we were doing more allowing two units on a lot where we now only allow one is a step in the right direction and it will help relieve upward pressure on housing prices leaving our zoning bylaws that for 50 years have helped create the current housing affordability crisis intact would seem to guarantee that the crisis will only worsen like to close with a quote from the color of law when we become americans we accept not only citizenship privileges that we did not earn but also its responsibilities to correct wrongs that we did not commit it was our government that segregated american neighborhoods whether we are our ancestors bore witness to it and it is our government that must now craft remedies i support this article and urge the board to do the same thank you thank you the next speaker on this topic will be charles blandy thank you uh my name is charles blandy i live in 58 lombard terrace number two which is a multi-family house uh and i'd like to echo uh jennifer sessies and alex bagnell's remarks um i'm reminded of the um the falconer quote the past isn't gone in fact it isn't even passed and um steve revelac has put an example of a racial covenant um in orlington on his blog equitable orlington i recommend everybody take a look at that um there are no moderate costs single family homes in orlington all right anybody can look at zillow right now and uh 912 square feet costs 589 thousand dollars that's a lot of money so we are living have lived accelerated gentrification that's already happened so the question is what's your baseline the multi-family homes that would be built will be less expensive than otherwise if you do nothing as we have done who's moving into the neighborhood and it is people who work for industries that print money um and you know what i'm talking about it's kennel square it's 128 harvard mit it's not cops school teachers people who pump gas and people who live the people who work at dunk and donuts you know it's not um and even those who are foreign born i mean we all know this they work for the same highly capitalized industries that that print money so if we change this we're not acting in isolation there are other communities we look to other communities and newton and brookline we look to them we say well what are they are doing and others look to us um and either we're an example of stasis or an example of progress and an attempt at inclusivity yes it's a regional solution it's a statewide solution in fact it's even a national and international solution but our example matters and the state itself is tantalizingly close or has been close to passing some kind of um of comprehensive zoning reform so what we do is necessary but not sufficient there's always a good reason to do nothing uh and we know what doing nothing does for unaffordability has increased and i can't imagine my kids who are now teenagers being able to afford a place in orlington uh after they graduate from college uh hopefully after they graduate from college so we don't get to keep what we have we're getting remapped by inequality and there is nothing more radical than inequality and i would add that there's nothing more radical than climate change which this um article also addresses so we're gonna have to decide what our values and interests are and i think that we need to pay attention to this proposal as a statement of those values and i wanted to move here 10 years ago because of density um and but i i i miss the diversity of other places that i've lived and diversifying orlington is not going to happen without this kind of a proposal it is it is necessary even if it's not sufficient thank you um the next speaker on our list is uh chris loretty thank you madam chair chris loretty 56 adam street and this is in a two-family district i don't think i've lived in a single family district for over 40 years so i have nothing against two-family or multi-family districts i do think though that it's unfortunate that the proponents of this article have decided to play the race card because i think there's really a lot more to the problem of diversity and economic inequality than zoning and i'm glad somebody brought up the um example of houston which has no zoning yet is a very segregated city it has the same problems that other areas have with zoning so that's really not any type of contra example and i suggest anyone who's been to houston would realize that i see this article more about money and i see a lot of proponents and it's the same people who want to build build build in town because they think the town needs more tax revenue because the leadership we have in this town has clearly demonstrated that it cannot control spending and therefore we need to build more to get more tax revenue and that's what this is about that's what the increased building in our linkedin is really about i'd like you to take a look at the um table three in the in the memo from the planning staff because i think that um really gives a good explanation of what will happen if this passes and how it will actually lead to increase prices and less diversity if you look at table three the more modest priced homes are around seven hundred thousand dollars i when the two families in east harlington when they are converted each unit goes for a million dollars and more so now you're including a house price from seven hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars if this passes in the in the our in the single family districts i'd like to know how that promotes diversity i'd like to know how that promotes economic equality i'd like to know how that promotes a greater racial mix within the town frankly it doesn't it doesn't do any of those things at all this article is about gentrification and if the board wants to gentrify the town this is an excellent way of doing it it will help getting more tax revenue in the people who