001So, welcome everyone. I'm Jen Goldson. Um, how many of you have met me? I see so many familiar faces already in here. All right. So, for those of you who have not met me, I am uh a planning consultant. Austin and I work at my company. Our company name is JM Goldson. I founded it in 2006. So, this year is our 20th anniversary. Um, I started it. It's a woman business enterprise in the state of Massachusetts. one of the very few uh womenowned businesses that are focused just on community planning and community engagement. And I'm pretty sure I was I am the longest lasting female-owned business in the Commonwealth at this point. So, thank you for planning. Not for all businesses, but for planning, clarify that a little bit. Thank you. Um so, with that
002being said, I'm really happy to be here. I was very um honored to work on the comprehensive plan in Ashland for the last couple of years and many of you were involved in that process coming to meetings but also serving on the committee. Can you please raise your hand if you served on the committee? Thank you. And can you raise your hand if you were involved in any part of the plan whether it was a survey or meetings or anything? Perfect. Almost everybody thank you so much for that. And so we were very pleased when uh the town said they'd really like to work with us again on this housing plan because it really follows from the recommendations that came out of the comprehensive plan and um and it just made it easier for everybody
003to to have us continue the work uh having just done such an in-depth study and understanding of the community. So we're really pleased to be here. This is a short little planning project. Um it needs to be done in March. Uh, I believe that's right. Tell me if I'm misremembering the date. I think it's March because we're trying to get it approved before your current plan expires. And there just needs a little bit of a a review process between the planning board and the select board and then it goes to the state for approval. We've done a lot of these plans. Um, in fact, uh, three of our service areas. Um, one is comprehensive plans, which you you're already familiar with our work. The second is uh community engagement which you're also familiar with that
004aspect of our work. And then the third is anything about housing, housing zoning, housing production plans, housing trust action plans, uh RFPs for municipal property for housing, all of those things our firm does. So, we're really excited to be here and um and I think many of you, at least if you're familiar with me in the comp plan, you also know Austin because he was a key aspect. to you as our project manager. Um and Austin is here supporting this project as well. All right. So um today our I am going to do this presentation and it will be interactive but really the main bulk of what we want to do tonight is around the the perimeter of the room. We have all these boards and and I'll talk more about them in a little
005bit, but they basically uh are a list kind of scattered among several boards of the the strategies and the goals that Ashland had in the current comprehensive plan, the one we're trying to update. And so we wanted to get your feedback on are these still relevant and which ones are there new ideas you want to see incorporated. Um and so that's kind of the nature of the activities is to go around and we'll be kind of standing around as well. You can keep continue to chat with us but to provide your feedback on the direction for this next plan. So that's the main thing is to hear your ideas. Um and then the product of tonight will be a set of ideas. Some of maybe carried over from the prior plan, some grabbed right or
006many grabbed right directly from the comprehensive plan. And then maybe you have some new ideas that uh that are in alignment with the comprehensive plan, but maybe they're not specifically stated in it, and that's okay, too. Um, and so that product will be a strategy list and goals list that we'll bring to the planning board and then ultimately the select board in the form of this plan. So, it's a quick little process and um I want you to know that um you all but mostly people who aren't here and I and I know we're being recorded so that's wonderful. um anyone who couldn't come but wants to participate in this process, we've actually just created the same forum asynchronously online and once we have the video from this session, we can post that video as
007well so people can hear the presentation and of course we can post the presentation slides too. What we have found since the COVID pandemic is that people do still like to come out and talk to each other in person, but a lot of other people for various reasons participate online. And so we wanted to make sure that this material was also online. So we're mirroring that. And one thing that sometimes people do, and I'm not asking you to do this, but people are going to ask me if you can just do this at home, listen to the presentation and then go home. You can do that [laughter] if you want to. Um, but you can also participate here. So, it's an eitheror. Um, you wouldn't want to do both because it's the same material. Does
008that make sense? Okay, perfect. And, uh, I can put this Q up QR code up again later at the end if you if you want to grab it at the end. We're going to keep that open till February 10th. We thought, why not leave it open for a while? we can continue our work as we're waiting for those results and then um and then we'll grab everything else off of that online forum and finalize the strategy list after February 10th. All right. So we've also incorporated when we talk about housing in particular um planners like myself and I have definitely been uh at fault doing this we tend to use jargon and acronyms and technical terms and you know very smart people who have a lot of education and come from all different backgrounds are
009like scratching their heads what the heck is Jen talking about. So, what we've incorporated uh into the presentation are these did you know slides and they're basically uh general slides trying to demystify jargon so we can all be talking about the same thing. Um they explain common planning and housing terms. They clarify sometimes they clarify like if we're going to talk about inclusionary zoning which is one of the slides you'll see we talk first about well what does that even mean? Um and then we want to try to create a shared understanding so that we're all talking about the same thing. If we're talking about affordable housing, what do we mean by that? If we're talking about extremely lowincome households, what do we mean by that? So, we're going to have these do you did
