Let's see. The open meeting is being conducted remotely, consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020, due to the current state of emergency in the Commonwealth due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. For this meeting, the ARB is convening via Zoom, as posted on the town's website, identifying how the public may join. Please note that these meetings are being recorded and that some attendees are participating via 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 at this time, I'd like to confirm that all members of the redevelopment board are here and can hear me, starting with Ken Lau, President, Jane Benson, Melissa Sintakelis. Here, President. Steve Revlak. Good evening, Madam Chair. And I am Rachel Zember, Chair of the Board. We also have two members of the Department of Planning and Community Development with us this evening, Jennifer Rait. Present. And Kelly Linema. Present. Fantastic. So as we move to the first agenda item this evening, we will be opening the Warren article public hearings for the 2022 town meeting. There will be, for those of you who haven't joined us for these before, there will be four nights of hearings for a total of 18 articles this year. Consistent with past hearings, the ARB will be hearing from the applicants and the public wishing to speak on each of these articles as scheduled. The board will pose any questions to the applicants this evening, but will reserve discussion and voting on each article to recommend action or no action until after all hearings have been complete. This is expected on April 4th. The typical format for each article that will be hearing this evening will be to hear from the Department of Planning and Community Development regarding the memo that they prepared and any items that they wish to highlight from that memo, followed by up to a six-minute presentation by the petitioners of the particular Warren article. We'll then take questions from the board, followed by public comments. We'll then ask the petitioner to address any questions and take final comments from the board members. And we'll go through this for each of the separate zoning articles this evening. So before we get into the first article, Article 38, I do want to ensure that we speak about the rules for the Warren article public hearing. If you can bear with me for a minute. The scope of this public hearing is the subject matter of the hearings is posted on the agenda. Any person wishing to address the ARB on the subject matter of the agenda item shall identify that you wish to speak by raising your hand when the chair announces consideration of each item. To raise your hand and zoom on your computer, go to participants and select raise hand. On your phone, press star six to unmute yourself. After being recognized to speak by the chair, each person will preface your comments by giving your first and last name and street address. Anyone wishing to address the board on the subject matter of the agenda shall limit your remarks to three minutes. If time allows, you may be allowed to speak more than once at the discretion of the chair if and only if you have a new and different point to make or question to ask on the topic. And again, we'll review that to see how we're running for time this evening. The board may receive any oral or written evidence, but such evidence is restricted to the subject matter of each agenda item. Immaterial or unduly repetitious evidence may be excluded. Everyone present at the public hearing is requested not to applaud or otherwise express approval or disapproval of any statements made or action taken at the hearing. Hearing participants shall refrain from interrupting other speakers and conduct themselves in a civil and courteous manner. During your public comments, we ask that you also conduct yourself in a civil and courteous manner with constructive questions or comments. Speaker should address questions through me, the chair. Speaker shall not attempt to engage in debate or dialogue with ARB members or other hearing participants. Questions may or may not be answered during the public hearing and will be addressed at the discretion of the chair. So at this time, we will go ahead and open the public hearings for 2022 town meeting. We will begin with article 38, which is a zoning bylaw amendment for two family construction allowed by right in the R0 and R1 residential zones. This was asserted by the request of annula court and 10 registered voters. So to begin, I'd like to turn it over to Jenny Raitt to see if there are any questions or excuse me, any comments related to the memo prepared by the Department of Planning and Community Development. Thank you, Rachel. I first of all, I'm Jenny Raitt. I'm the director of planning and community development. I'm joined by my colleague Kelly Linema, who is the assistant director. And the two of us are available to answer any questions that the board members might have about the memo that we provided, which outlines the consideration that the board might take for each one of the warrant articles that are being heard this evening. So I think I'll defer to the board to see if there are any questions or comments on the memo. But I did want to say a couple of things. The first thing is that this particular zoning bylaw amendment is subject to mass general law chapter 40a section five, such that this zoning bylaw may be enacted by a simple majority vote rather than the two-third super majority vote that applies to other zoning amendments. So I wanted to make sure that that was clear. And second, I actually wanted to invite Steve Revolac to make a couple of comments before we entertain the board's questions on the memo if there are any. So with that, I think I'll turn it over to Steve. Okay. Thank you, Madam Director. I just wanted to a few weeks ago, Ms. LaCorte appeared before the board to discuss her proposal with us. And during the during that discussion, one of one of my colleagues on the board said, this seems like a proposal we've had before. And, you know, I noted that I had filed a similar proposal or actually I'd worked with a work with a colleague of mine who filed a similar proposal, I think back in 2020. Now, although Ms. LaCorte is substantially similar, I just wanted to point out that this is her article. You know, she what she as far as I know in Ms. LaCorte, I encourage you to correct me if this is wrong.  Mine is not one of them. And I will, you know, I look forward to hearing what you have to say. That is it. Thank you, Madam Director. Thank you, Steve. Jenny, any additional comments? No, that was all. I'll be happy to take any questions or comments from the board on the memo that the department prepared. Great. Thank you, Jenny. So I'll run through the board members to see if anyone has any specific questions for Jenny or Kelly, starting with Ken. None at this time. Thank you, Ken. Gene? Yeah, thank you for the very comprehensive discussion of this warrant article. I don't have any questions. I have a comment, but I'll wait until we hear the presentation by Ms. LaCorte or someone else who's filed the article. Great. Thank you, Gene. Melissa, any questions on the memo from the department? No questions. I'll listen to the presentation as well, but I do encourage everyone to read that memo if you haven't, if you're following Article 38. Thank you, Melissa. And Steve, any questions for the Department of the Memo? No questions, but just a comment. In the portion of the memo which reproduces the main motion, it looks like there was some strikeout text that didn't come through as strikeout, at least on my copy. It is correct in the... Or there's a difference between... I mean, there's strikeout text in the set of main motions that was distributed or published on February 17th that it looks like they might not... It's a Scribner's thing. It looks like it may not have come through in the memo. That's all. We will look into that further. Steve, thank you for flagging it. Great. Thank you. And before I turn this over to Annie LeCourt for a representation, I do want to remind the board members that if there are any questions which the petitioner doesn't have an answer for this evening, because we have several nights of hearings ahead of us, we can certainly ask Ms. LeCourt or any future petitioners to come back with us, to us with those answers before we deliberate and vote on April 4th. So I just wanted to make sure that I gave that reminder. And I believe Annie LeCourt is with us this evening. And Annie, if you wanted to go ahead, I think we have allotted about six minutes for the presentation. So take it away. So thank you very much for inviting me through this hearing tonight. I would like to mention that Laura Wiener who has worked on this article with me and been a great deal of help to me in understanding housing and zoning is also here. And so we're both here to answer questions or help field whatever is going on. So I'm proposing that we allow two families by right in all of the residential zoning districts in Arlington. A considerable portion of the land in Arlington is restricted to single family development. What I've been seeing happen is that in neighborhoods where multifamily dwellings or duplexes can't be built, that we are seeing very large buildings being built as single families. And my hope by proposing this would be that we see more units built, more modest units built, things that we might call the missing middle, although I recognize they will not be tiny given the other rules around zoning on lots. And that this provides some housing flexibility. And it also is an environmentally sustainable move because more housing built in Arlington near transit is housing built for people who are going to use their personal vehicles less, less burning of gas, less traveling in individual cars and that it increases housing choice both for the residents who already live here and for people who are trying to move into town. So it offers the opportunity for young families that may struggle to purchase the average single family home in Arlington now to have additional options in terms of condo availability. It diversifies our neighborhoods. It makes it possible for those of us who have lived here for a long time who might want a down size to consider the option of moving into a smaller unit in our same neighborhoods. And two families just to get back to the environmentally sustainable issue, two families are also more energy efficient generally than a single unit building. So that was what I was thinking when I decided to propose this article. If you want to go to the next slide, Kelly. So as I said, two family zoning is better for the environment. Smaller homes, insured structures have lower carbon footprint.  Arlington is a great community in part because it is so close to job centers and public transportation. So it's a good place to increase housing in terms of sustaining the environment. This is really an article that is about housing choice, flexibility in our zoning code, investment in this community, and expansion of who can live in this community. It is not necessarily an article about affordable housing with a capital A. I don't believe any of these units will be built at 80 or 60% of the area median income and qualify for any kind of subsidy, so on and so forth. But they will take some pressure off the market and they will offer many people who want to move here and many people are already living here some options. We can go to the next slide. So in what we're proposing, the building that would be built on a lot that might have two units in it will not be larger than the single family home allowed on that same lot. We're not changing any of the setbacks, we're not changing any of the height restrictions, we're not changing any of the required open space, so on and so forth. So we're expecting structures that meet all of our current zoning restrictions in single family neighborhoods just with two units in them instead of one. Nonconforming lot restrictions also remain the same. So for example, my house is on a nonconforming lot, which means that I can't expand the footprint of my house beyond what is here without a special permit. So they're all ready to families in the R0 and R1 districts. I added a lot of slides at the end of this particular presentation to show you some of those two families. We don't necessarily need to look at them tonight unless people ask, but I wanted the board to understand my thinking about that. A two family is sort of a standard unit of housing in Arlington. This isn't exotic for us or unusual or different. They're two families all over town. There are many two families within walking distance of my house, which is right across the street from Stratton School. I do think that any change is going to be gradual. I checked these statistics with Kelly last week and we have been averaging about 27 teardowns a year. That's 27 completely rebuilt homes. We have seen an increase this year, but last year we had almost no teardowns, so we think that's just an increase based on pent-up demand. But I suspect that most of those teardowns are actually within walking distance of my house. It seems like every other house is coming down and all of them are being built into very, very large single-family homes. I personally would love to see some of those single-family homes be two units and for us to have more families in a neighborhood that I love with more kids attending the school that my children attended. In conclusion, I think this is a simple change that could have a meaningful impact on housing availability in Arlington. I think it increases our housing choices and it encourages sustainable development, and I think it's a great investment in the future of our community to allow this kind of flexibility in our zoning code that will allow people to stay in Arlington through the full life cycle and also make it easier for folks who are not current residents to possibly get a foothold in our community and become contributing members to our community. And with that, I conclude. Great. Thank you very much, Annie. I appreciate the presentation. I will now turn it over to members of the board for any questions that you might have for Annie, and we'll start with Ken. Hi, Annie. I have one question right now is does this address parking or just remains the same as is? So it doesn't address parking in the sense of expanding the allowable space for parking on the particular lot. Most of the single-family homes that I'm seeing built that have this same footprint are being built with two-car garages and space for two cars to be parked in front of that. At least in my neighborhood, it's not unusual for a building that's built to the maximum allowable space on the lot to also have parking for four vehicles. So I just believe that it wouldn't be different for two-family structures since the structure is not going to take up a greater footprint on the lot. And the available space for parking in a garage would be similar. So you don't see this increasing traffic at all with more parking. It is what it is. All the setbacks requirements would still apply. Yes. All the regulations for as far as closeness to property lines, all that stuff would still apply. It just stays the same. Yes. I mean, there are single-family homes in my neighborhood where on any given day there are six cars parked in front of them. Yeah, I realize that. I just want to have this address. It doesn't. It assumes that whatever the restrictions on parking and available, ability to use the lot to create parking are the same for the two families as they would be for a single family. Thank you. That's all I have for now, Rachel. Great. Thank you, Ken. Gene, any questions for Annie? Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for the nice presentation. I guess the first question is one for either Annie or Jenny or Kelly. And that is the updated housing production plan recommends as a strategy exactly this allowing two-family homes in single-family zones. And I'm sort of wondering to Jenny, I guess, any thoughts about how that corresponds to this article and to Annie about, well, let's see, Jenny first. No problem. Yes. In the housing production plan that was adopted by the board, one of the strategies to address fair housing and access to housing and remove barriers to housing is the recommendation to allow two families in single-family zones and to consider that as being one strategy among many others to increase housing affordability and availability. That particular recommendation emerged from the Fair Housing Action Plan, which was completed last year, which looked at access to housing and barriers to affordable housing and fair housing in Arlington. And some of the barriers include barriers to home ownership as well as barriers to rental housing for specific races, classes, and various protected classes of people in Arlington. So this was one of those recommendations that came from the Fair Housing Action Plan and is now part of the housing production plan. And I just, for Annie, I wonder if you took that into consideration in this article? So actually, Gene, this is classical court behavior. When I decided that I was going to file this article, I sort of was like, oh, look, I've had this brilliant idea nobody else has had. And it turns out that's not true. So I didn't know it was in the housing production plan at the time that I proposed this. And I also didn't know that it had been proposed in the past. But I think I have benefited from the work that was done by folks on the housing production plan and by the previous proponents work in sort of formulating my thinking about this and also seriously from the time that Laura Wiener, who used to work on our planning department, spent with me, helping me kind of understand the technicalities. Thanks. So second question is, I'm, I guess, concerned that we'll end up with, in many cases, with two fairly large living units or housing units, let's say, on the space. And I'm thinking that what I would like to see for this warrant article, and I raised this, I should say, at the zoning bylaw working group meeting last week where it was pretty much favorably received, would be to limit the size of the units that would be created to 1,850 square feet of heated living space. And I came up with that number, because under state law, it's the maximum size for what's called a quote unquote starter home. And I think if what we're trying to do, and I agree with you, as an aside, you know, considering how much land prices are and how much construction costs are, these are not going to be affordable to low income people. But I think if we limited the size of the units consistent with the starter home requirements, then we would be depressing the price of the units somewhat, and then it would more likely fulfill one of the goals, which is to create more missing middle housing. So I wondered if you have or would give that some thought as a possibility. So I have a couple of questions about that. And I don't know if now is the time to ask questions of you, or I'm happy to try to answer them. That would be great. Yep. And if there are just for process wise too, if there are questions which Jean has that the two of you need to follow up on following this meeting, that is certainly something that we can do as well. And we have offered to any person coming in front of the board in the past to to basically have a board member work with them on any revisions that might be suggested that come out of today's meeting. Great. So the first question I have Jean is, are you talking about restricting the size of units in a two family to 1850 square feet in R1 and R0, or in all residential districts? No, in R1 and R0, because that's what your warrant article is about, and it couldn't be expanded to include any of the other districts. Right. But if you could restrict the size of multi-family units like this of two and three family units in the other districts, would you do it? Because it seems to me like it's going to have an inconsistent code. I'd have to think that through. I'm not sure. There's some, I can see your point. On the other hand, the point is when you're allowing something that's not currently allowed in a district, you might want to put restrictions on it that you wouldn't put elsewhere in the town. So I'm not sure. But this article is not about the rest of the districts. Right. So we don't have to worry about that. And then my other question is, if what we really want is to create more smaller units, then it would seem to me that the way to do that is to expand the number of units allowed. So that within the footprint that's allowable in our single-family districts, you could actually build more smaller units, rather than. And that's not what you proposed. It is not what I proposed. It's not what you proposed. And then it, you know, I've read every one of the comments that came in, and it was just exacerbate, I think, what a lot of people's concerns are as you as you, if you would allow more than two units in these buildings. So, yeah. So I, you know, I guess I'm sort of asking if you and the other people who, you know, had signed on to your warrant article would give consideration to this amendment for your warrant article. So I'm not, I'm not 100% certain what the process is here. Okay. So the way that I had imagined it was that I was going to propose this warrant article. I was going to propose a final vote and that you were going to decide whether or not you supported the article and you were going to, as a board, write the final vote. So it would seem to me that if the board decides that they want to restrict the size of these units and put it in the vote that they take, then that's what we'll get. If you're asking me whether or not I think it's a good idea, I don't. But, you know, I don't see it as a hostile move and I don't want to, so unless I'm wrong about, if select board that would be fine. Let me, yeah. Let me just clarify the process and what I'd like to do is to take all questions and comments such as genes that we have from the board members, listen to the public comments and then circle back and identify any comments like genes that are requesting you to consider any potential changes to the amendment as proposed to see if that's something that you'd be willing to entertain between now and when the board votes on April 4. So if that works, Gina, what I'd like to do is just table that question until we, until we're finished with public comments. That sounds like a good thing to do. Thanks so much. I'll stop at this point. It sounds like a very collaborative way to approach this, Rachel, and it's sort of what I was expecting. Okay, great. Thank you. Melissa, any, any questions for, for Annie on the proposed foreign article? Annie, thank you for your proposal. I guess I was just curious about any residential design guidelines if that had been given any consideration through your thinking and, and kind of the development of this proposal. Partly I asked because, you know, some of the comments that I've received and some that came in and writing have been really concerned about form sizing and mass as well. So I think I was curious on, you know, what your thinking is on that as a proponent. So my thinking had been to keep this as simple as possible. And I would assume that all standards that apply to single family homes being built in, you know, torn down and built on the same properties that we're discussing would apply to two families. So to the extent that the design guidelines are imposed on single family homes, they should be imposed on two family homes, duplexes, you know, whatever is, is being built by a developer. I've read the guidelines. I've walked around my neighborhood. I don't see any projects being built in my neighborhood that are applying the guidelines. I'm not sure what to do about that. Madam chair. Yes, I do see our building commissioner on here. And I was just wondering if he could speak to that. Just to help me understand what the control is on the size under this proposal. The control is for the size of the... Yeah, the massing and how he would see this playing out. Great. I'm happy to turn that over to Mike Champa, who is with us this evening. Thank you. Mike Champa, director of Inspectional Services. I'm sorry, Melissa. So you'd like to know how the sizing restriction would play out? Yeah. So I mean, I feel like a lot of the concern is either McMansion or now with regard to two family, it would just be, you know, kind of still maximizing the building envelope with two family on one site. I think that's generally what I've heard is a concern. And I'm just trying to understand from your perspective if that would continue or is just because that the proposal doesn't have those details. It's saying as is, is there anything else that we should know that could be exploited here that we're missing? I mean, I think that so R1 and R2 have the same lot sizes. So it, you know, you would just be, you know, they would be building the same size house, but you would be getting two units. I think the RO gets a little trickier if there's not a restriction because of the size of the lot. You know, they could build bigger homes. It could, you know, two large homes. But I'm not sure where the, I'm not sure where the happy medium is that it makes it a project that's worth doing for someone size-wise as well. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Annie. Great. Thanks, Melissa. Any other questions or you're good at this time? I'm good at this time. Okay, great. Thank you. Steve, any questions for, for Annie? No, just actually sort of a follow up. I'd like to follow up briefly to something Mr. Benson mentioned. You know, we did discuss this article at the Zoning By-law Working Group and you know, the, you know, the practicality of imposing size limitations. Now, I did ask, pose a question to staff earlier today is in terms of how many starter homes were been built under 40R. And I understand the number is very small.  Thank you, Madam Chair. Great. Thank you, Steve. Annie, I just have one question for you before we open this up to public comment. My question is, you know, given the discussion that we've had both tonight and I'm sure we're about to have with the public and when this same topic has come before us, you know, one of the things that I see as potentially necessary is, you know, real education plan in terms of the way that this, should this go forward, that this be discussed with with town meeting members and precinct members ahead of town meetings so that they understand what this article both proposes and more importantly doesn't propose in terms of the way that things might change. Have you given any thought to what an education plan might look like, you know, knowing when town election is and, you know, new town meeting members and that window there? I just want to say that I think when there has been a strong education plan in place that has been helpful for town meeting members. So just wanted to see if that's something you have any thoughts on. I haven't thought about it very much yet. I'm sort of taking it one step at a time. If the show goes to this article, then that would be the next step, which is to come up with an education plan, particularly for town meeting members about what this proposes and what it doesn't propose. You know, we usually hold a series of precinct meetings before town meeting now and I would, you know, be sure that I and other proponents of the article, other supporters, showed up with those precinct meetings to answer questions. I suspect it would probably be a hoove me to produce some written material that could be used, you know, FAQ or whatever for that purpose. You know, I'm not, I'm not delightfully assuming that this is either going to pass the ARB or past town meeting. It felt to me like it was something we needed to discuss. Thank you. I appreciate you addressing that. All right. Any additional questions for Annie from the board members before I open this up for public comment? All right. So at this time, I'd like to open the public comment period for article 38. Any member of the public wishing to speak, please use the raise hand function at the bottom of the participants window. Please make sure to introduce yourself when you begin speaking by your first, last name and address and note that you are allotted up to three minutes for your comments. We will go ahead and take the speakers in the order in which hands are raised. Starting with Steve Moore. Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Steve Moore, Piedmont Street. This feels pretty much like it's a redox of what was pursued about two years ago in front of the company. And maybe it was three and failed pretty dramatically. And I believe in effect what it is. And I'm not sure how folks are addressing it, but this is doing away with R0 and R1 zoning. It's not just allowing two families on R1. It's doing away with R1 and in effect doing away with R0. That's, to my mind, what's being presented. Changes to the vision of Arlington as with all vision adjustments, I think needs to be done with a scalpel. And I believe this is an effect of hacksaw. This is a huge change. It's not small change. And as I said, when it came up two years ago, it failed as part of a package pretty dramatically. I think this would push a huge workload to the ZBA, which handles all special permits, because pretty much, I think many lots, maybe the majority of lots in Arlington for R0 and R1 are nonconforming. For many reasons, be them size, be them setbacks, be them, they've been grandfathered in as many two families have happened in R1 districts. And that means the ZBA has to prove all of that. And that's a pretty big workload on top of what already is a pretty big workload for them. I heard during the presentation a statement that it's unusual to see certain parking and such on a single park. That doesn't mean it's typical. I think there would be serious parking implications for two families, two family parking in single family areas. Not that it couldn't be dealt with, but there would be implications. I think with Arlington lots being as small as they are, the only way to go is up. And that is a pretty dramatic change for the visual character of town. And I don't know if it's a great way to go. But again, this is food for thought as much as anything else. So to finish, I basically don't support this. I think the way we need to go is to incentivize the building of two families. Not impose changes to zoning that would push two families. I think we need to incentivize builders to do it since they're going to make more money usually, but I believe with single families, though I'm clearly not an expert in this area. So I would just like to say I don't think the ARB should support this article as it's currently being streamed. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. The next speaker this evening will be John G. from Boston. Thank you, Madam Chair. John Gersh, Kipling Road, Town Meeting Member for Precinct 18. I have four questions. I will state them and then take the answers while I listen. Number one, would these two units each then be entitled to build an accessory dwelling unit? In effect, total of four units on each lot. Number two, how would the existing residents of Arlington in these districts be notified so as not to be blindsided by this change? In other words, would they be treated as a butters with a butter, letters and such? Or is this going to continue to be R1 and they would not need to be notified if they were not paying attention to these hearings? Number three, I'd like to know if there's any evidence that these new units would be more affordable than the existing single family homes that they are replacing. If they would, yeah, if it makes any affordability sense to replace with condos. And number four, I would like to know, I heard I think Mr. Court say something about residents would not maybe have as many cars and I just would like to know if there's any evidence to support that idea. I will take my answer offline. Thank you. Great, thank you for those questions. I would like to ask Annie to respond to, I can actually respond to the first one, maybe Jenny to number two and then regarding affordability. Annie, I believe that you've already addressed that in your notes but if there's anything else you wanted to add. So the two units would in fact each be entitled to ADUs per what was approved last year in terms of the ADU. Jenny, would you like to speak to how existing residents would be notified? We're not changing the zoning of the existing in terms of what they're currently classified as so I don't know that existing, I don't know that notification would be required but Jenny, I'll turn that over to you. Okay Rachel, no notification would not be required. The only time notification occurs in single and two family zones is if there's a special permit hearing through the zoning board of appeals for a specific project and then also people are notified when there's a good neighbor agreement attached to a project and that's sort of a different scale of a butter notices but not that kind of notification that this individual is asking about at John. Great, thank you. And Annie is there anything else that you wanted to add regarding affordability? I know that that is I'm sure a question that will come up again so if there's anything else you wanted to add at this time I will hold further questions on that until the end but if there's anything else you wanted to add at this time I'll go ahead and give you a minute to do so. I hopefully won't need a minute Rachel there's a lot of hands up. I'm a big proponent of affordable housing but this is not an affordable housing article. This is really an article about allowing for more starter home missing middle. I mean I recognize a particularly in R0 if you took the average lot and you built to the max which is what people are doing when they're tearing down their houses you're going to end up with two very large units. But I would say that what's happening now is that houses are being built to the maximum size on the lot and we're just getting a very large unaffordable single family home. I was hoping that this might encourage more duplexes and two families to be built that would allow for just sort of one slightly lower step on the ladder for families to be able to afford to move into Arlington to just sort of keep the cycle going. So thank you Annie. Jean I see that you have your your hand up do you have something you'd like to add? Yeah to to John Gershwin's question and I'm sort of going to ask this to Jenny. So while this would I think not change the rules on ADUs one of the other rules I believe is that they still need to meet the setback and all of the other requirements. So if you're building these houses out to the size that you're allowed to have they're not going to be able to stick an ADU on it. I wonder if Jenny thinks I interpreted that correctly. I want to clarify that you can't build an ADU if it's new a new building? No no you can't build an ADU if doing so would go into the setbacks or exceed the FAR or reduce the number of open space available. That's correct and there's also limitations on the size of the accessory dwelling units that's codified in the bylaw. While there's no parking requirements for ADUs the parking requirements for single and two are one space per dwelling those are the only different that's sort of a differentiation there but otherwise no to answer your question. Yeah so I think that's the gloss I would add to the ADU thing that while it's going to be available if we assume that the builders are going to try to maximize the size of the place it's unlikely that somebody's going to come in later and be able to put an ADU on because they're going to violate the bulk of the open space requirements. Great thank you Gene. I'm actually going we have a lot of hands up so I'm going to move on to the next speaker so Jordan Weinstein. Yeah thank you very much for holding this meeting. Jordan Weinstein, Lennon Road in Arlington and I'm a town meeting member from Precinct 21. I am opposed to this yeah if it were a bylaw that actually created more affordable housing which in my mind is the only thing that would help drive down and take the pressure off the market in Arlington and also help diversify and allow people who can't afford the rising cost of real estate here to come into the into the region into our town I would support it but this does nothing to address that primary issue that we have with real estate here with housing. I don't agree with the logic that's being presented for even making this kind of a change better for the environment. I don't see how a two-family how doubling the occupancy on the same plot of land is going to take any pressure off the environment and you know I can come up with arguments for why it would add more pressure to the environment more use of the utilities probably automobile use and also I think that there's an assumption here that really needs to be examined the assumption that building more and making more housing available will help ease the pressure on the market. Let me give you a couple of examples of why this hasn't been the case as the theory maybe this works but Don Seltzer published a great blog on the ARFR website and he cited at least 10 examples I'll only give you a few of single family homes that were sold and then converted into condos each condo selling for much more than the the initial price of that single family home one of them is one from 9 to 11 Arnold Street a single family home sold for $600 was converted to two condos each of those condos sold for nearly $900,000. $21 to 23 Beacon Street $950 sale price of a single family home one of the condos sold for $980,000 the other for $990,000. We can go back and actually get and look at the actual data and not present theoreticals here there's plenty of data. To me it really is an act of would only enhance gentrification in Arlington and as far as choice it would not lower the pressure on the market it would only create more unaffordable housing and I think finally it's really a giveaway to real estate and developer interests who are interested more in profits than people or our community I think we ought to be focusing our attention on true affordable housing here in Arlington thank you thank you the next speaker this evening will be Carl Wagner thank you madam chair can you hear me okay I can thank you thank you I'm Carl Wagner I live at 30 Edge Hill Road in Arlington and I was born here moved away and then like a lot of newer people moved back and discovered how Arlington has this wonderful spot between the urban and the suburban it's neither of those but it contains all of those two plus it has extra features we have some of the most diverse housing in the area and we're also more affordable than all the towns and cities that surround us except for except for Medford the the proponent is is trying to add housing I think it's very important to note that the same article came to the town and came to this this ARB just a year or two ago and it as was said earlier it it was turned down because it didn't match the needs of what Arlington needs it doesn't help affordability it doesn't help our climate resiliency it gets rid of green spaces it doesn't help the housing stock diversity it goes on and on to the point where you realized like Mr. Weinstein just said what it does is it makes housing choice for people who don't live here yet and don't you as volunteers of this board and the people in the planning department and in our town official status don't those people have to work for the benefits and the needs of the people who live here already or to work for making it more affordable for the people who don't live here yet and this would make housing choice for higher income people at the higher price point it would probably do nothing at all for affordable even if if Mr. Benson's proposal came in but it will definitely eviscerate the middle income housing the middle stock of the housing and I ask you therefore to turn this down I further have a question I would like people to realize who are here tonight that that the proponents of the article a year or two ago as was mentioned are include one of the members of the ARB and I hope that that you'll recuse yourself since you already said two years ago that you want to be going for this very thing I think it's really immoral to have an ARB commissioner vote yes or no on something that he's already stated very recently he wants the same thing to happen thank you thank you I'll just state that there is absolutely no reason for any member of the ARB to recuse themselves during this no matter what they've been involved with regard to past past war on articles we haven't invited any member of the public in Arlington to work together with the ARB to to to help to solidify the war on articles as they're trying to put them together and we've had Annie come in front of the ARB earlier in this year many other proponents and that's again something that's open to any member of the public to work together for for the preparation of any one of these war on articles the next speaker this evening will be Winnell Evans thank you very much madam chairman Winnell Evans orchard place and town meeting member precinct 14 I very much appreciate the intent of this article to provide housing choice but I I agree with previous speakers that the choice that it would provide would be entirely for buyers who can afford million dollar plus homes and it would remove choice for everyone else by further incentivizing the demolition of our older and less expensive houses in 2020 this board voted no action on a similar article noting that there was not yet quote a clear understanding of the impact of similar rezonings due to the recent nature of similar longing changes in other states unquote this concern hasn't been addressed yet but really all we have to do is look at what happens here when single families are replaced with duplexes in every single case each new unit sells for several thousand more than the demolished single family and sometimes for close to twice its price now one justification for this article I've heard is that by providing more market rate housing we alleviate some of the competition for lower priced houses but 2021 data from the mls says that houses listing at one million and up average 12 days on the market and sold for well over their asking prices while those listing at 750 000 and lower sat for 26 days and sold for close to their listing prices in other words the competition is for the more expensive houses and this makes sense people who can afford those prices don't want fixer uppers they don't want to put sweat equity into a house they want new big and ready to move into and while those older homes that are targeted may be smaller and in need of work they still provide an opportunity for someone like myself this is how i moved here to get a foothold in our housing market their replacements remove choice while driving up home prices and land values which will lead to an eventual rise in property taxes this affects existing homeowners of more modest means and those on fixed incomes and also renters as their landlords pass along these costs all these people are being pushed out of town arlington is meeting the needs of higher income buyers it's middle and lower income buyers that are shut out this proposal while well intentioned would have the exact opposite effect of what it hopes to accomplish finally the arb also expressed concerns about quote a lack of public engagement unquote regarding the 2020 version of this article this likewise has not been addressed yet several months ago this board heard a proposal to rezone several areas along mass app the board was united and insistent that the proponent must contact every affected property owner and town council told the proponent that he must notify a butters to the affected areas will the proponents of article 38 likewise be required to provide notice to all property owners and the butters of r0 through one districts i believe that they should thank you so much for the opportunity to speak i appreciate it thank you the next speaker will be james plumbing sorry getting everything set up does that work now it does we can see you and hear you fantastic james plumbing 58 oxford street i like to speak in favor of this article most of the redevelopment that i see in town just you just build out to the max because there's a market for it people want it um and if you build out to the max you're gonna get whatever that is it doesn't matter how many units are in it as i see a couple advantages to do in multiple units if you have a two family instead of one family the tax base is larger and that new unit doesn't require any additional roads or water or sewer lines to support it and for schools like we can support the student population we have so really our tax rate and base everything that seems to cover that's not really an issue and then if you have more residents you can also support local businesses better of the three districts we have the heights is the one that struggles the most with vacancies it might help to have more residents nearby to support those businesses for affordability there's nothing that's going to happen to slow that the effect that our units can be less portable over time you wouldn't you would never say that beacon hill would be an affordable place for someone to live only the wealthy can live there our engine is becoming that and there's nothing you can just stop it unless you solve today's housing which is frankly it's very slow and it's expensive so that's why there isn't a lot of it the only upside to this is that it's good for the town because you have more taxes and it's good for some of the residents who can move in because you would now you have people who can afford a million dollar house instead of two million dollar houses so you whatever little economic diversity you have left at least you have that as opposed to nothing thank you thank you the next speaker this evening will be john warden my name is john i'm not john warden uh i thought you called john warden john warden yes john warden okay go ahead thank you can you hear me i can yep oh thank you all right john warden jason street i'm meeting member um i first i i i i oh yes um my wife patricia warden would also like to speak at some point we don't seem to be able to find a way to get both of us separately on your list so we're doing this as we had done at a previous meeting that's fine um john if you could have patricia speak right after you that would be great well i'm sure she's she probably would rather speak before me but but anyway my name's on the list thank you all right first on the materials that the the planning department made on your website there was a vast number of photographs of two family houses in single family zones a couple of which are neighbors of mine and they were all marked page after page of illegal houses and whoever put that together uh i i'm i'm appalled that they don't understand the difference between an illegality which is a structure that's built without a permit and and pre-existing non-conforming use uh which was built under a permit or before we had before we had zoning uh and uh that his grandfather in this was mentioned before and and i'm also i'm really mystified how the professional