want to spend more money will be very pleased with you but let's be honest about this it is not going to improve the population mix in this town and the way those who are supporting the article claim that it will thank you thank you the next speaker uh who's not already had a chance to speak this evening is uh brian ristusia i apologize if i put your gear the last thing that's okay you're close enough okay thank you so i'm brian ristusia i'm at number 73 ryan club street here in earlington um and uh there's so many areas to discuss but i've only got three minutes so there's two things i'm going to focus on um the first is with respect to some of the other comments that we've seen it seems to be a recurring fallacy of comparing the sale price of new duplexes constructed in a two-family uh zone derivative place an existing single family with the cost of older obsolete unrenovated homes that they replace instead of the sale price of a renovated single family home and the property records here here um duplex units individually are significantly less expensive than the typical rebuilt or renovated single family that might be put there instead if the duplex wasn't allowed and generally speaking uh first-time home buyers are not in a position to compete with builders who want to get these rundown properties um to renovate and so the supply of unrenovated property is pretty limited and i think um um you know i don't buy that argument and i encourage the rest of you to look at it very critically um and finally i i encourage all of us to reject the recurring argument that our single family zoning is not built on a racist and segregationist foundation um i've heard a lot of folks tonight say that arlington wasn't a party to redlining because we were on the right side of the line where financing was easy to get um they're leaving out who the financing was easy for you know obviously white people that are relatively well off and the powerful motivation for our town at that time to adopt single family zoning in order to price out the sort of residents who might erode that state of affairs so again i encourage everyone to be critical of that sort of line of thinking and i think that's all i have fun for thank you very much let's see is there anyone um new who would like to speak otherwise i will go to the um the four people who uh had additional points to make seeing none um i will ask you to please stick to to new points uh that you would like to bring up as we uh discussed when you were speaking previously and we'll start with steve more uh yes steve more 64 piedmont street i just want to say i was thrilled to hear uh mr bagnell's quote at the end of what he had to say that's that's something we need to live by in society but that's on the side um i'm speaking now as a member of their arlington tree committee just to finish off my thought um not only your speaker had talked about the cutting down of trees uh there is the bylaw on town which talks about if you're going to do certain types of renovations or definitely for a tear down and rebuild and demolition um within the setback uh those trees are protected meaning uh there has to be a tree planned either to save them or a fee that has to be paid to the town uh when you want to take trees that are mature and large and are in the setback if the trees are not in the setback which uh is true a lot of the time for these tear downs as well they're not protected and uh and so the tree loss is not there is no compensation financially to the town and you lose the the ability of that tree to cleanse the atmosphere and one of the one of the core purposes of the reforesting of the town that we're trying to do is to be sure we maintain the canopy reduce heat islands uh help generate a better literally a better atmosphere for the location because trees do that and that's how they contribute to sustainability uh it is true that if you don't live in arlington but move farther out building farther out means you have to take those trees as well as the emissions produced by those vehicles so i can't say that it's a zero sum or not i just wanted to be clear about how that how it does work in town with the uh the protection of the trees and there is a loss as you build out the town further beyond in the r1 zones where an awful lot of the trees are you will lose canopy uh as buildings are placed where the trees are thanks thank you the next speaker will be uh jennifer uh sussie i'm sorry i just sussie i i don't want to mention jennifer suss 45 teal street thank you um so two just two remaining points um what i do want to talk about the school issues as i was very recently member of the school committee but um i also just want to say this has been a really good discussion and i encourage you to put forward this article actually to continue the discussion i think that we need to have a larger discussion in town meeting about housing issues and in our community i think when i hear people talk about this i hear a lot of anxiety on all sides right we're many people of very good will can have divergent views and can discuss them productively i think and i i see a little bit of that going on today and i'm really heartened by that um and so i just encourage you to to sort of approve this for further discussion at town meeting um about the schools um the mckibbin report uh that came about i think it was four years ago it's actually been pretty closely accurate to what we've seen in the school population and according to that report we're supposed to be getting peak and elementary enrollment this year you know with covid everything's all crazy but we've already seen peak kinder and enrollment uh so if we start adding housing in the in the kind numbers that we're talking about we're not going to overwhelm the school system we're not going to everyone's not going to come in in just first grade