010you know slides throughout the presentation. And I encourage you, especially at those slides, I view this as a give and take. I don't view myself as wanting to be a talking head up here for 25 minutes. So, especially on these did you know slides. If there's something you're still scratching your head about or you want more information on, just ask. You don't even have to raise your hand. You could just blurt it out. and uh and I'll try to remember to repeat your question in this and then answer it. Okay. Okay. Perfect. All right. So, first did you know slide. Um a Massachusetts housing production plan is actually a a term that the state uses. I don't love the the name because it's not just about production. It seems like it is, but it's really
011not. Um it's about a lot of things, but the main thing that has to be in order for the state to approve it is a way to achieve your 10%. And guess what? you're almost there and I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment but um it needs to talk about how you're going to if you are already at the 10% and I'll talk more about what does Jen mean by 10% I will demystify that in a minute but for those of you who understand and know this 10% and 40b and subsidized housing inventory I'm going to say you're almost there and this plan needs to help you figure out how are you going to stay there or how are you going to achieve that depending on what your community what place you're
012in when we're doing this plan. So, let me ask my first question. Who is already familiar with the term, and it could be any of these terms, 40B, comprehensive permit or subsidized housing inventory? So, raise your hand if you're like, "Yeah, I pretty much know what Jen is talking about right now a little bit." Okay. Okay. Perfect. So, I have a slide where I'm going to talk more about the subsidized housing inventory, but let me just say for now that Massachusetts is one of the few states in the country back in 1969, it enacted mass general law. It's a section in chapter 40B. You can look this up. And it basically says that every community in the state needs to have or I shouldn't say needs, there's a goal, a statewide goal for every community
013in the state to have at least 10% of its yearround housing stock >> designated as affordable. And I'm going to put that in quotes and I'm going to tell you why in a minute. Um, and year round is more important in in some other communities like Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard that that but basically think of all your housing, your single family homes, apartments, condominiums, two family homes. All of those uh homes are called units and each unit adds up to a certain number that you have in your community and 10% of that should be designated on the subsidized housing inventory. Now, I put affordable in quotes a minute ago. Does anybody know why I did that? Yeah, tell me in brief because a lot of them aren't affordable, right? Correct. So the way the
014state wrote um wrote this law, it gives an incentive and I'm try I'm trying to understand why it did why the state did this back in long time ago. Um they gave an incentive for rental housing because a lot of communities weren't producing enough rental homes, enough apartments or rental single family. It doesn't have to be an apartment. And so they have an incentive in there saying that if you approve a development that is rental, if at least 25% there's a couple variations to that, but I'm going to stick with 25% of those units in that development are affordable are actually affordable, then the whole every single unit, even the luxury rental count on that subsidized housing inventory. So if you I'm just going to make the math easy. If you have a 100 unit
015apartment complex under this program, 25 of those units are actually deed restricted affordable. The other 75 units can be luxury market rate and they will be counted on the subsidized housing inventory. Not so for condos, not so for other ownership. Does that I know you may have thoughts on that, but do you understand the concept of it? Okay, that's why I put affordable in quotes. So 10% of your housing stock, the goal is that 10% be listed on the subsidized housing inventory in any way it counts. Even if they're luxury rental. Okay, we can talk more about that if you're still like, I don't know, I thought I understood what she was saying and now I'm totally lost. Um, but the other thing that a housing production plan, and this is my favorite part, is
016we actually get to hear from people. We get to talk about housing and we get to hear like what are your concerns? what are you uh you know what are you wanting to see in the future what are you not wanting to see in the future and that's the way we've structured this process um you get to identify future housing policies and by policies does anybody know what I mean when I when we talk about local policies what what's one kind of local policy zoning you could have initiatives like uh a program like a home buyer first-time home buyer program you can do that at the local level too so when I talk about polic policies. I'm talking about both policies and initiatives. Um, and then you can also by having this this plan approved
017by the state, you also uh increase your access to state grants. You get more points basically when you apply for grants. Um, there's something where they in the state, maybe you know this already, they consolidate the grants into this one application called the onetop for growth. and a lot of housing plans and a lot of other plans and and other work is funded by that. So, you'll be able to get more state money, be more competitive for it. All right. Does that in general, you may not know every ins and out of what a housing production plan is, but did you did that help you learn a little bit more about what we're doing in this plan? Yes. Any questions before I move on? All right. Okay. [clears throat] So the other thing I want
018to talk about is the comprehensive plan. So the comprehensive plan is brand new. You just adopted it. You worked for a couple years on it and your community worked really hard. You got amazing um public participation and your goals, your vision and a bunch of strategies are captured in this plan. And some of them, you know, quite a few actually relate to housing and housing policy. And um so one thing is making sure that this plan builds on that. It's fresh work. Um so we really want to take a careful look at that. And I have some more detailed slides on what's in that and what's related to housing a little bit more before I get you into these activities so that even if you don't have the whole plan fresh in your mind, you'll
