Author: Jim Dowd

WTF is the deal with this Affordable Housing thing?

by Josh Turiel

Every city in the state deals with the issue. As has been mentioned in these pages before, I’m an Actual Real-Life Elected Official On The North Shore (I’m a Ward Councillor down the line in Salem). We deal with this issue, and the misconceptions (and real-life issues) that affordable housing mandates bring to all of our communities. I’m not gonna BS anyone. There’s structural problems in our real estate markets, and many of our programs. But there’s also a lot of bias, predjudice, and just plain idiots out there when it comes to this stuff. I know that idiots don’t read the Clam, so I’m writing this for the rest of you. And making fun of the idiots.

A lot of people are reacting to the fact that the building will be lime green with no windows. We so just can’t even.

First of all, basically every community in Massachusetts is mandated to make sure that at least 10% of their housing stock is maintained as “affordable housing”.  What is affordable housing? At it’s simplest (the whole thing is pretty complicated), it’s homes that can be rented by people at income levels generally 80% of the median income in the area or lower (to a point). This is a gross oversimplification. Don’t post hundreds of comments with the precise numbers – it’s not about the exact numbers.

If your income qualifies you, you can be eligible to rent properties within that affordable inventory. Depending on actual income, you may be eligible for other programs to help you make those rent payments. The best known program is the federal Section 8 program – which provides subsidy vouchers to low-income tenants. Basically, the government helps pay rent directly to the landlord.

In our state, we have another program called Chapter 40B. It simply says that if your community has less than the 10% affordable housing stuck mandated, than a developer can take 20% of the units in a development, designate them as affordable (with rents according), and bypass most local zoning bylaws.

A lot of developers have used this to build complexes far larger than would otherwise be permitted in communities.

So the challenge that most cities have is to try and keep their affordable housing levels as close to the magic 10% as possible, without going under and giving developers a chance to get the nose of the camel in the tent. Salem’s at nearly 14%. So there’s no 40B bypass here. Manchester By-The-Twee? Under 5%. Somebody identifies and buys a plot of land there, they can ram through whatever they want under 40B.

Another thing about cities like ours – they’ve become pretty hip places to live for a lot of people. Young families, refugees from the cities, empty-nest couples – as much as our real estate prices have exploded, it’s worse in Metro Boston. Way worse. I have a friend with a good job who is nearly 40 (yes, I know it’s an anecdote). He’s interested in moving closer to the city – lives in an outer suburb right now up in the Merrimack Valley. Salem is about as far as he might be able to find a place – and most are out of his price range. If he moves into, say, Somerville? He’s going to have to get a roommate. A middle-aged man with a perfectly good job. Why? Because the rental housing market has become so distorted due to exploding real estate values.

In other words, when you’re on Facebook and your racist friend is ranting about all the (fill in your minority group of choice here) who are getting free homes from the government, or living in your neighborhood, you can mostly ignore them. There’s a lot of people. I mean a LOT of people, who work for a living, have real jobs, and simply can’t afford to live in their communities. We need these people almost as much as the Wicked Tuna guys NEED THIS FISH. They make our cities run. They work in the pharmacies, the supermarkets, the restaurants. A lot of them have jobs that are “up the ladder” from traditional service jobs, and they can’t make things on their own, either. A lot of the people reading this are a couple of missed paychecks away from not being able to afford their rent.

Are there freeloaders? I’m sure there’s people out there playing the system. We’ve got them, you’ve got them. You don’t have rules without people figuring out ways to bend them. But that’s not the mainstream. It never has been.

Besides all this, we’ve got hybrid non-profit/for profit entities that try and serve this market. In our area, we have groups like the North Shore CDC. They do a lot of work in Salem – I know most of the management well from their work here. They build and rehabilitate housing in downtown cores and generally improve the areas where they provide affordable housing. How? They police their units better than most hands-off private landlords would. They maintain them centrally, and in doing so, they make money. Which they then use to expand their portfolio and provide more services. Also, a lot of communities that implement the CPA (Community Preservation Act) use the CDC and similar agencies to help implement the affordable housing percentage mandate in the law.

It’s like capitalism and socialism, all tied up neatly with a lovely bow.