or just kindergarten we're going to see a you know a diversity of of of kids um so i'm not personally worried and i i i know people have expressed in the past about school overcrowding i am though bringing back to my earlier point sort of worried about this trend of losing generational diversity and i know chris already has started lobbying this as an accusation but the health of the financial um town is important if you just have people living in arlington who have kids in school system and you don't have options for people to downsize and stay once they're over 60 and don't have kids in school system or to come to arlington before they have kids in school system so if you've lost all that housing diversity and you've lost affordability then it really does put a lot of economic pressures in the town but if you have lots of different diversion housing opportunities for the entire life cycle then you have you know you have a better community in general but you also have an economically better community those are just the two remaining points i want to make thank you very much uh the next speaker will be don selzer thank you again don selzer Irving street i just have one more piece of data to add to the discussion uh it addresses the question of just how many more housing units do we need to build in order to make a difference and the metro mayors coalition of which we're a member has an answer 189 000 units among its members arlington share is 6800 units a 34 percent increase in our current housing the 34 percent increase in our population and according to the metro mayors if all the communities achieve that kind of goal then that would just temper the rise in prices it's not even going to lower them at that kind of level thank you thank you uh the next speaker is joanne preston hi i got interrupted but let me just say quickly because people have brought up some points why jennifer sus brought up the mckinnon report it was based on any on an academic too it's based on projections for the future and when it does that it everything all other factors stay the same what has not stayed the same are the big increases in taxes senior citizens have moved out of my neighborhood because they can't afford the taxes they don't buy condominiums here or rental apartments because those are affected by high taxes they move next door to medford or burlington so that doesn't add racial age diversity but what are i um and people have covered the environment and it is true that we've lost a lot of trees major region reason is construction trees by all scientists have said in residential areas are the major way to remove carbon and i thought we were trying to get to zero carbon most of the trees are on residential property but this is something else i wanted to talk about um much has been tossed around about affordability i don't see how luxury which is what these are going to be market rate um a uds or we have known from in this discussion that these duplex townhouses are more expensive than the original ones the original ones in my neighborhood were all in perfect condition um so it was not a dilapidated house replacing a new marten swiftly house but more importantly i don't think the proliferation of expensive which these will be luxury townhouses duplexes are serving the housing needs of arlington i'm a member of the board of the arlington housing authority and i'd just like you to know that we have a waiting list of over 300 low income applicants many of them homeless when i think about affordable housing this is what i'm thinking about i'm not thinking about luxury duplex townhouses and this is really the affordable housing we should be talking about here we shouldn't be talking about million dollar duplex housing and i only wish we could spend our valuable time in the expertise of the people here on this pressing problem i think this is our moral responsibility thank you thank you do we have any other members of the public wishing to speak on this article seeing no hands raised at this time i will um first of all thank the public for a very engaging conversation on on both articles i appreciate all of the voices that we heard tonight um and there's certainly a lot to take back into our discussion which will occur on wednesday evening um do we have any other questions uh from the from the board or for steve before we allow him um a chance to address any questions or comments that might have come up okay steve did you have anything that you wanted to to add uh nothing further this evening madam chair thank you thank you okay uh jean did you want to go ahead and identify those suggested changes or we do prefer to send those through to jenny yeah i i will i will send them through to jenny and you there are just some things that i thought needed to get added so that it at least is um complete on what would need to be done if we were to do that and one of the things i forgot to say when i first spoke is to sort of thank jenny and the other staff for that really i think very very good and very very helpful and informative packet they put together for us to take a look at i'm sure it took a little time to do it i would say it was time well spent and i meant to say that before and i forgot so thank you everybody i agree you took words right off my page so thank you i think i i would definitely echo that too thank you jenny and erin and kelly and everyone who put that together thank you and you're welcome of course um any other items from the from the board okay um i'd be looking for a motion to continue the open public hearing to the next scheduled date which is october 28th 2020 for the sixth article that we will be hearing so motion second okay we'll take a roll call vote Ken yes david yes gene yes adi yes and i am a yes as well great and we will see you all on uh wednesday night the 28th thank you all very much goodbye