019at least have your thoughts, your memory jiggered a little bit about what's relevant to housing. Um but the vision as it relates to housing we just highlighted here on the screen um includes enhance downtown vibrancy through a mixeduse village and to manage neighborhood evolution by creating contextsensitive residential product projects. So not just any project but contextsensitive looking at design uh site planning location etc. Are there any architects in the room? Okay. I usually get one or two. Okay. So, um anyway, contextsensitive is a little bit of a term of art, but does that make sense that what how I'm describing contextsensitive? That was something that the committee talked a lot about. We we want to promote contextsensitive design. Okay. [clears throat] All right. So, Austin, let's hear some of these. And actually, I'm going to
020have you read. What are a few that are at the heart of the matter? some some things that folks wrote. >> Yeah. So, there are there are a number of different themes on here. I picked a few that felt like they grabbed at a few different angles of what people were talking about. The first one I saw was what people can afford to buy is not aligned with what developers build. So, there's a little bit of a challenge with market rate development. Next one I saw was inclusionary zoning bylaw. So, that's one way to get some affordable housing through the market production of housing. traffic definitely comes up when new units are being produced. Real affordability real is underlined. So I think that kind of speaks to that first one again that developers aren't always
021necessarily able to build market rate that is truly affordable to people. The next one that I saw is housing with a size and scale that can seem like it belongs in a New England town and affordability. And the next one I saw was quality of life. It all comes together in housing, which is part of why we really love doing this work. >> Great. Is there any um comments that you wrote that you hoped that we'd read that we skipped over? Anybody like Oh, Austin didn't read mine. Yeah, go ahead. What was yours? Not enough homes. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, thank you for reminding us. So, a town has a net zero plan and energy and sustainability, energy efficiency, all very important. Residential properties are one of the the biggest contributors. Yes. Providing
022home ownership, condo ownership, ability to build assets, not just rental properties. Yeah. Thank you. Anything else that people want to make sure is mentioned? Yes. Yeah. Thank you. So, talking about three families and two family zones that seem to fit in and you don't need to create these big buildings, you can do a more gentle gentle density that is >> Yeah. making sure that you're not uh taking advantage and having illegal situations that cause dangerous situations. Right. Okay. Perfect. Let's move on then. Okay. So, we're um we're moving through this planning process very quickly. Um it looks like a long squiggly line, but actually the last, you know, from where we are now to the end is only going to take a couple of months just because we're trying hard to meet the deadline so
023that you don't um lapse in having uh an approved plan. But we are at the ideating stage. So, we've done the something that's called the comprehensive needs assessment. We have to pull a lot of new census data. We did a lot of that for the the comp plan, too, but we updated all of that and and for the housing production plan, it actually needs to be more detailed. So, we've done that and we've brought it to the planning board for an initial presentation. Um and uh and now we're really ideulating where do you want to go? What what kinds of strategies and goals do you want to incorporate into this plan? And from that, we're going to be doing all this other stuff. We're going to be writing it up and proposing ideas based on
024what you tell us. Also based on what's in the comprehensive plan because we want to ensure that there's really strong alignment. Um testing meaning going before the planning board and presenting initial ideas, going before the select board, presenting initial ideas so that we get some feedback, asking for public feedback as well at that stage. And then ultimately the planning board and select board will agree and decide well these are the strategies we want in our plan. And then organizing and committing is basically creating an action plan saying over the next five years and note the comp plan for those of you who may remember or or not is a 10-year plan. This is shorter term. It's five years. Um how do you organize the next five years and who does these things? Some of it
025will fall if it's zoning, it'll fall to the planning board and the and the planning department. Other other initiatives, maybe the council on aging or or it depends on what it is. So, we'll organize that action plan. It'll be a matrix. And then committing is basically getting approvals. So, we need to get local approvals and then we send it to the state and they can take several months. Usually, it's quicker than that, but it it all depends on what else they have on their plate. Now, I just want to say one important thing that I want to make sure you all know is that when you have a housing production plan, you approve it. Um, and it gives you certain benefits. If you fall below your 10%, you can get certified as making some incremental
026progress. So, it gives you that benefit. It gives you that I remember I I mentioned a couple slides ago the grants, you get more favor um competitiveness for those state grants. Um, but the thing it doesn't do is require you to implement all of the strategies. They're recommendations. Uh, but by voting to approve it, you're not binding yourself. You can still meet the 10% or even the incremental production in ways that you hadn't even thought of in the plan. Just having the plan is what gives you that ability for that protection. Does that make sense? And sometimes that eases the room because they're like, "Okay, we can think of ideas, but if you know, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out." Um, but we certainly want to do our best to think of