So in Gloucester, it starts to get a little weird. Right now you’ve got an affordable housing project that the North Shore CDC is working with your Action Inc. to design and build. It’s on Main Street (https://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/affordable-housing-downtown-site-plans/). Now I don’t know Main Street like a native – I hang out in Gloucester some, the site admins are friends of mine and we’re all like hanging out on the Interwebs being funny together. I’ve been through a few projects here in Salem in my four years of doing government. Bear with me here..

THE DESIGNS ON THE BOARDS YOU SEE IN THE LINKED ARTICLE ARE NOT THE ACTUAL PROJECT!!!

Really. it’s Sunday morning, we’re reading facebook comments and drinking paint thinner mixed with mouthwash.

There, I feel better having said that.

I read the article, and virtually every one of the commenters on it should have their keyboards taken away, and their iPads replaced with Etch-a-Sketches. You lose your Internet license.

What you are looking at in those photos are basic design concepts that are intended to show what we refer to as “massing”. It’s the basic profile of what the building shape would be, how the access would work, and where things are located. The floor layouts are approximate as well. Once the basic shape of the building is established, then a full design with materials and real layouts would be drafted and the whole design review process starts. Given that I think Gloucester may not be at the 40B number, you would be stuck with whatever they want to do, basically. It’s good regardless that there is a public process you’re going through with it.

What it is NOT, is a final design. There is NO BUILDING BEING BUILT WITH BLANK GREEN WALLS GOING UP FOUR STORIES. Real buildings have things like metal, brick, and glass. Massing studies do not have these things.

So the bottom line message to my friends on the other side of the bridge is this: Trust the public process. Feel free to weigh in on the design, when there is one. I’m generally happy with the work that the North Shore CDC has done here in Salem – though they have opponents and I’m not always on their side here. That’s the political process at work, and it usually results in better outcomes across the board.

Having people living in your downtown is good for the downtown, and the businesses there. It’s helped us a lot, it’s good for you too. And from an affordability standpoint, it’s also good to see people be able to live in the communities they love and work in – even if they don’t get paid the big bucks.

We’re at a weird point in history.

Today all the exciting stuff, the ideas leading to real change, is happening at the margins. In garages, workshops, kitchens, in people’s laptops and heads. We’ve heard a lot of talk about the “creative economy” on Cape Ann, and have to say that we wholeheartedly agree when it comes to the need to focus on creativity.

Creative Economy: What can we get for this on Ebay?

But we disagree on the scope. It seems like the focus is on what we usually think of as “artists.” Painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, poets and writers. Yes, those people are obviously creatives, but the most creative thing that’s happened in Gloucester in a long time- Chief Campanenello’s new opiate policy.  A long-term problem, a seemingly intractable one. A new approach, one with some risks and very real objections (“are we just letting people go for breaking the law?”).

Creativity is about solving old problems new ways. New visions, breaking down old barriers. We’re at a time when people have unprecedented power to get incredible things done both as individuals and groups, probably more than in the entire history of human civilization. We have communication and collaboration networks, open-source tools and limitless access to information.

We have whatever internet genius did this. Bravo sir. Bravo.

But we actually have to get over ourselves and do shit. It’s hard. And we have to support new approaches. But this is what Gloucester desperately needs right now. Everything is changing. Whatever the fishing industry becomes it will never be like what it was in the 70’s and 80s. Again. Ever. It will need to change. Our education system needs to change (And we see so much evidence of that in our schools, in the STEM labs and with the truly creative teachers in all disciplines).

But there is so much incredible happening out at the margins. In a building in the  industrial park on Kodelin road they are making pipe organs, huge beautiful pipe organs, for churches and cathedrals all over the world. The process is jaw dropping, forging their own pipes out of molten lead. That, folks, is the creative economy. Applied Materials up in the Blackburn and pushing the limits of technology. Creative economy?

Here is the thing: If you are creating new ideas, new approaches and actively implementing them, you are creative economy. We have to push the boundaries of what “creative” represents. And even what “economy” represents. New ways of funding, paying, trading and buying are coming along all the time.