staff would surely understand the difference would let something go on the on the arb or the planning department website uh that contain that uh that confusing and and incorrect language so i i would ask that that sort of thing not happen in the future um just a couple points this is a terrible article uh it was rejected before it should be rejected again you know you already have uh the right to have a two-family house in a single-family zone it's but you call it an adu and you can have that adu expand beyond its 400 or 750 feet by getting a special permit so what you're asking for now is the ability to create four-family houses in the r1 and r0 districts uh and that's totally over the top the the master plan the master plan which has been adopted by the town meeting at the very extensive public participation over a long period of many months says there are two kinds of housing that we should have in eilinton and that would be affordable housing and senior housing now at the zoning bylaw working group of which i am a member i brought this i brought this point up and and nobody said anything about senior housing i guess they don't think that that they're not going to get old like i am i think you probably will maybe you won't be able to afford live in arlington anymore uh but affordable housing was scoffed at oh they you can't afford to build affordable housing well wait a minute we're talking about developer profits you can't afford to do it if you're going to if you're going to charge uh the kind of money that they're charging and getting for these houses so that that that that's that that's just a false error and if they can't if they can't follow the master plan then we shouldn't be doing it so i i i would urge you to uh to to reject this and and and that if it's bad enough what's happening to the small marginally affordable well built i just want to say well built how's built before the war before world war two or well thank you materials you're a time yep thank you thank you madam chairman thank you and what i'd like to um clarify uh the the document that john warden was referring to was prepared by the petitioner not by the department of planning and community development uh so patricia warden uh i will go ahead and um turn to you now if you could introduce yourself and i'll start your time thank you patricia warden precinct eight i have worked for 30 years on affordable housing article 38 is not about affordable housing it is about providing lucrative development opportunities for developers with its Orwellian language and proposed changes it feeds the appetite for profit developers to continue their documented tear downs of reasonably affordable homes and replacement with much more expensive units it entirely violates the master plan the article is extremely discriminatory and racist and should be rejected out of hand if we are to retain our cherished housing equity and diversity in arlington the article proponents are trying to make a profound and tragic policy decision for arlington which deserves publicity to all citizens and taxpayers uh it is essentially it eliminates much lower income people of all races from the arlington housing market there is nothing in this proposed bylaw for them nothing it also hurts the so-called missing middle buyer from arlington contrary to what the article 38 proponent claims our teachers service providers etc are priced out of units that this article will bring if you study the logistics of likely consequences in arlington you will find that um any affordability will be a thing of the past except what arlington housing authority can provide the new housing units will have prices for those earning more than 200 percent of very immediate income also proponents of article 38 claim that nothing can be done to present tear downs and replacements with extensive homes but those same proponents opposed development of a temporary moratorium on tear downs of capes and opposed every one of the many attempts by citizens at last year's time meeting to present tear downs and increase affordability of our housing if nothing can be done that's because they choose not to do anything some we suppose the parent department assured you the members of the redevelopment board that before any of the strategies of the housing plan were to be promoted and enacted with zoning changes it would first be vetted by appropriate town groups including the select board but that has not been done one thank you your time thank you thank you uh the next speaker this evening will be wendy rector hi um my name is wendy rector i live on bridal place in arlington um a lot of the points that i was going to bring up have been mentioned and i just want to highlight them um the um unintended consequences of this i could i think could be uh detrimental to the town in that um units that are affordable to the missing middle as they are now um may be lost with tear downs and we see this a lot in the two family zone where smaller uh even smaller two families are replaced with much larger two families so i feel very strongly that if the the intention the intention of this um warrant article which is to increase more uh housing units that are um not affordable in the technical term of affordable but are not um high-end housing that there needs to be incentivized some way smaller units and um i think that um tying uh development of two units on a single family lot to um uh adhere to the residential guidelines might be a way to incentivize those guidelines and give a developer something you know that is a an alternative to building a large house but i think that it needs it would need review and um one of the concerns that i have in this is if the one one family zone lots um have to conform with single family zoning um zoning is there more than one front door because i think that changes the nature of a neighborhood and i'm not saying that you can't have a two family because there are two families that are developed where you have a primary residence and a secondary residence and i see that as something would be more um fit in better in the single family neighborhoods but i think that it take it will take more um development of this uh proposal to um and it would probably involve more uh review and oversight um and i just think that there's a lot more that needs to go into it before it's ready ready um to be to be voted on thanks thank you uh the next speaker this evening will be elizabeth pile hello my name is elizabeth pile i live at 66 Gloucester street um a town meeting member from precinct eight i'm also a zoning and land use attorney and i've been practicing in those fields for more than 20 years and i was a member of arlington's residential zoning study group the rsg which for three years studied the issue of new construction in the residential districts and what the impacts of those new houses would be on the community and i can say that my single biggest takeaway from being on the residential study group was that homes that were single family but located in the two family districts were targets for tear down rebuilds and that these new homes that were built were bigger more expensive and built to the maximum envelope possible which were always very large houses and bigger than what was replaced and if this article were to come into effect this article 38 we could see the same kind of impacts throughout town and i oppose this article because the impact of it would be to put arlington more out of reach for people from diverse communities this would remove existing housing opportunities at the 600 to 700 thousand dollar range or the middle range and replace it with only luxury units and although the proponents of the article their intent is to make more housing choice the article would actually have the opposite effect and have less housing choice and one of the things that rsg we we always talked about was the potential for unintended consequences caused by major zoning changes and how important it was to fully vet changes with all stakeholders so unintended consequences that were negative to the community would not happen and i've heard many examples of these kind of unintended consequences come up tonight the impact on green space the impact on massing the potential for parking problems for having a to use on the lot that these these impacts have not been fully vetted such that this article is not ready to go forward at this time and arlington by removing single family zoning would be the first and only municipality in the state to take such a drastic action arlington should wait and see how these kind of impacts play out nationwide and in other communities to see if they actually work and have the impact that proponents say that they might have because many scholars think that they'll have the opposite impact less affordability less choice and a lot of unintended consequences so i would urge the board to reject the article to vote no action more study and public outreach is needed on these important issues um this article would lead to greater gentrification has not been fully vetted thank you your time thank you very much for for your time tonight thank you uh the next speaker this evening will be don selzer uh thank you madam chair don selzer Irving street i'm going to try to answer the question of how many just how many homes will be affected by this zoning change references have been made to the 2019 report on demolitions i remember when it was presented to the residential study group and they refused to endorse it it was based upon the mistaken notion that only those homes smaller than 1500 square feet and built before 1980 were candidates for tear downs it was a poor discriminator at the time and is even more outdated now in actuality any single family lot of 5000 square feet or more and worth 850k or less would become a target for tear down and conversion to a duplex condo for which each unit would sell for about a million or more in today's market nearly half of the single family homes in r0 r1 fall within these criteria what would this mean for a specific r1 neighborhood such as Stratton our most racially diverse school it is predominantly comprised of these types of homes affordable to the middle third of arlington households making between 100 and 200 000 dollars these are the kind of homes that are affordable for our first responders and for two teacher households as an example one such home 2200 square feet and built after 1980 sits only a block away from Stratton it sold just a year ago for 780 000 dollars if this warrant article were in effect it would likely have been bought up instead by a developer to tear down and replace with more expensive condos crowding up against its neighbors and the front yard dug up for a steep double driveway leading to garages under this board has been provided with the recent tear down and conversion history in the r2 districts in every instance a single family home was replaced with condos each costing more than the original home the net impact of this warrant article will be to remove choice for middle income families and instead provide more choice to households making 200 percent or more of AMI despite the intentions of its sponsors it will not create more affordable housing and it will further erode the economic and racial diversity of arlington thank you thank you the next speaker will be michelle hi um madam chair i'm just want to say i'm a new resident but i've been here for a few years and i heard annie talk about that i'm so sorry to interrupt you would you mind introducing yourself with your first last name and address i'm sorry michelle nathan i'm a robin hood road that's you know bordered mystic blades thank you so i heard the woman annie who proposed the article talk about in her neighborhood that she sees housing guidelines are not followed and i unfortunately have seen the same thing in arlington and i wonder since guidelines aren't followed and there'll be a lot of development how will guidelines be ensured um to be followed and also i don't understand why developers when they apply for permits don't put the true cost of construction so they pay less in permitting fees i don't know why that happens thank you thank you the next speaker this evening will be christin anderson thank you christin anderson 12 upland road west i am a precinct 13 town meeting member my concerns are of environmental health specifically regarding stormwater runoff stormwater is a waste product rainwater on the other hand is a resource when it is absorbed by trees and vegetation and when it is able to percolate back into the soil um and recharge groundwater so um with this in mind i have a couple questions how will this zoning change affect the amount of pervious surface that we have in arlington on a per lot basis so what i mean by that is let's say we've got a single family lot that that is redeveloped um turned into a two family with a couple of ad us what is the estimated loss of pervious surface and secondly how many trees will be cut down in each lot that is developed in the event um that this article passes thank you very much i'll i'll let you guys answer that uh thank you christin what i'd like to do is hold that question i'm not sure that the applicant can answer that today um but i will say that for the end and um ask ask this they respond may may i say something else about this then since there this is going to be the end of the discussion on it um this is a terrible this is a terribly important issue and we tend to overlook stormwater runoff unless development is happening in the flood plain which is really unfortunate and we have flooding problems in this town and we also have problems with uh hazardous contaminated water in our water bodies and so when we talk about how this warrant article is going to be good for the environment i really think that this needs to be addressed so um i'm i'm disappointed that no one has even considered this as of yet are you sure that the that the proponent has not thought of this i i do not know but i'm going to hold that question for the end when we circle back to the discussion so i i appreciate your concern thank you thank you um the next speaker will be uh ann alert hi i am ann alert i live on west minster avenue i'm a town meeting member in precinct 21 um and i respect um any schools with this warrant article um however i have a lot of concerns for the impact on the town a lot of people have already discussed my concerns so i want to just focus on the ones i think we might need a little more discussion on and and that's increased density is something i've heard a lot about from the town but the residents i know really are not in favor of increased density for a wide variety of reasons um and the other thing i think that hasn't really been discussed tonight is the impact on property taxes if density increases which i think it will over time because the property would be more valuable and developers will come in then this puts a lot of pressure on the schools and the infrastructure and we already have spent you know are spending 300 million dollars on rebuilding the high school we've had to in the last few years take over a school because the increased enrollment and what happens is like these big jumps when you um no longer can fit into the school buildings are really going to increase property taxes and this is maybe a little bit outside it but one thing i've noticed being a town meeting member is that that there really isn't a process for the town to figure out and communicate the the impact on our infrastructure for some of these warrant articles and i think it's huge i think this could make you know over time even the adu thing if that takes off and you know allowing two families by right can really increase the property taxes and make the town less affordable even for the people who already live here um the other thing i just want to remind people of is that anytime we have a zoning change that only requires 50% vote to implement it it still takes a two-thirds vote to reverse it so we need to be really careful about putting these things forth to town meeting. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks uh the next speaker this evening will be Rebecca Peterson. Hello um this is i'm Rebecca Peterson i live on Florence Ave um i i urge you to categorically reject the elimination of single family zoning in Arlington. I think Arlington appeals to buyers primarily because it has a suburban feel but with urban conveniences where we have good restaurants we're close to the T we're close to Boston but eliminating single family housing will destroy the very thing that drew most people here i think this proposal is patently unfair to people who saved to buy a house specifically in a single family neighborhood most people who bought in single family neighborhoods didn't do that by accident and so you know those of us who have done that have spent the subsequent years paying for our homes and improving them so i would respectfully ask you what about people who want to live in a single family neighborhood do we matter i wish we could stop demonizing single family homes is the only goal to stuff as many people as we possibly can inside the town borders many of us do not want to live somewhere as dense as Cambridge i don't you know i appreciate the townlike feel of Arlington with the yards and the trees in addition as other people have mentioned in eliminating single family housing does absolutely nothing for truly affordable housing but it is a dream on the other hand for the tear down crowd and the developers the constant push from the town for increased density is really tiresome people who live here if you if you look at the comments tonight it's overwhelmingly people do not want this we should be trying to protect what little green space we have and maintain our quality of life rather than encouraging people to build on every square inch possible so i really hope that you'll pay attention to the vast majority of residents here tonight who are speaking against this article thank you very much for your time thank you the next speaker this evening will be Matthew Owen hi i'm Matthew Owen um i'm at 164 Forest Street um and i'd like to speak in favor of this draft warrant article um i think one thing in this discussion tonight that sort of hasn't been foregrounded a lot um is there been these comparisons between you know how much um a single family home cost that was redeveloped into a duplex and what each of those units cost but i'd like to give some examples of what the cost differences are um in currently in the r1 district two examples so 37 rubly street which was a small single family home sold in 2019 for 680,000 and then um was torn down and a single family home was put up and sold the next year for 1.51 million um the seven Hancock Street which is in my neighborhood um sold in 2020 for 639k and then sold um just a few months ago for 1.5 million and i think you know if we don't enact an article like this this is pretty much the status quo we're going to get the um smaller homes that you know are sort of people are latching onto as like oh this you know allows our time to be affordable are just going to be redeveloped whether it's into a duplex or a large single family so i think really our choice is between do we want to be a town with a decreasing number of starter homes and an increasing number of multi-million dollar single families or do we want to be a town that has an increasing number of um starter home sized um family units um just one last thing i'd like to note um is just to point out that you know there's been talked that this is sort of like a radical push but i would like to note that um two families by right is legal in the entire state of california currently um so this is not you know an especially radical idea um at this point in time when we're we're dealing with a essentially nationwide housing crisis in our urban areas thank you thank you the next speaker will be uh eram homen hello can you hear me i can thank you uh madam chair would it be appropriate for me to ask a question of the arb at this point and if so would that take away from my three minutes it would be part of your three minutes yes okay then okay then i then i will wait on that my name my name is eram homen i live at 12 widamore street i am a candidate for town meeting for precinct six i am here to speak against this proposed article uh you've already heard a number of the reasons i will try to abbreviate what i have to say uh but it seems to me that be it smaller units or larger units whatever is being proposed for arlington whatever the rationales are it seems to me that the proposed zoning changes are intended more to enhance the profitability of the developers than any other goal that is the one thing which is consistent uh the arguments made in favor of this simply don't hold and i'm addressing the claims made in the march third memo from jenny reyton kelly linema and talia fox to the arb uh the claim that this will create more affordable housing basic linguistic thing more affordable than what just an anecdote a two family near me an existing shell was renovated it was a two family 800 k and 1.3 million for the two units that was an existing shell it was not even a tear down that would have cost even more mrs lecourt even admits that this is not an affordable housing measure by definition measures which increase the total possible supply of market rate i.e luxury housing in arlington make arlington even less affordable because it raises the price of housing and also because more importantly it increases the number of affordable housing units that we need under the supposedly affordable standards of 40 b and those are not affordable to get out from 40 b the claim that arlington can or should address the quote racist legacy and quote of past zoning is laudable and may even be possible but further raising the price of housing in arlington will simply make arlington's housing even less accessible to those of limited means regardless of their race or color in short i think one could at least argue that this proposed zoning change is another one of the racist policies encoded in zoning that it is supposedly intended to to remedy it seems like it's just one more the claim that this will improve environmental sustainability likewise does not hold yes newer construction will be more energy inefficient but that would be true of any housing built regardless of type so it is not an argument in favor of this article the argument very time thank you very much thank you the next speaker this evening will be judith garber hello can you all hear me we can thank you hi i'm judith garber i'm at massachusetts avenue i'm also tell me meant for precinct four i'm generally in favor of this article um as someone who lives in a multifamily unit i feel grateful that i get to live in arlington and i certainly wouldn't be able to afford a single family home here um and i think increasing our housing is not necessarily a bad thing i don't think we're as dense as we may think we are and i don't know where everyone lives in arlington but here in east arlington like it's not so bad it's really nice having a lot of neighbors it's it doesn't feel extremely closed it doesn't look extremely dense um obviously this is the kind of neighborhood i moved into um knowing what it was so i understand how everyone's feeling about it but i just wanted to put that that word in there and for some of my other um town being members who i've talked to about this and uh who couldn't make it this meeting but feel the same way um we're generally in favor of this although i i'm mostly very interested in hearing um the discussion at town meeting especially around you know there seems to be this question of is this going to increase tear downs or is it going to or tear downs destined to happen anyway and this will just make it able for more people to live in arlington which i am in favor of um i don't know if it'll increase tear down so i'm i would um ask if the proponent or the arb if they approve this to see if we can get some kind of information on that um and i also want to say you know i've seen some of the information about how many people used to live in arlington in the past couple decades and there used to be many more people here it's not like we're at our maximum capacity we used to have many more people living here and i think we can have more people living here again that's all thanks thank you uh the next speaker well i just have an email address so it's uh jawdbw hi i'm janice weaver precinct 21 i live in crescent hill avenue and i'm against this article and i'm the 17th person on the list to be against it there were three for it um they did do a knockdown on my street and the house itself is fine the driveways horrible and the walls do not match up with the rest of the neighborhood uh there are no restrictions on how things are built to keep in line with the um architecture of the neighborhood if you go up orient avenue the same thing happened when they built i think five or six duplex houses it looks like a parking lot because no one can park in their garages evidently because there are always two or three houses outside and i hate to see that happen in other areas of town i think um as the previous speakers have said you're trying to push out people who would like to have um single family homes and you make us feel as though there's something wrong with us i grew up in a two family home i enjoyed it i loved it but then i moved to a single family home with my parents and then i bought this house in arlington and a lot of my friends most of my friends have had to move out because of the prices and only taxes will be increased nothing will go down and you have to understand that when people say oh this will be better for the tax rate it will not be better and the school cost us more as other speakers have said and rebecca peterson was right on target nice to see someone who just moved in a few years ago to say she moved here for the very reason that a lot of us moved here that it's um suburban and not urban and the people that are moving in to try to make it urban should go back to the cities that were urban thank you very much thank you the next speaker this evening will be uh i mean cahill hello can you hear me yes we can hear you oh okay hi um yes i mean cahill dixon av there's just so much to say um and so many people have made good points of the 17 people that have spoken um i just have to approach this from an engineering perspective it's just irresponsible to human health to not look at our infrastructure with you cannot make this decision without assessing the condition of our below the surface pipes that keep us healthy this is our water mains this is our sewer mains we have the luxury of turning on the water and getting clean drinking water we have the luxury of flushing the toilet and bringing it away to get treated properly so from engineering we literally use the the zoning to decide how big to size a pipe and i understand that the justification there was a meeting last week was that okay population used to be 10 000 more the pipes are like 60 years old in the ground okay we have clay pipes we have gas mains being dug up these clay pipes are being broken we have to look at this it's like you just can't make this decision without it i have a list right here about 25 trouble spots that the sewer department checks these locations they're in residential areas teresa ridge um ridge tomahawk dodge forest these are the areas that we're talking about increasing the building and increasing the um the the cars driving on it i think it's very unrealistic to think that the traffic would not increase um and it's just i just can't overemphasize like i just have to really stress this out of the responsibility of being a civil engineer i'm like environment and the storm water i completely agree with that that but that's actually i i think the answer to that is that this is still contained within the building requirements that i i think i remember annie saying that um so i i i think we do overbuild because i see clean um water getting pumped out of people's basements you know out of some pumps and over these huge houses that have been built in the single family so i i just i hope and i really wish that we could do this in person um it's it just seems like this is way too big a decision for this town people that have invested so much money in in either their their their houses and maintaining their houses and being the community that it is but think be thankful that when we flush the toilet it goes away we don't have to think about it okay that's ever something everybody can relate to right and we want that for our our health okay we don't want backups into our houses thank you thank you uh the next speaker will be Colleen Cunningham all right actually it's her husband Stuart Stuart Morrison Kensington Park um first of all i thought i'll answer a question was raised a couple of speakers earlier regarding the higher population um Arlington did used to have a higher population it was largely you know large let's say Irish Catholic families that had five or six kids so what's happening now is that those large Irish families are gone and they've been replaced by yuppies like several of the people that have spoken up here and that leads to um you know the the problems that people are alluding to which is higher population density more people more services being required so on and so forth so we used to it is true we used to have more people but it was just simply large families so let me go to the main um point here which is a number of people raised these points already so i'll try to be brief um it's clear that although this idea was brought forth with some you know and he's trying to solve a problem here it hasn't been thought through and i think that many people have expressed the notion that there are a lot of unintended consequences to this um this this article so unanswered is the question of how we deal with the impact on taxes on the sewer system with the increased population and so on unanswered is the question of you know how this is going to change the character of the town um and that's a major issue because people love the town because of its character and if all of a sudden it changes from being what many people appreciate which is a suburb of single family houses to something that's a lot more like summer vill or parts of Cambridge that's going to cause a lot of anger and and and that's not a good thing that we want you know we don't want to do that in this in this town and i'm afraid that many people i pay attention to zoning issues my wife does most people don't and they're going to be broadsided by this so there needs to be on the subject of you know thinking this through and actually preparing for it one would need to actually alert the majority of Arlingtonians that this major change is coming their way and then the other unanswered question is really who benefits from this right i believe that the proposer thinks that you know society is a whole benefit but it's very clear that the real beneficiaries are going to be the real estate industry developers and you know the people that make money by doing construction here in Arlington and the question then is well why would we want to you know lend more throw more gasoline on the fire of you know developers who are enriching themselves in Arlington at the expense of the existing homeowners who like Arlington the way it is we don't like the tear downs unfortunately you know there are a lot of tear downs happening now being replaced with one families the ARB has not done a