027ideas that will be useful to you. Okay. So, I'm going to just touch very briefly on this needs analysis. It's a very long document and there's a lot in there, so I had to kind of pick and choose what to present. Um, I believe is this on the is the needs analysis chapters on the website at this point? Yeah. Okay, good. So, if you really want to read through the whole thing, you're very welcome to. Who has already? Very good. Thank you. All right. So, some of this will be repeat then um for some of you, but if you want to read it or even skim it, the rest of it's on on um the the town website. And where what page would that be? On the planning board or Great. Great. So, if people
028didn't hear that, it's on the planning board page on the town website and then there's a link that goes to a dedicated page for the housing production plan and you can find it there. All right. So, your population is expected to grow and you've been becoming more ethnically and racially diverse and you'll continue to do that. But the one main thing that you all probably already know because this is not unique to Ashlin is that your population is aging and that does affect your housing needs. Um the average household size, meaning how many people live in a home together, um will decrease as people age. That's a very natural thing to happen. Kids move on. Spouses maybe are no longer with us. Um how many of you live by yourself right now? A few of
029you. Um how about in with one other person in your house? Most of you. How about three people? and four, five. I don't know if I got everybody. Did I miss anybody? Okay. Um, yeah. And then in the next five years, your situation may or may not change. Sometimes we don't know. My situation just changed um about eight, I don't know, two years ago, 18 months, whatever. I was a fourperson household and now I'm two because my kids are adults and moved out of the house, which is crazy, but that happens. Um, all right. So, the population will grow and uh the composition will change. So, those are the main things. We find that in almost every town we work in. Household trends. There's a we looked at your household size, meaning what we just
030asked you. Do you live with one person, two person, three persons? And then we looked at the houses and the apartments and the condos and everything, your housing stock and how big are those places. And what we find often is a mismatch. You know, a lot of um uh communities like Ashlin were built at a time where the preference was for these larger, you know, two, three, fourbedroom, fivebedroom, sometimes single family homes. Can I just ask how many of you live in a home with at least three bedrooms? Almost everybody. So, that kind of proves my point. That doesn't mean that you're not in a home that you should be in. I'm not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that sometimes as people's households get smaller and they find that the maintenance of
031these larger homes, the energy costs of these homes, the um the yard, you know, lawnmowing, snow plow, all these things add up. Accessibility uh accessibility needs can change. Sometimes just even walking up one step into your home or walking up to the second floor for the bathtub can be a challenge. So, for all these reasons, sometimes people prefer to have another choice. Not saying they have to, not saying they will, but some people will. Um, and that's what we heard a lot about. And you'll see when I go over some of the comprehensive plan strategies. They talk about the needs of seniors and they talk about the needs just to have options. And so, we like to say it's a freedom of choice. Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything, but it's do you have the
032freedom of choice to stay in this community as you age? And do you have those housing options that you feel will support you as you age? So, that's a question that we have um in many communities including including in Ashlin. Does that question resonate for people? Raise your hand if you're like, "Yeah, I kind of get what Jen's saying." Okay, great. Um so, I want to talk about a term and I I can't read your name, but um is it John? uh the fellow who talked about the two families and the three families. Jeff Jeff um talked about a term that I was going to define. So if people heard this term missing middle housing or gentle density is another term for it. It basically describes smaller non-s single family homes. So options between there's
033this great graphic that I didn't put on the slide. Sometimes I do, but there's a great graphic by I think the architect's name is Daniel Perilleki and he has the single family on one side and then the big apartment complex on the other side and in between there's all different kinds of housing. It's not one or the other. There's, you know, two families, accessory apartments, there's three families, there's smaller smaller multif family. And so we call that one term of art is missing middle housing. You'll hear people call it or gentle density. And that's kind of what you were talking about, Jeff, when you're talking about that contextsensitive, you know, there's other things we can do, not just the big developments. Um, and then, uh, I just have a note here that I highlighted that
034these can pro bridge a gap between single family homes and larger apartments and it can provide for just more naturally affordable. Um because if you just look at the land cost and along with all of the energy costs and maintenance costs of a single family, it's it's different as you get more units in a building. So if you have a two family, when I first owned property, a home, it was a two family and we got income from the rental unit and we lived upstairs and that was a much more even though we paid a little more for the two family than we would have for one single because we were able to subsidize more than half of our mortgage with the rental income. that became affordable to me and my husband just starting out
035when you know we were you know just just out of school and not really able to afford something um like a single family. So it just can it was not capital A affordable deed restricted housing but it just was a little bit more affordable for someone in our position. Can anyone relate to that? A few people. Okay. Not everybody but does that make sense? Yeah. So that's what I mean when we say more affordable. Um, I do try to use small lowercase A when I'm talking about things like market rate properties that are not deed restricted, but they're just smaller or for other reasons more affordable than the capital A that would be deed restricted. Okay. All right. So, in Ashlin, we did look at what we would consider your missing middle housing. Um, we