So, here I’ll I’ll include Snotbot. It’s a huge risk. It’s something a lot of good people have worked their asses of on, and it’s something that can literally make a positive impact. Of all the things we do in a day to try and help the environment: turning off lights when we leave the room, riding our bikes or taking public transportation, recycling and composting, of all those things we try and do- this has the potential to have a direct impact on a threatened species: whales.

When we study them, currently, we harass them In so doing we also are very likely getting bad data. To get better data we have to sample them from a distance. It’s the difference between watching birds with binoculars or chasing them around your yard screaming, “BIRDY BIRDY BIRDY BIRDY!!!!” And that data ties in to toxicology, to the health of our oceans. It’s stuff we need to know for not only the survival of whales, but for the survival of PEOPLE.

So we, your beloved Clam, are asking you to support this thing. Because you’re weirdos and you like the weird and this thing is weird in all the right ways. Because whales. Because we’re fairly certain at least 47% of you are actual drone fetishists and probably also contribute at drone/sex/slash/fic over on reddit. Drop a couple of bucks, be sure to send it, remind your friends and family and hassle some people for us. Say you knew us before we flew to LA and drove to Patrick Stewart’s house and shot him with a crossbow.

Or do it because Patrick Stewart asked you to. I mean, it’s Patrick fucking Stewart.

Hey cats, light posting today because we’re crammed into the minivan on the road conducting an important experiment for the Mars Project in case NASA someday wants to shoot a small family to the red planet. Results so far: A few ironic songs on the playlist is good, but the kids sticking “Dominic the Christmas Donkey” in every third song will make the parent/astronauts rapidly turn course and dive the spacecraft toward the sweet release inside the nuclear furnace of the Sun.

We’re at our pals’ place in Ithaca NY, a town we’ve been coming to at various times since the 80’s. When we think of “hipfrastructure”- meaning a place that has what you need to attract creative and innovative people- this is one of our reference experiences. There are tons of public spaces, they’ve had a bike share program  forever, A huge natural grocer sits in the center of town, there is an ongoing farmer’s market in permanent space by the lake where they take the local currency called “Ithaca Dollars.”

The city occasionally threatens to stop emptying the garbage cans at the Gloucester Farmer’s Market. In Ithaca: “How about a building?”

The reason for all this of course is thirty thousand students with cash coming in from the outside. But college towns have different flavors and we’ve been to a ton of them. You’re always going to get that one strip with bars, head shops, tattoo studios and such and you have that here. But here they’ve also taken that influx of outside cash and have tried to make this a great town to live in for everybody.

Again, they’ve got a lot of things we don’t: Tons of land all around them, for instance. But there are similarities as well- there is a lot of poverty as this is still Rust Belt New York. The manufacturing base has gone away.  They’ve had to make drastic changes as their primary source of middle class lives transitioned to education and scientific/technology pursuits and they really have done the best job I’ve seen of trying to bring as many people along with them in the transition rather than the usual, “fuck it, you’re on your own now” business. we’re so used to in the American economy.

Are there a lot of hippies? Yeah, there are a lot of hippies. But they are actually good for many things: making crafts, running the bike share and getting your shitty old Subaru fixed and promising to pay the dude when you got home because you are an idiot high schooler visiting his summer-camp girlfriend over Christmas break and you are not hip to things like “water pumps” and then when you send the guy a check a week later he sends it back to you ripped up with a note that just says “Karma”.

So think of hippies as an essential reference species that tells you the strength of your hipfrastructure. Kind of like frogs in swamps, if you see them you know it’s healthy. No frogs means something toxic is going on.

Oh, and hey: The current mayor here is awesome. Literally a poor African American kid from town with addicted parents, living on the street at one point, who got himself to Cornell on a scholarship (Oh NOES! AFFIRMATIVE ACTION!) and is now the youngest mayor in the country at 27. He’s worked his ass off to build bridges between the town and the schools and check this out: He doesn’t drive so he uses his municipal parking space to sit outside and drink coffee with the passerby. After the Ferguson riots he included the police chief.

Most chill use of municipal property ever

Obviously Gloucester is a different place, but not all that different when you think about it. Like Ithaca our core industry has been demolished, we’re surrounded by education and Science/Medical/Technology on all sides and we’re trying to figure out what to do. What makes me enjoy visiting here is seeing the extend they’ve embraced the future while keeping what’s important about the past.

