Using a multifaceted approach, city officials and architectural planners last week discussed plans for adding and preserving thousands of units of housing within the city of Boston to help alleviate the area’s current housing crisis.

Michael Hicks, president of the Boston Society of Architects and principal at Domenech Hicks & Krockmalnic in Boston, said the issue of housing in the city, while recently receiving a lot of attention, is not a new one.

“Four to five years ago we identified that both middle- and high-income housing was a high need,” said Hicks, who moderated a discussion of housing zoning and funding issues at the annual Build Boston convention at the World Trade Center. “But we also saw that the money to build the housing was not an issue. The issue was the approval process developers have to go through.” Although a lot has changed since then, Hicks said, many of the same barriers exist for housing development and preservation.

To address those issues, Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development director spoke about a three-year plan, which will be officially published later this year, that the city is just beginning to implement.

“The three-year work plan the city is undertaking is the first one I know of where there is actually a work plan to follow,” said DND head Charlotte Golar Richie. “Usually when you see housing reports come out there are big conclusions about what the problem is, but they usually don’t have a work plan and end up collecting dust on a shelf somewhere.”

Richie said the city plan, which was developed and written up over the course of about six months, involves roughly 7,500 units of new housing in the city. “We tried to figure out how do we make tangible changes that affect this crisis, and I think by now we can all acknowledge that this is a crisis. We’re trying to do something about that.”

The city plan, she continued, involves “five Ps:” public housing, production, preservation, partnerships and performance.

“For public housing, we’re going to renovate every last one of the 1,100 units of vacant public housing in this city,” Richie declared. She estimated the cost of those renovations would be $8.6 million, which Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino committed to funding from Boston’s $30 million surplus property fund.

In the realm of production, Richie said the city would work with private companies to help bring new units of housing to the city, aiming for $1 billion in new development. Among other plans, the city would hire a permitting process ombudsman with whom developers could air their concerns and then work on finding solutions. “We want to streamline the permitting process to make it easier to do business with the city of Boston.” She added that she would like to see a more predictable schedule of community input. “That doesn’t mean we don’t want to work with neighbors right from the beginning, we just want to make sure there is an end point,” she said.

The city plans to help bring 2,100 units of new housing on line by making about 1,000 city-owned lots available for sale and reuse.

In terms of preservation of housing, the city will help 2,000 tenants become homeowners under the plan, as well as help 3,000 low-income homeowners hold on to their current homes in the face of financial difficulties. Richie also said plans call for preserving 75 percent of “at-risk” federal housing. “All this is going to take a lot of work, but it will get done,” she said.

To accomplish those goals, the city is relying on partnerships, Richie said. “We cannot do this alone. We have to work together.” Those partnerships include working with the private sector as well as the federal and state governments. Richie said she did not know yet what effect the recently passed income tax rollback would have on the availability of state funds for housing.

“Boston has set out some ambitious numeric goals for us,” she said. “But having goals matters, and teamwork counts, and I’m sure we can do this.”

Main Street Links
To do its part in helping to bring more housing to the city, the Boston Redevelopment Authority will work on expanding its planning efforts and working on changes in zoning policies.

Specifically, the BRA is working on a policy that would allow more housing units to be built where there is convenient access to public transportation, said Lynn Berkley, a planner for the BRA. Developers building near transportation centers could receive density incentives she said. Because of proximity to public transit, the city may require fewer parking spaces per unit, which could pave the way for more units to be built.

Berkley added that the BRA is continuing to look at ways to shorten the permitting process.

The Boston Society of Architects has also come up with a plan that complements the city’s efforts to bring more housing inventory to the community, according to BSA Housing Committee Chairman Alfred Wojciechowski, principal at CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares in Boston.

Earlier this year, the BSA unveiled its “From Main Streets to Boulevards” proposal that focused on zoning.

Using land in the vicinity of the Forest Hills MBTA station in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of the city as a test case, the BSA is hoping to show city leaders and potential developers how slight changes in existing zoning laws could jump-start an infusion of new housing. In addition to adding to the city’s housing stock, the plan would also create links between some of Boston’s “Main Street” areas by allowing for residential development in what are now viewed as underutilized areas.

By changing zoning and making better use of land, anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 units of housing could be built near the Forest Hills subway stop for example, the BSA estimated.

“We’re not looking at making changes in well-developed neighborhoods with a tightly woven fabric,” Wojciechowski said. “We’re taking a look at existing land and deciding strategically what is the most appropriate re-use of the site.”

He added that in addition to Boston, surrounding communities including Cambridge and Arlington are also re examining the zoning within their borders.

Richie said she hopes to post which city parcels are available for purchase online in an attempt to jump start the disposition process, but added that has been one of the challenges to the plan so far.

“We want these available online, and I’m amazed we’re not there yet,” she said. “We’re still in the hand-counting-the-
ballots stage, we have to get with this era.”

Another, more formidable, challenge facing her department, she added, is gaining neighborhood acceptance of the idea. “The neighborhoods want control,” she said. “They want to know who’s going to live there and where they come from, and they want to know what the housing is going to look like.”