036just said two to four units. You we could have gone up higher. We could have gone to six units or eight units, but but we saw more of a prevalence in that. um two family, three family and then the fourunit buildings. And so this graphic just shows that 92.4% and this is an estimate based on 2024. So that does not include new development that may have occurred. I understand that we are now in 2026. The data is always a little bit behind. So this is a little bit different. But from the most recent data that we were able to look at, it was about 92.4% single family. And then that you know the more than eight units at the time um was only three%. I think it has changed now especially with some of the
037newer approvals that are also aren't counted here but that's what it was what two years ago. Okay. Um affordability and cost burden. These are other um terms I want to talk about. Yes. These I believe and Austin can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe these are calculated by units. You can do it either way. >> Oh, I'm sorry. >> Thank you. >> Correct. Correct. Correct. And I think Austin, most of the time we put both counts in our full report. And I believe we did that, but if we didn't for some reason and you can't find it, yeah, just let me know. Let me know. But I think both are in there because we understand that people look at it different ways and want both numbers. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So, affordability and cost
038burden. I want to I want to talk about this concept of cost burden. Is that a term people have heard before? So cost burden is another term of art and I should have a did you know slide on this one but basically what it means is that you're spending more than 30% of your gross annual household income towards housing costs. That means you know your your utilities, your insurance, um mortgage, rent and um we look at that as just a benchmark to understand who's spending too much and will they continue to be in a in a stable situation if something happened like their car breaks down or they have a major tooth extraction that they have to go through like I did two weeks ago completely unanticipated and now I'm like $4,000 less money I
039than you know this month than I expected to have. So things like that happen and you don't know when they're coming. And so when someone is spending more than this benchmark, it puts them more at risk. You know, can I, you know, I was lucky. I could still afford my mortgage, but someone else maybe couldn't if that happened to them. Um, so that's all we mean by cost burden. It doesn't mean there's a problem at this very moment, but it means that you're more at risk. And you're even at more at risk if you're severely cost burdened. Does anybody know what that definition is? For severely 50% if you're spending half your gross income on uh housing costs, then you're considered severely costburden and that puts you at even more risk. And so what we
040have seen um we wanted to talk a little bit about how Ashland's I'm going to get back to cost burden in a minute but we wanted to talk a little bit about how Ashlin Ashlin's median income compares to the region. Um I don't know if this will surprise you or not but the region actually has a much stronger um income change basically 21% uh increase in the region between 2014 and 2023 whereas Ashlin decreased and this is adjusted for gross income decreased by 5.5%. The region is the Boston metropolitan. I think it includes like 101 communities. It's this huge Boston Boston, Quinsey, Cambridge metropolitan region. Yeah. Yeah. So that region as a whole, the income grew. And so when I heard Austin Reed, you know, the the homes the market rate, even maybe some of
041those affordable homes don't seem very affordable. That's because the affordability is benchmarked on the region. It's not benchmarked for you, but you're not. It's a humongous region and it doesn't make sense when you look micro at a community like Ashlin. It doesn't make sense to benchmark it there because it means that if something is built that's affordable to the region, it's not affordable to many of Ashland's residents who might need that housing. So, that's one thing I wanted to point out. Does that surprise anybody? No. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. That would be a strategy if you were to adopt inclusionary zoning, which I will define in a few minutes. If you were to adopt a policy like that, you could say that we want those units to be affordable benchmark to what's affordable to
042Ashland. Maybe that would be 60% of the area median income instead of the 80% or maybe even lower. You could even benchmark it to move with the median income of of Ashland. You have you have some control there when you create a local policy. Um it's not the same with 40B. 40b basically will give you Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I I want to use this other term which I may have already said a minute ago. 60% of the area median income, 80% of the area median income. What is Jen talking about? So let's demystify that a little bit. So um the area median income, just raise your hand if you already know what this means. A lot of you, not everybody. So the area median income looks at that big region that I just talked
043about and it benchmarks uh for a fourperson household. And right now this changes every year. So we just got the newer numbers for you. Um and this is created by the federal government. So it's the US United States Department of Housing and Urban Development creates this these numbers every year. And so in the Boston, Cambridge, Quinsey metro area, the median income for a four-person household is $160,900. And when you look at um we just talked about 80% AMI. Does anybody know why we said 80% AMI? Exactly. So, I just said many affordable housing programs benchmark at that 80%. But 40B is one of them. And so, when you look at that, what I want you to look at is it's actually different depending on how many people live in the household. So, if you're a