Also Carl Sagan puppet shows.

Oh, hey ‘Merica. Whatcha up to? Probably getting ready for the corn husk festival or some kind tractor/Winnebago drag race or whatever it is you folks do out past the Berkshires we honestly have no idea. But no matter what’s going down right at this very moment, be it getting the airboat prepped for some awesome gator huntin’ or trying to clean the buffalo poo off your elaborately decorated cowboy boots, you’re all Massholes now.

Yep, that’s right. Welcome aboard, fellow citizens of the Commonwealth. Just this week you finally have the rights and privileges we stuckup elitist Yankees with our stupid accents and our difficult-to-navigate rotaries have had since Creed was a thing: health care and gay marriage. Also we lowered the Confederate flag when it should have been: Following the Battle of Boykin’s Mill by the 54th Massachusetts Infantry in 1865. Who the fuck put it back up? Not us, that’s for sure.

So it’s good to see the rest of the country coming around. “Wicked good” to see actually, which is one of our comical sayings you will probably soon be uttering. We think you’ll enjoy being Bay Staters. We’re smart, we’re funny and we have high standards of living with a greatly reduced impact from the social problems plaguing much of the rest of the nation. Of course you’re going to have to give up big-ball bowling and calling subs “hoagies” or whatever lame term you use, but I think we can all agree you were on the wrong side of history with both of those anyway.

You know what? We can all save ourselves a lot of trouble and time going forward if you all just sort of skip being all backwards-ass about the obvious changes needing to be made in our nation and just go ahead and follow MA’s lead like you’re going to wind up doing anyway. Going forward, when you’ve got to figure out what to do about gun laws, educational attainment, environmental regulations and public services- here’s how this will work: A. Simply look at what we do and then B. copy us. Easy enough? Resisting is only going to make you look stupider when you’re forced to come around eventually after being repeatedly bitch-slapped by reality for an embarrassingly painful amount of time, which you will as history plainly shows. So save yourself the trouble.

For instance why not skip all the Ayn Rand bullshit and build yourself some light rail? Think of it this this way: yours won’t be a hundred years old so it will work far better than our system which shits the bed if it snows for more than ten minutes. Following that you can go ahead and get yourself some gun laws. I wager you may even enjoy planning an evening out without having to read the “biker gang shootout likelihood” rating on Yelp when selecting a restaurant. Then fix your schools. When people try and say education in the US is broken because American students lag behind Chad or some other dusty former colonial backwater they are talking about you, not us. Our kids score between Finland and Singapore globally. The rest of you guys…not so much.

This Chinese farmer used scrap parts to make his own working helicopter. Even their rednecks are better than ours.

Since it’s now MAUSA you’ve gotta catch up, so do like us and buy the textbooks that don’t have a talking snake as part of the biology curriculum. Spend the money on schools you were instead going to use to buy handjobs for some dangerous, pollutive industry that keeps sending its operations overseas. Spoiler: they will anyway. Trust us, you’ll find having a bunch of smart people around to be useful for all kinds of things! They solve problems, start innovative businesses, cure diseases and generally bring up standards all over the place. Sure they can be annoying at parties what with all the “knowing” of proven facts that that turn out to be the opposite of what your cousin said that one time. And they can be buzzkills when reminding you how drunkenly launching fireworks from your ass crack may produce adverse consequences, but it will be worth it in the end (see what we did there?).

#patriotism

And to any of my fellow residents of our fair state reading this: Now we’ve got to up our game as well. What separates us from them after last week? I mean, besides not having giant lagoons of pig feces in our neighborhoods or whatever. It’s on us to push out to the next ring of social progress in order to keep our leadership position. To this end we have to:

• fix our public transportation system (see above)
• go to single payer health care- yes, that is the only real long-term option
• stop being stupid about basing the funding of public schools on local property tax rates, it sets ups an inequitable system and you know it (I can use the word “inequitable” because you’re from here, btw)
• we have to really push on alternative energy and other environmental advances. Are you not ashamed to know California now has a better bottle bill than us?
• do something about our young people and their crushing student debt because they can’t actually live  here with it
• we have to continue to draw creative-class and STEM businesses, organizations and industries to our state. They want smart people, we got smart people but we got to make them want to stay here and our smart people have to be the bestest and smartestest of all because they ain’t comin’ for the weather, kiddos

Ok, that’s it. Oh, and everybody? Chowder is white. Stop it with that red shit. Just stop.