good job in stopping that what will happen under this piece of under this warrant is that the tear downs will just all of a sudden turn to making two families everywhere thank you you're a time thank you uh the next speaker will be Dolores mickey hello hi i'm Dolores mickey in precinct 16 and i really appreciate a lot of the comments that some of the um participants on the call have made and i agree with one of the previous um committee or community members that we should really be doing this in person so i just want that put out there um so i would just like to say that with greater density in our residential neighborhoods um we need to consider um what the increase in traffic would do to the roads um residential areas throughout the town already experience very unsafe levels of cut through traffic so um for instance our main roads mass have pleasant street medford street lake street summer street they already cannot handle the traffic we see so our lintonians see the result with this increasing amount of drivers speeding through our residential neighborhoods so um how will these roads be able to handle even more traffic from our denser neighborhoods if if these changes were to to occur the town is working hard to improve the workability i mean the walkability of our town and um you know it's a big consideration with all the school children that we have walking to and from school each day this zoning change threatens to undo all of that work um that we've been you know pretty committed to over the years and pushing this you know it would just it would increase the speeding issue that we have to through our neighborhoods so i think that needs to be considered as well um i think i'm not sure how it would impact like the um rodent issue but i do believe we have a pretty significant rodent issue in our linton too and i'm wondering if um if that would be impacted so thank you very much thank you uh the next speaker will be grant cook hi can you hear me i can thank you grant cook uh wallson ab i think i'm still in precinct 16 um so it's easy to confuse what is with what ought to be when when what is has worked out in your favor um somebody mentioned a scalpel versus blunt force and i i think zoning large swaths of our towns that only a single family home is allowed seem to be the ultimate in blunt force approach but we hear talk about expectations of our neighborhood and i live in a let's um it's led to some pretty nice neighborhoods i live in one but if you go back and ask why we did it that way i suspect some of the reasons would be pretty sensible and i sure some of them would be less savory in their virtue as somebody has said we don't have one housing problem we have many but they boil down to two areas scarcity and subsidy and we see scarcity now in prices on what should be starter homes well out of reach of middle income buyers we talk about luxury units even if you're home in our lintons of modest stock you have a luxury many only dream about the luxury of wealth and equity i would love to hear more talk of subsidy of the affordable units it's what we need to generate true affordability it's not going to occur naturally for those that believe it can where is it the land is too expensive and multifamily units must go through regulatory hurdles that we have put in place discouraging those developments but as much as we talk about affordable units of a virtual shield professing noble intent we hear very little doing about it it has been asked how do we create these big a affordable homes organically and it's usually met with silence from some of the same voices we hear here this proposal is one tool to address scarcity it's not a panacea it hopefully is one measure of many the proposal doesn't change the size of the home it adds people i have the good fortune to live across from our two districts so i have duplexes and apartments across the street those people contribute greatly to my neighborhood they're my friends they're my peers in my prior years i lived in a neighborhood in east arlington that had many single family homes mixed in and the neighborhood was very vibrant so commentary about negative impact of expectations of the neighborhood i'd like to see more specifics on that we surely don't discourage single family unit construction in our two districts and we have plenty of two families and our ones today that exist in prior to zoning i don't buy many of the data free allegations of infrastructure breakdown as was recently pointed out on the same discussion our largest sewage generator was the brigham factory which as we all know is gone our schools have capacity i watched the high school get built i know it can handle more students because we plan for that and some of this also betrays the commitment we talk about a lot with discussion of things like black lives matter but the signs we have in our front yard wealth seeks an outlet and our towns and many of our neighboring towns supportive scarcity exclusionary zoning drives the gentrification we criticize into other neighborhoods it drives it into rocksbury it drives it into southy it drives into east summerville but those places are far away we don't see them day to day living next to an our two district i've seen demolitions paul reveres had several four in close proximity were replaced with two families and some by single families all of them are more expensive i'm sorry you're you're at time okay thanks for your time thank you uh the next speaker will be barbara thorton thank you very much um there's a there's a lot to respond to here so i'm going to go through some points as barbara i'm sorry could you please just get your i'm sorry barbara thorton precinct 16 uh park a 223 park af thank you thank you um first of all this is becoming a town full of mac mansions and i keep hearing people complain about mac mansions and when we finally have a an opportunity like this warrant article that miss lecourt is proposing to slow down the mac mansions we seem to be opposed to it i moved to arlington because i i valued the economic diversity that was in this town and and it was in this town and it isn't anymore um i'm not asking for a great deal of economic diversity this isn't about affordable housing but it is about creating a diversity of housing styles and types for our different phases of life that would be that would be good for people it's not going to change developers coming in and tearing down and rebuilding housing but it will keep them from they have a choice they can build mac mansions or they can build something else this will give them something else to build and i'll bet you that given their choice they would just assume build a two family as one more mac mansion i want to go back to ilean cahill's comments about infrastructure and i think infrastructure is important to consider more than half of the of the homes in arlington i would guess are over 50 years old the infrastructure within those homes not the pipes because i trust our dpw you don't keep you don't keep good care of the pipes and upgrade but within the homes they're not being upgraded regularly which is why so many are subject to tear down once they're bought you can have a small home but it's going to be incredibly expensive to to renovate it to bring it up to standard and now some of the standards of these older homes are becoming seriously dangerous so we either need to figure out how to renovate these older homes or or provide new homes of the same size that are available to people in arlington that are safe and i and i hope that this the arb will consider doing that consider the importance of standing up to mac mansions providing a diversity of housing styles and providing for opportunities to renovate the infrastructure of the homes in arlington by allowing this process and lastly it won't happen overnight this is an incremental approach it's going to be out of the 19 000 homes in arlington i don't know how many it'll be a year but it's a very small percentage maybe 10 homes across the town a year that this happens to and i think that's something that we can find out about by the four town meeting and make some good guesses on it but i i very much been in support of this article thank you barbra uh the next speaker will be san j newton hi san j newton i'm a pre-sync pre-sync 10 town meeting member on otawa road and i will keep my comments short this evening i'll thank the board for spending so much time listening to so much comment this evening and i'll just say thank you to miss the court for bringing forward this article and express my support for it and i'll i'll leave it right there thank you thank you the next speaker will be susan stamps okay yeah here i am oh perfect timing i just got back home coming back from new york on the train um it's been a great discussion tonight thank you to the arb um i'm sorry would you please sorry would you please introduce yourself first last i'm so sorry yes i was okay thank you susan susan stamps i live in east arlington on grafting street um i'm also a member uh town meeting member and i am a member of the tree committee although i'm not speaking for the tree committee um i have a tremendous respect for annula court and um there people are desperate to try to figure out how to make more housing available i i completely agree with the um you know what what um what the push is i i really can't agree with a proposal though for all the reasons that has been stated tonight my particular i used to live in carlyle where they have two and four acres zoning because they're on wells and um their own septic and when in my time there they were cutting down huge acres of trees and putting in mac mansions and i i was on the housing authority at the time and i was pushing for them to in those mac mansions rather than making them single family homes to put two or four units in those buildings which they wouldn't do because of zoning but the reason there was not particularly to provide more housing at a reasonable cost because i didn't think it would but it was to prevent the degradation of the environment um unfortunately i um which which it would have done it would have been a good thing for the environment in carlyle i think it would would have i think i agree with the speakers tonight that it would have the opposite effect in arlington because right now so many of the single family homes have nice yards and big trees and and all kinds of greenery and um i think they're everybody understands that if a builder tears down a house and puts in a duplex versus a single family home they're going to make a lot more money and which that's they're entitled to do that and it's a noble profession but what what's going to happen is they're going to build out to the lot lines all the trees are going to come down the driveways are going to be bigger because they have uh two you know two houses to put in driveways for so as one of the speakers there's going to be more impervious services which is really the wrong way to go in this time of climate change taking out the trees is the wrong way to go and um there have to be some better solutions out there um i think we ought to be looking to cpa money to um effectuate more subsidized affordable housing and and think of some other creative ideas but i don't think this is the right one thank you thank you uh the next speaker will be uh identified as rs ipad thank you steven blagdon hutchinson road i sent uh the board a letter on this and won't repeat myself there have been many good comments against article 38 which i agree with this article won't reduce mac mansions it will increase tear downs and just as large or larger than mac mansions two families will be built i keep hearing a change is not a worry because it'll be incremental and take a long time this is like increasing the water temperature slowly on the frog so it doesn't realize it's being boiled listening to the presentation i was surprised and disappointed that this hasn't been thought through and the effects identified and considered it seems to have aspirational goals rather than realistic ones the adu by law ended single family zoning last year the town should see how that lower scale change works out and analyze the impacts before something like this which were turbocharged tear downs how can you get four units replacing a single family you build a duplex to the maximum structural limits with rough adu plumbing and electrical in the garages you get your completion approval now the builder converts the garages to adu's and doesn't have to replace the parking that has bad effects i've noticed in hour zero the tear down threshold looks to have reached about a million dollars i made some practical points in my letter a few of the written comments make a good point that this patrol the proposal is a betrayal of the implied compact with those who spent a lot of money to buy and live in a single family house article 38 would destroy our linkedin as we know it please say no thank you thank you the next speaker will be alex bagnell hello um alex bagnell wyman street uh zoning rules and land use policy are complex mechanisms with a lot of leaders in the end they are an expression of our community values with zip code playing an extremely large role in determining economic opportunities and household incomes we should be welcoming to more people in our high opportunity community not continuing to exclude exclusion by race and or class were key drivers in the creation of single family zoning we can and should do better this article isn't going to solve our housing problems and nothing is going to happen overnight but it's a meaningful step in the right direction and i am very much in favor of it thank you thank you and with that i believe we have heard from uh all of the speakers this evening who have their hands up uh to speak about article 38 yes jenny i didn't get a chance to speak uh i okay i'm sorry you didn't have your hand up so um could you please i you're more than welcome to to speak if you haven't had a chance this evening you could introduce yourself with your first last name and address that would be great hi thank you sorry it looked like i had a hand up on my side so that's okay please please go ahead yep uh terry kirkland brunswick road um so a few things that we listened to um you know for mr weinstein um mr wagner um miss evans we fully agree with all of your statements put forth i really wish we had more time to listen to mrs warden uh personally a lot of things she's saying about how people are taking small houses and building it up uh to these mac mansions why aren't we imposing more rules like that mrs warden's thoughts were very well thought out i wish she had more time to continue what she was saying uh because that's where it is she said no one was coming and speaking to these problems on you know taking a smaller home you know maybe 800 square feet or less and let's keeping it to those sizes and let's help people uh get those smaller homes that we're talking about um also to uh what miss kay hill said about infrastructure we learned about that firsthand um you know when the house came up next to us the uh the water line which was just the drain off water was not inspected properly by the town and what happened and a full crack happened and tons of water thousands and thousands of gallons of water went under our property that's a huge issue um when we're talking about all these houses coming down and what's going to happen to the grain space uh the cross the you know across the street we also had three houses go up and over those 40 50 trees that were there every single one was cut down every time i've seen a multifamily home that's maybe as they said tear down and built up any trees on that property are gone so the contractor can get the maximum space they don't care about the greenery i see a lot of two family