044single person living alone and you make 92,650 a year gross annual income, you could potentially qualify for affordable housing. If you make uh if you're let's say there were a lot of people two people living in their households in this room. So if you're a twoerson household and you make 105,8850 you could potentially qualify or less you could potentially qualify. Now does anybody know why I say you could potentially qualify? Anybody know why I'm saying that caveat? Assets. Yeah. So if you're if you own a million-doll home, you're not going to qualify, right? So they look at assets too, but this is just giving you the the income. Okay. So the other term I wanted to teach is um extremely low income and that's the 30% of the area median income. And I want to
045point that out because there's an important finding in the needs assessment that I'll show you on the next slide. But I want you to know what that means before I talk about it. So if you're a single person living alone and your gross annual income is 34,750 you could be cons or less you would be considered extremely low income and then it goes up. You can see these these are big enough to read right so I don't need to read them all but you can see it goes up by household size. So I'm saying that because when we looked at Ashlin's numbers we can look um and again this is even older than the one before. You can see it's 2021 because HUD does not update the it's called the CHAZ data. It doesn't update
046it as quickly as the census does. It's very frustrating to to planners like why is this so far behind? But this is the most recent data that we have. But it breaks it down by and this is Ashland. It breaks it down by residents of Ashland households and what their income is based on those categories that I was just talking about. So if you this bar here is the extremely low income category households in Ashland and what the colors mean and then it goes up. If you go left to right it goes up in income. So the 80% AMI is this 50 to 80%. This is the category that would most likely be able to afford a 40B affordable comprehensive permit affordable. But I want you to look at these shades of orange, yellow, and
047blue. So the dark blue is people in that income bracket that don't have a cost burden. They spend less than what amount of their income on housing costs. Yeah. Not cost burden. 165 households in Ashland. The 150 is moderately. They spend between 30% of their income but [snorts] not 50%. And that's the yellow golden. I don't know what to call that color. It looks peachy to you. It looks yellow on my screen. This one, 150 households. So, what's this larger one? 570 households are That's right. Severely cost burden. That's why I wanted to teach you what the extremely low income category meant because what we see when we look at this and we go up the scale here, we don't see quite as many households even living in that very low that 30 to 50
048and we see a lot of households in the low income, but most of them 700, they don't have a cost burden in Ashland, at least according to this estimate. And then we look at this um community preservation act. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about when I say the Community Preservation Act. Yeah, most of you, not all of you. So, it's a a local option grant program. You basically if you own property in Ashlin, you pay uh a little bit of your taxes toward this program and it can help fund things including affordable and community housing. And the CPA, Community Preservation Act, um defines community housing in this in this category up to that. I mean, you can go lower, but it allows it to be up to that moderate 80% AMI
049to 100% AMI. But you can see in that category, you have even less of a need. And you don't have much of a need in that 50 to 80. It's not nothing, but it's a lot less if you if you look over at that extremely low income. That's where your biggest need lies. Now, full disclosure, I don't know the assets of these people. It could be that many of them are living in million-dollar homes. I just don't know. We don't have that data. But that's something to consider. like you probably don't have 570 actual severely cost burden because they have assets and and equity and other things that they can get, you know, lines of credit and things like that. But this is the best data we have. Does this make sense in general? Okay.
050All right. Very good. So, um, I talked about this already. I should probably just move this slide up because I needed to find this before, but the subsidized housing inventory is that list that counts all the things that um are eligible toward your state goal of 10%. And what happens when you meet that or you're otherwise in safe harbor? There's a couple ways to make safe harbor, but I'm just going to talk about what happens when you meet that because you're just about to meet it. When you're over that 10% goal, it allows your local zoning board to deny unfriendly 40bs. You could still approve them if you think that they're a good idea. Um, but it also allows the zoning board to impose conditions that would other otherwise not be allowed. So, it basically
051gives you more control over those comprehensive permits. Um, and the reason I mention this, does this make sense just in general? Okay. The reason I mention this is because you are just about to exceed the 10%. So, the zoning board, and correct me if I misstate anything, Jasmine, because I know this is hot off the press, um, but the zoning board has recently approved two comprehensive permit 40bs. Um, one is the residents at Ashlin Crossing. It's 226 units that would count on the subsidized housing inventory with 57 affordable units. Does anybody know why I said they'd all count? Because they're rental and the whole thing will count. And then also the sanctuary is 250 units with 63 affordable and I believe that's also rental correct. Yes. So that whole thing will count. So this these
052two projects once they are counted according to our calculations and I just want to say the state's going to calculate this for you. Our calculation is not the law but according to our rough calculation you'll get beyond the 10%. We think you'll get about 11.4. So, you will meet 40B, the goal, the 10% goal. There are less than um I just looked this up. There are because it keeps changing, but I just looked it up. There are less than 27% of all the communities in the Commonwealth who meet that goal. Something like 95 communities or 96. So, and that doesn't count you yet. Congratulations. That's you may you may or may not you may have opinions about these projects, but that's a great goal that you met that. That's not something um to go unagnowledged.
