This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
☀️Snowmelt ahead: Sunny with highs in the 40s.
It’s Wednesday, and the sun will set at 5:31 p.m. Today we’ll be talking about the bureaucracy of building housing. Let this be your sign to try and attend your city or town’s zoning board meeting. If you’ve done it before, you’ll know that you can learn a lot about your community and your neighbors there.
Four Things to Know
Patron saints spark a fight: Quincy’s mayor has made the decision to put 10-foot-tall bronze statues of the patron saint of police officers, St. Michael the Archangel, and the patron saint of firefighters, St. Florian, in front of its new public safety building. It’s a $850,000 public art endeavor that some city residents believe violates the separation between church and state. “I want to be clear that the depictions of Michael and Florian transcend any religious connotation,” said Chris Walker, chief of staff to Mayor Tom Koch. The proposed statues would depict St. Michael on top of a demon and St. Florian pouring water on a burning building.
State-run hospitals staying open: After public outcry, Governor Maura Healey announced that the Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children in Canton and Pocasset Mental Health Center in Bourne will stay open — for the time being, at least. The Pappas Hospital is currently home to 36 patients, who can go to school there and get round-the-clock nursing care. The Pocasset center, one of two inpatient mental health facilities on the Cape, has 16 beds.
Student journalists are covering hectic news cycles and large communities both on and off campus — and facing financial pressures that sometimes leave them more dependent on the universities they cover than they would like. At UMass-Amherst, the Massachusetts Daily Collegian gets about 75% of its funding from the university. “It can be complicated,” Editor-in-Chief Caitlin Reardon said. “It is interesting to be covering a body that does fund us, but there’s a line. We’re independent, completely student operated.”
“Don’t tell me not to live, just sit and putter:” Recent performances of “Funny Girl” in Boston had a special feature for blind and low-vision theater-goers: headsets through which they could hear live audio descriptions of sets, costume changes, facial expressions, and more. It’s an accessibility feature that’s becoming more common, at least for a few performances in a show’s run. There are also touch tours of sets, braille and large-print programs, and ASL-interpreted performances.
Why is it so hard to build housing? The blueprint and zoning gauntlet
I’m GBH’s Sam Turken, and all week we’ve been exploring why it’s so hard to build new housing in Massachusetts. So far, we’ve talked about reconstructing old properties and finding land.
Next: drawing up design plans. If only it was as simple as deciding the building’s color, or whether the roof is flat or sloped.
The design phase involves hard choices. The developer and architect have to consider how many one-, two- and three-bedroom units it will have. Will there be commercial space on the ground floor for restaurants and shops to attract more people to the area? How many parking spots? What about restricting the income levels of tenants?
These decisions all come down to … money! Capping rents and designating apartments as affordable housing gives a developer access to government subsidies and tax credits that help fund the project. And fewer parking spots means more room for additional units, which means more rental income.
Oh, and by the way — it’s probably best to collaborate with other residents and businesses in the area. Because once designing is out of the way, it’s time for arguably one of the most frustrating steps: hiring attorneys and going before the almighty planning and zoning boards.
The local planning board reviews the project and accounts for any community opposition. Board members can demand changes to everything from the building’s landscaping to the roads around it to mitigate traffic.
The zoning board has similar power, but focuses more on granting or denying exemptions to the local zoning code.
If a developer wants to include fewer parking spaces at a Worcester apartment complex than the code mandates, the zoning board needs to OK it. That can come with conditions.
“Maybe we’ll allow for fewer parking [spots], but only if you actually increase the number of handicap-accessible spaces,” said Worcester Zoning Board member Jordan Berg Powers. “So you’re doing a dance with people.”
Sometimes that dance is more like a grueling ballet rehearsal. Mazzocchi noted a developer may appear before a zoning board half a dozen times as each side wrangles over changes. It took four years for one of his apartment proposals in Boston to get approval.
“It’s not uncommon for projects just to get scrapped,” he said.
—Sam Turken, Reporter, GBH News
Your thoughts: How can Massachusetts lower the cost of housing?
“I have long held that [for] less expensive(?), faster construction, and higher quality, prefabricated housing is the answer,” Gerard wrote. “Americans, I feel, have long associated prefab with inferior quality housing, along the lines of older, poor quality trailer homes. But in most parts of the world — Scandinavian countries, in particular — and even the USA, prefab is faster, with very high-quality construction.”
Maura from Wakefield suggested an idea from Rep. Jake Auchincloss: bring modular homes, assembled elsewhere, to old military bases like the former Fort Devens. A version of it has been done here before, Maura said, but not in a way that necessarily keeps housing affordable: a former U.S. Coast Guard property in town was sold to private developers, who built apartments where rents for a studio now start around $2,400. “The USCG had existing single family starter-type homes,” Maura said. “Idk who benefitted here, but surely not the renter.”