houses that don't even have a yard uh in many homes i've walked around them and multiple ones that were two families and they made sure they condoized them and selling them again maximize the lot they had they had maybe a foot before their fence so those are just some of the things that you know we're very concerned of um you know coming we're in an r1 district right now i couldn't imagine in a ranch style home that we have a large frontage that you could put up a huge double decker i think that it would not even look well with our you know the rest of the house is around us um so we really hope that more people decide that this is not the way to go um this feels that it was just a prematurely put together where we're not talking about as other people have stated what's the parking going to happen what do our schools are going to look like you know we have put all this money into these schools but they're they're going to be maxed out if we take what is it the 79 percent that's our one or our zero we can make them into two families that's a lot more people that's a lot more trash has to be picked up so i think there's a lot of problems and this was this is just not a well thought out um or well prepared argument for us all to do and especially by zoom so this is something we really need the whole town to get into and everybody should have a notice to see only like 80 people on this meeting is is sad but thank you for your time and thanks for letting me speak thank you um and then the last speaker this evening will be gary goldsmith oh you're you're on mute if you could unmute yourself there we go gary goldsmith beverly road um quick uh two quick points or two quick questions one is it is disingenuous to think that there would be fewer cars i think we can assume that anybody who is purchasing a a house or a unit in arlington is going to have at least one car so my one question then is if we were to uh to enact this uh this article uh would we require two uh two parking spots i believe someone earlier said that uh the current requirement is one spot for each dwelling unit uh we would now have to require two parking spots um and how would aid use affect that the other question i have is that i think it's disingenuous to think that this would have any issue have any impact on reducing the mac mansionization of arlington houses i think it's pretty fair to assume that if a builder developer is building two units rather than one um they will try to maximize uh the the size and uh the of the units um which will maximize the price uh and one final comment and that is that there is a certain population looking for a house which is costing two or two point two million uh there is a much larger population looking for a house of one point one million even though that seems like a crazy number but that's that's what it is so this is likely to increase our population some of the estimates on growth are uh include single family houses being expanded but um it is a lot more likely to sell uh units at one point one million than two point two um those are my questions or comments thank you very much and i thank the board for considering this thank you all right so um at this point i will uh turn things back to the board and to uh annie will court the petitioner i'm just going to recap a couple of the topics um annie that that i heard some of which you may want to address this evening and some you may want to um think about and and come back at it at a future evening and and respond to or respond in writing if that's okay with you sure okay great so um i'm just going to run through a couple that that i highlighted and then asked any of the board members that there there are others um as well so um there was a question about um and maybe this is something that you and um jenny have discussed but how you are seeing the residential design guidelines potentially um playing into the requirements for um the two family dwelling units um that that would be proposed on um in the r1 and r0 um districts um the question about will this increase teardowns or simply be a reconfiguration of existing is a topic that people are looking to have addressed uh the question about traffic impact um and parking i believe that can also have some questions about your thoughts on on parking um and i believe that that also played into um some of the questions that um christin and others had about um infrastructure and um pervious um pervious potential increases in pervious surfaces um specifically related to stormwater runoff um there was a question about any potential projections on impact on property taxes um and then we go back to gene's question about any you know any of your thoughts potentially on limiting the size of the units in these particular r0 and r1 districts if they choose to to move to a two family construction so um i'm not sure if you're prepared or would like to answer any of those i'm i'm prepared to give some general answers now but i will that's fantastic learn those questions if someone can give them to me in writing into an faq going forward yes i can so we can certainly follow up with um with that list sure so let me um give you all an anecdote about the inspiration for this article so when i first moved into my house which for don selzer's sake you should know is directly across from uh strant school so it's right in the strant school neighborhood there was a row of eight or ten um ranch houses on the other side of the strant school playground on mont nav all of them six room houses some of them had sort of kicked out the back maybe added a little wing or a deck or whatever all of them on six thousand square foot lot every one of those houses when it has sold over the last 15 years or so has been torn down and rebuilt as a larger home the last one of those houses that was torn down and rebuilt as a larger home was built as to the maximum size of home that you could possibly put on that lot with the maximum driveway and a two car garage so that house has the exact impact that a two family allowed by this article on that same lot would have there are three or four of those single family ranch houses left as they sell they will all turn into exactly that house because that's what's being built in my neighborhood right now the largest single family possible so what we have is a five thousand square foot house with as much driveway as is allowable under our bylaw and a two car garage across the street from spratton school and a single family home worth two million dollars which could have been two very generous duplex units with no more effect on the environment or the lot with no more paving and no more structure than is already there so what i'm seeing in my neighborhood is that every tear down is is exactly this every time someone tears a house down it turns into this very large single family home and what i'm saying is those could have been two families now in terms of trees and permeability i don't think they're going to have a different effect if there's two families or there's one because the restrictions that we're placing on the building of the structure itself are the same same setbacks same height restriction same volume so we're not increasing the environmental impact it is true that there will be more people and more kids in the schools and there will be more you know presumably more water flowing through our sewers i've discussed this and several other people have discussed it with people in the town that tell manager mike ratamaker son and so forth they don't see a concern these are the people who are in charge of managing our water and sewer and they believe that our population is much lower than it was at its peak everybody is using more water conserving equipment in appliances so on and so forth and so our flow is not increasing even as our the number of housing units in town increase because the population is not matching what it used to be and we also have a very good very consistent anybody on time meeting that knows this consistent program of replacing our sewers and improving them so that we have less infiltration and inflow so the the folks who can affect it are aware of the infrastructure problems and they are working on them and they're working on them regardless of whether or not we increase the number of housing units in town so my general answer is I did think about this I thought about it a lot I spent the whole summer watching that house go up and thinking about it and all I'm saying is I'd like more neighbors and I would like not to see these small ranches get knocked down and turned into McMansions but I don't think there's any way for us to reasonably prevent someone from selling their house maximizing their investment in the property that is probably the sole asset that they have and selling it to whoever is the highest bidder which in many cases is a developer if it's not a developer and someone moves in and does not want to expand that house or does not want to build a two family that's great this bylaw does not require them to do so so I think we're talking about you know at at the most 10 20 you know tear downs like this happening in a year maybe less because on average we're only having 27 so it's not going to be this huge overnight change and in fact it may not happen at all because this doesn't require any particular developer or any particular homeowner to build a two family it just says you have the flexibility to do it if that's what the market demands that's what you want to build that's what you think is best for your own investment in your property were there other questions in the address in that no I think I think there were I think you got to most of them and again we can follow up with with a list I'll at this point what I'd like to do is run through my fellow board members and see following public comment if there are any other questions you would like to specifically ask any court to follow up on or address prior to when we deliberate on this on April 4 know that we are we're not going to have deliberation this evening this is just for any additional questions or guidance that you'd like to provide at this time so we'll start with Ken hi Annie thank you for that comment I do have one question that if you don't mind doing a little research on and getting back to us on and that one is where this has been enacted in other states or in other areas what has what has the outcome been or you know what what what have they found uh pluses or minuses you know uh you know I heard talk that all california has eliminated that I also heard rumors that um washington or or in the seattle area is also the same way uh there are other areas that have done this and what was the outcome and how long has it been it just to be another uh more information for us to talk about and be uh and so we're not making haste judgments here that's all had Richard great thank you Ken uh gene thanks just a couple quick things I really appreciated Annie's um response that uh she just gave I just want to I think add on to that a little bit because a lot of um people tonight said you know we have to do something about stopping these huge single family homes from getting built and the problem is that the state law does not allow us to impose any sort of limit on the size of a single family home that would get built that's pretty clear in the state zoning code however it only applies to single family homes so we could and this is why I raised it uh earlier we could impose size limits on the duplexes and the two families which would I think have the effect of at least having somewhat less expensive homes than they otherwise would have and somewhat smaller footprints than they otherwise would have so um yeah I don't have any particular questions I just wanted to you know pick you back on what Ms. LaCorte just said thank you thank you Gene um Melissa um Madam Chair we're only asking questions of the proponent at this point correct okay um or the department if you have any questions for Jenny or um Kelly okay thanks um maybe this is for the proponent just going forward I think to echo what Rachel you said at the beginning of the conversation to really consider how um outreach happens because you can probably tell from these conversations there's a lot of information and people pick up up from different areas so how can you better you know kind of communicate the essential pieces of it and get people familiar with it um and I think the other thing that I I guess I heard and even from my own you know kind of experience sharing this with other people um also being able to explain well enough for people the ADU and you know two family and how that kind of you know the differences and the benefits or you know comments of those are a couple of things I've heard from other people as well so thank you great thank you Melissa Steve thank you Madam Chair um I have one comment and that and two questions um one for the proponent and one for staff uh one is I I do want to uh express some gratitude for to Ms. LaCorte every it seems like every year we have discussions where people are concerned about housing affordability and you know the escalator that's been going up and up and up and up for the last 20 years um and somehow we never can seem to agree on what um you know what to do about this but it does take I think a lot of uh it takes a certain amount of courage to propose something like this because it's you know it's it's something different and it's going to be controversial having said that um two my two questions of one well the first is more of a suggestion I think for the proponent given I I think I fall into the same category as Mr. Lau where it would be interesting to have some data on where similar changes have been enacted I know that Washington State um you know allows multifamily by right in cities over a certain size California has been mentioned uh Minneapolis was I think the first large city in the United States to allow multifamily by right and that's been a few years ago so there may be you know there's probably a good chance that there is some data to go on now my question for staff is um have there been any ad use permitted yet you know since we passed the bylaw you know last time meeting no there have not been any ad use permitted there have been no applications for accessory dwelling units um and nothing permitted either thank you great thank you um okay so Annie I think I would just again as I mentioned earlier I'd echo um Melissa's question I think it'll be important to address um outreach outreach for sure yeah yeah um so you know I think there there are a couple of really good comments to to to take a look at here um we can certainly follow up with again the list of questions that we've provided with you and if they're um in taking a look at those if if there is some additional information you'd like to send to the board prior to the fourth we certainly would be more than happy to receive that um otherwise we will discuss at that time great thank you Rachel I just want to mention one other thing for um sure public consumption for the future my I'm not Mrs I'm Ms my husband's got a different last name and um I would appreciate the public taking note of that in future great thank you for the clarification you're welcome great all right thank you again for all the work you put in and for joining us this evening I appreciate it all right uh so with that we will now move to article 28 which is a zoning by law amendment for enhanced business districts and at this time I will turn it over to uh Jenny Rage uh to discuss the um memo that was provided by the Department of Planning and Community Development thank you Rachel I'm going to share my screen and give a quick presentation and then I'll turn it back to the board with any questions or comments great thank you okay can see that yes yes thank you