053You're one of the minority. Okay. So, I just want to talk Oh, I skipped over this one. So, there is one that I believe is not correct. Jasmine is not is still pending. Um and this one is 55 West Union, 116 units with 29 affordable. So, I just thought I'd mention that to just let you know that this one is still pending. Okay. Um, so I also wanted to say like when do things count? So I I believe that both of those have to go to the concom. Is that right? They both do. Okay. So once the zoning board of appeals files uh with the town clerk their decision and all of the, you know, boxes are checked and the concom is signed off and all that and if it's not appealed, then that is
054the day whenever that happens, that's the day those units will count on your subsidized housing inventory. There's paperwork involved and the state has to approve it and the town has to put in all its paperwork. So, there might be a little lapse, but they approve it retroactively to the day the zoning board filed their written decision with the town clerk. So, that's the day you get to count those units. Now, there's a couple of benchmarks you need to meet in order to stay on the sub because obviously when the zoning board writes that opinion, the units aren't built yet. Anything could happen and what happens if they never get built? So, the state won't keep them on forever. So that the developer has one year to get the building permit in order. They can do
055it in longer. It just means that the units will fall off and then once they get the building permit they can come back on. But if the developer gets the building permit within one year then those units ah I keep pressing this by accident then those units will stay on the subsidized housing inventory. The same thing the certificate of occupancy also has a time frame. It's 18 months after the building permit. If the developer gets the CFO, people know that term, certificate of occupancy. If they get the CFO within 18 months of the building permit, then those units continue to stay on the subsidized housing. If they don't, they fall off until the occupancy is gotten and then they come back on. Okay? So, you might see some shifting depending on how those timelines work.
056Does that make sense? Okay. Is this helpful? Okay. I'm almost done. All right. So we want to hear from you. Um so we have around the room as I said earlier all these boards with the strategies from your current plan which is about to expire and um we just want to know what housing policies and initiatives do you want to carry forward if any you can also have new ideas. So we have um I think the boards go from left to right in order but you don't have to follow that um order. You can do them really in any order but they're numbered left to right. And the last one is about where you'd like to see development. Um, and the reason we ask that is because we have to um it's a requirement of
057the housing production plan that we have to not just say these general things about zoning and initiatives, but we actually have to pinpoint are there specific properties. They could be we have to look at both town-owned and privately owned properties where you'd either do zoning changes or do some kind of local initiative like a request for proposals to get development on a town owned property or um or another 40B. It could be a friendly 40b even if after you've met. So we have to say those we have to have at least one real property and we have to say that we looked at both private and public. Sometimes we look at the town own and we're like there's nothing here. we but we have to say we looked at it. Okay. So, I want you
058to think about both town owned property and private and then um we have to say are there areas that that the town would look to reszone. And so, I bring up the comprehensive plan because we've already looked at a lot of this in the comprehensive plan. This is something called your future land use um vision. Uh it's a map that basically maps out the the spatial strategies, the ones that we can map. And I'm going to go through some of the highlights just to give you a sense of it. Um, so the first thing is this pink in the middle here is downtown. And so this whole area, um, we defined it as downtown vibrancy, a lively, walkable, mixeduse, traditional New England village, supporting small businesses, civic life, and community events. And of course, housing
059is part of making that vibrant. And so that's something to think about when you're thinking about the strategies you want to see. We have thriving business corridors similar to the downtown thing, but it's looking at other corridors um including Pawn Street. We also mentioned Main Street downtown, but Pawn Street 126, Waverly Street, 135 quarter, West Union Street, um coming into downtown and Mungo. I don't know if I said that right. Did I say it the way you would say it? Okay, good. Um, and so I bring that up because part of thriving business corridors is having people and customers and and walking and things like that. So maybe not in all those places, but maybe in some of them. So I just mention that as well. And this all can relate to zoning like when
060you don't have to tell me what the zoning needs to be, but ideas around this can be translated into zoning ideas. And then manage neighborhood evolution are these like pale yellow areas. And what we said for that in the legend is context sensitive. So there's that that um that approach again of context sensitivity. Residential development accommodating limited population growth while supporting neighborhood character and adapting to the changing resident needs. So this is more the the gentle density idea um where it's appropriate. So, those are areas for you to think about. And then I just pulled out some of those specific strategies that talked, there may be a few others because sometimes they were scattered in other areas. Um, but some specific strategies that talk about housing in particular. Um, so identifying town-owned parcels for affordable
061housing, expand work promoting programs to help seniors age in place or in community. And I'm paraphrasing these, they're a little more detailed in the plan. Um, prioritize the preservation of already deed restricted homes so you don't lose those. Dedicate town funding to create additional affordable homes. You can use CPA funding for that as an example, especially for seniors. Evaluate development incentives um for affordable housing in the downtown district. So incentives rather than requiring you can also incentivize um you can incentivize all sorts of public benefits including affordable housing and then explore adaptive reuse in zoning incentives for historic so for the conversion of historic buildings. So um what I mean by adaptive reuse does anybody know what that term means? adaptive reuse. It means using a building, usually it's referring to historic buildings for a
062use that it wasn't built for. So, if you had a single family and you build an accessory unit, for example, that's an adaptive reuse. If you have a two family and you made it a three family, that's an adaptive use. If you have a library and you make it into housing, that's an adaptive reuse. But it typically goes along with historic preservation. It doesn't have to, but that's typically where you hear it. All right, so this is just a sampling. Um, I did not pull out every single thing that dealt with housing, but this was in the the main area that talked about housing. Okay. I did want to talk about inclusionary zoning before you go do the boards because one of the goals and this I think it carried into a strategy as well
063was to adopt a for inclusionary zoning bylaw. So, I want to make sure you know what that means and that it did not happen. That's one of the things that did not happen. Um, so it's usually incorporated into zoning, although I've seen it put into other town town bylaws, but it's typically part of zoning that says new develop, it typically says new development um of a certain size, and I'm not being specific because you can say the size you want. Um, you know, some communities say over 20 units or over 30 units or or anything that's over six units. I've seen um a percentage of those units need to either be set aside and deed restricted as affordable and that's also variable. I put 20% just as an example but it doesn't have to be
06420. It could be 10% it could be other percentages. I've seen sliding scales where it's if it's a small project maybe it's 10% of the you know maybe it starts at 10 so you need one unit if it's 10 units and then as you go up maybe you need more. I've seen different ways of doing this. So the point is there's not one way to do it. It's very localized. Um, and those have to be set aside as deed restricted affordable. And typically those bylaws say they have to count on the subsidized housing inventory. That's doesn't have to say that, but that's typically how those bylaws are written. So, they could be ownership, they could be condos, they could be rental. Um, you don't have to specify. Um, the other thing uh just to know
065is it can be in I have this thing down here says incentives or requirements. You could require that percentage or you could provide some kind of incentive saying if you create this then we're going to I don't know. I'm going to make stuff up. You're probably going to hate what I say, but we're going to lower the parking requirement or we're going to lower the open space requirement or we're going to increase your height. That's the kind of incentive. Or we're going to streamline your permitting or reduce the permitting fees. There's a different ways to to to incentivize. So they could be required or incentivized. But I will say sometimes these are adopted and they have the effect they don't have the effect the community wants. They don't have the effect of creating the affordable
066units. They have the effect of dampening the ability to to do these developments at all. Sometimes communities want that, but usually that's not why they adopted the ordinance. So you also have to just look at what's feasible in the market. Um, and we typically recommend that you run some scenarios, pick a few example parcels and run some proformas. You may even have some folks in the room who is are there any developers or builders or anybody that comfortable with performers for proformas in this room? No, that's fine. But maybe no, maybe someone's not raising their hand. That's okay. But basically, you can usually tap into local talent or hire someone to run that. But basically, you want to make sure that it's affordable. There are also some inclusionary zoning calculators where you can plug it
067in. Um, I think those are good a good benchmark too if you can't run case study performance, but you just want to make sure that you can actually develop under the restrictions. Does that make sense in general? Okay, I'm almost done. I promise. So, the goals are around the room. I'm going to just read the highlights, but not every word. Um, provide and preserve housing for all incomes and ages. adopt inclusionary zoning, which I would argue is actually a strategy, not a goal, but we can change that when we write the new plan. um affirmatively further fair housing to promote equal housing opportunities and uh promote sustainability which um both talks about where things are built and how they're built. Walkability but also access to open space as well as um having clean energy or
068um as we mentioned earlier energy efficiency even and then build community awareness and support. We typically have one of those to encourage engagement and information sharing. So those are around the room with the strategies that are associated with each of those goals. We'll be here if you have questions. Um and we're looking for your opinion about which if any of these should be carried into the new plan and then what new ideas might you have. Um, and then we also want you to use that map over there, or you can just write on a sticky if you have either sites or other, you know, areas that you're looking to be included in this plan as potential either zoning changes or uh, town-owned requests for proposals or any other sites could even be private. That's it.
069All right, I know that was a lot. Any questions?