all right so I'm going to talk about the zoning by law amendment that addresses enhanced business districts um I'm going to give this sort of overview and then I'll get into the details of the actual amendment so this is applicable to only properties that are within the business zoning districts can you hear me okay I can there's a little feedback I think that there might be one or two people with their microphones um unmuted if you unless you're Jenny if you could please mute your microphone that would be great I think I might have taken care of it okay um all right only properties within the business zoning districts proposals for new development or redevelopment of course those are things that come before this board um and uh this would not be applicable to any existing commercial spaces with frontage that already would exceed the dimensional requirements those would be exempt so we looked into this a little bit more broadly um Kelly did some research at uh as to other communities both in the intercore in metropolitan Boston and then also um other communities throughout the country and found that um it is what we're talking about doing is compliant with recommendations and standards that come from a group called the congress for new urbanism which is essentially they create standards and recommendations and designs um around smart growth um and so one of the things around smart growth is good design um and so that's one one of the places that we looked uh for some precedent uh we also noted that this bylaw amendment would expand upon the requirements that were described in the site standard section as adopted last year by this board um and town meeting um through the industrial zoning uses um those amendments specifically gave a sort of a suite of standards that would apply to any new development or reconstruction in those districts um so the proposed amendment is really aiming to encourage pedestrian activity and maintain a more active streetscape while also limiting the amount of ground floor spaces that are occupied by banks or offices or lobbies essentially non-active uses so the proposed amendment itself um is in uh development standards it applies to new construction additions over 50 of the existing footprint or debris development and it would be required to i'm going to actually scroll through um to provide a minimum transparency on the ground floor to make all facades visible to ensure that each ground floor uh storefront in a building has a clearly defined primary entrance um to ensure that any lobby entrances for upper story uses are optimally located and well defined um the primary building entry is connected by an accessible surface to the public right of way or the sidewalk lobbies are limited in both width and total area to preserve ultimate ultimately preserve uh floor space for other uses and as i noted existing commercial spaces with frontage that exceeds these requirements would be exempt and that's i'm actually going to pause there and see if the board has any questions that pretty much walk through the bylaw amendment great thank you gently you're welcome great uh so we'll start with kin any questions uh for jenny oh i'm generally supportive of this great thank you jean yes i'm generally supportive to have a number of questions um some of them are just wording changes i don't know if you want me to go through them now jenny or if you'd just like me to send you changes afterwards um i'll leave that up to rachel but i will note that it's probably obvious from hopefully the memo we did make some wording changes based upon feedback that came from the zoning bylaw working group and they are highlighted hopefully that was clear when it came through uh in the novice agenda but um are there other things beyond those edits okay so rachel what would you like to do sure jean i would say if it's um small adjustments that you could send us to jenny but if there's anything that's substantive that it would probably be helpful for the board to to to hear those changes yeah let me just mention the ones that i think are the most substantive great thank you under the standards um the second bullet which starts all facades visible from a public right of way the second sentence says no blank facades are permitted and is that no blank facades on any side of the building or only no blank facade that faces a public way it gets that face as a public way we need to okay so we need to modify that a little bit in the um in the next bullet talks about a primary entrance that faces the principal street so i'm thinking of a building that's on the corner and it has storefronts on two sides so there may be a principal street there may be two principal streets so i think we need to slightly change that so that um it's clear that if there are storefronts i'm thinking for example the building at the corner of um massive and lake street whether some businesses face lake some businesses face massive if we consider massive the principal street we have a problem with this piece um let me see if there's anything else that i think are oh so i'll say that the others are wording changes that i'll send you i don't think they're particularly problematic but the one that the zoning pilot working group mentioned is if you look at the purpose one of the purposes is to eliminate the amount of ground floor space occupied by banks offices lobbies non active well this does a good job i think with the lobbies but it doesn't i don't really see how this limits the amount of floor space occupied by banks and offices which is one of the observations made by another member of zoning by a low working group not me but i think there's a little bit of a mismatch so either take out some of those change the purpose a little bit or add something about banks and offices that's really helpful jean um i have one question rachel and then one suggestion i'll start with the suggestion actually um the last point that was made but i i i agree with that point actually and i don't think that this change is the the use per se but maybe it should just say non active uses you know and then that just covers it because it's not it's not banks or offices lobbies even i mean we we make the points about lobbies and the standards but i put that back to the board potentially if you're depending upon where this goes um that it could just state non active uses how would you i would review jenny i don't like the word bank and offices put in there jenny and lobby how would you define non active uses for purposes of i guess that's a good point um short of saying i think we use you know limited um well i need to think about it and i don't want to take the time here to do that let me let me think about that the question that i had though is um i think it's actually an important one that you raised about mass avon lake also um 117 broadway there are a number of cases actually where we've we've we've approved buildings on corner lots there's actually like we were yeah so i think how we deal with corner lots is a really good question i might just put that back to the board about how you want to deal with that probably deserves its own bullet point under the standards as a sort of standalone issue um so maybe you know again to think about a little bit more i think those are really good points yeah there are buildings throughout town i just used the one quarter of mass and lake as an example but you know park av and massive has that you know and you know if i thought some more i think of some others also yeah yeah multiple buildings that have been approved on corner lots so yeah so okay those those are my comments and jenny i'll send you the what i think are only minor wording changes and if they're not i apologize okay thank you gene thanks great thank you um okay so uh we can jenny did you want us to follow up on the question regarding the ground uh storefronts and the question about the principal street now or do you want us to follow up on that separately i think we could go through the rest of the board comments and then i'll follow up it's outstanding and figure out what to do and let the public i think there's only at the moment there's one hand raised just so okay great we'll circle back to that one um after public comment then so melissa any uh questions for uh jenny hi jenny um thanks for putting this together so just i'm curious on how it's only for the applied to new construction additions existing footprints so i guess where i'm coming from is when there's a change of use for example how is that handled it wouldn't apply unless they're doing something significant with reconstruction it would not apply and remind me what the significant threshold is i think it's 50 percent that's what it says okay and that and again sorry i feel like part of um what i'm thinking is that some of this is under new construction i understand that when there's a significant investment but when there's the smaller changes that you know we have talked about here i know you know one of the arbs on the bank uses that one concerns me and that's a change of view so this wouldn't apply could it apply or should it you know i guess throwing it back to the board should it be applicable in that sense could you i'm sorry could you repeat that one more time melissa well i guess i'm trying to figure out if it should include um when applicability for a change of use okay let's come back to that one um when we also talk about corner lots since that's a question for the board if that's okay with you that's fine okay uh steve any questions for jenny uh no there's one follow-up remark about um non-active uses um you know it it does feel you know it does it i would struggle with how to personally struggle with how to define that so i'm you know i i can sympathize there the only place i know of that has that i'm aware of that has something like this is uh cambridge essential square business district where they regulate banks and it's basically on a certain percentage no more than a certain percentage of a block face can be composed of banks or financial institutions uh at least that's if my memory serves me correctly i don't know if we wanted to you know consider possibly going down that route but it is you know it it it is it is it is one idea too we could consider great thank you steve um and jenny i'll just follow up i know that we're going to talk a little bit about non-active uses and lobbies um the term lobbies is a potentially a bit of a challenge when you think about hotel lobbies which can be active uses and um you know obviously is something that we recently permitted which i don't know if the right move is to uh minimize the size of those so when we get back to that that's just something that i'll throw in there as well any other questions um for for jenny um before we move to public comment all right uh so any member of the public wishing to speak on um on this warrant article please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your screen this is again article number 28 um i'll call on you in the order the hands are raised and we will start with steve more uh yes thank you more piedmont street um just one quick question um what is the intent and purpose of speaking to the entrance for the upper floors to be optimally located i don't understand that uh thank you for the question um why don't we go ahead and um answer that one i think that that is a is a good point of clarification other people may have questions about um jenny do you want to speak to that one i'm happy to but if you want to i'll be happy i'll let you speak to it and i'll add sure so um i think with with that particular citation um it's really um looking to identify for you know for example for a mixed use property where you have the residential entry and the lobby um as opposed to the um any entrances for for storefronts um you know ensuring that you are optimizing that location and um uh ensuring that the the storefronts have um are provided to the public in a way that is um highly visible and that the the lobbies are um are not uh kind of bifurcating the the different the different uh storefront uh sections in terms of the facade but jenny go ahead and um i'm sure you have additional color that you'd like to add there actually i i liked the way that you you faced all of that um you know i think that that's kind of the key we we don't want to see basically dead space on storefronts you know when we walk down mass have or broadway we want to have yeah we want to have something that makes us want to visit that store something that pulls us in if it's something that is just sort of you know blank space or just a window that sort of doesn't have any engagement anything you know product or anything that's sort of bringing luring you inside that's sort of the that's that inactive sort of use of the space and something that's sort of not well optimized which is i think the word that you used um so this is sort of aiming to and in a small way try to limit the amount of that kind of space in our storefronts the other thing is our storefronts are very small there's not there's not that much room you know when you if you walk down mass have you'll see the storefronts are not that wide there's not that much space to optimize so why would we not then want them to be fully optimized so this is basically trying to get at that of course in a larger scale redevelopment you'd want to you'd want to see even more of that and so some of the points that we've made about the mixed use developments that have been approved um the hotel i mean there's a lot of different examples where the board has tried their best through design um to encourage those you know that sort of activity and engagement at the street level but there's only so much that we can do so this this is an attempt to try to get at um more of that in the actual criteria and in the requirements i hope that helps to answer some of your question steve uh so uh madam chair i think then it does thank you both that that helps me out quite a bit i think um you might want to consider more words than just optimized because you don't know what is being optimized and i think what you're telling me here if i understand you correctly is you're optimizing the street busyness and presentation of the storefront as interesting and welcoming just i'm not saying use all those words but optimizing if you just say optimize you know what you're optimizing for and for a moment i thought perhaps you met uh folks with uh other abilities and things like that i was unclear so so thank you thank you madam chair great thank you very much um gene and can do you mind if i take james Fleming's comment um unless you have something specific to to that one gene you see you nodding your head did you want to go ahead then yeah i i think i just wanted to also say to steve we have had some buildings come before us in the past few years when the entire front was storefront but there were second and third um levels so they would sort of have to be on the side of the back for offices or for apartments so if we didn't so we have to allow for that because it both helps the streetscape and it allows the second and third floors to be accessed great thank you gene that's a that's a really good point kin did you have something else to add just something real quick uh the way we look at things is there's two programs one that supports uh the misuse above and then uh what's the program below and we're and then we want to put the primary uh program below which is activates the uh the street edge uh is the primary that's how i how i see these things and that's how we usually how i usually look at it we look at a project we want to keep that program on the first floor that activates the street life but engages the street edge uh the primary great thank you uh great thank you steve uh next we'll have james swimmin