The question we hear over and over again at your beloved The Clam is “will Sefatia run for mayor?” as if this is something we should know. As it turns out, we do. The answer is yes. Or, more accurately: It’s really goddamned likely.

Just a typical workday at Clamedia Tower.

Shocked? Let’s clamsplore:

Look at how the voting pattern broke down in 2013, which we should note was an off year like this one (there was no presidential contest):

Total votes cast: 8307

—-

Sefatia (running at-large): 5016

Verga (running at-large): 3899

—-

McGeary (unopposed, Ward 1) 1185

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Kirk (for mayor w 60% of vote): 4724

So, given people tend to do what they’ve done before unless given a really good reason not to, as it stands today if she runs she wins. She knows this. This is why she’ll run because: a) it looks like she likes the job, b) people are asking her to, c) it pays pretty well, d) she hasn’t screwed anything up which is the standard most incumbents have to meet.

This is not an endorsement of her or of anyone else. We like all three as people and consider them friends but we are a strategist and this is just how it breaks. Numbers are reality. When people have her and Greg to choose from on the same ballot in an equal contest, a substantial number more choose her in every ward in the city every time. It’s that simple

Paul has no history of being able to get that number of votes and we like him a lot, but  just don’t see a place where the momentum for him is so strong against the other two he draws about three thousand plus votes (a handy rule of thumb for Gloucester is it typically takes about 5K votes to win. If you can’t dig that up in any model, then it’s not happening). We can see few hundred for Paul per ward, sure. He has a couple of key audiences pulling for him, but Gloucester elections are mostly about name recognition. The majority of voters will never pay close attention to the positions or qualifications of the candidates beyond the names themselves. This is the reality of local politics.

*Note: We could go much deeper into the wonkiness of it all but suffice to say even in a two-way Verga v. McGeary contest the biggest, but not only, barrier for Paul would be Ward 5 representing West Gloucester and Magnolia. It’s Greg’s home turf and there are a lot of votes out there- about half again as many as the other wards.

However, turf or no, in the predicted contest including Sefatia she remains the vote leader in 5 as she has historically been in every ward and precinct of the city.  Greg simply has led there against other candidates down the ballot in the at-large races. 

Sometimes when we are at parties and we sketch this out on napkins people disagree with us and scrunch up their faces and say things like, “But if everyone just did x….” and we laugh and laugh to the point of snorting microbrewed India Pale Ale out of our nasal cavities. We then ask, “Are you a wizard? Because if you know a way to get ‘everyone’ to change their current behavior when there is no visible and immediate economic or social gain for doing so, then you are wanted on Madison Avenue and at the Brookings Institution.”

You?

Elections are math. People behave in predictable ways. Simple as that.

The next protest we get laying this out is “but she promised not to run when she was given the position of interim.” Yep. She did. And she’ll pay a vote penalty for that. The only question is how many votes will it cost her? A thousand? She can spare a thousand, especially in a three-way race. Maybe a candidate going crazy-negative on her could make something of it but I don’t see Greg doing so in a major way and there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t epically backfire given how many people love her. Not likely in our opinion.

Now, big caveat, anything can happen between now and then. She could screw up. She could say something to offend a huge group of people or get into trouble or who knows. But right now Gloucester is getting positive national attention for once, she’s in the spotlight and clearly digging on the job.

Everything we know about behavior and economics says she’ll opt to keep it.

——-

Fun Proof for people planning to give us shit about this analysis:

Before emailing or texting or commenting with what idiots we are, please show how one could say “false” to any one of the following statements:

A. Sefatia likes being mayor and it’s a financially rewarding position for her

B. Sefatia has not screwed up being mayor in any visible way

C. Sefatia will continue to be able to draw on the large amounts of electoral support she has received in the past

D. There will be some penalty for her breaking her promise not to run, but not more than a thousand votes or so

E. There will be a growing chorus publicly asking her to run

F. She will not get into trouble and no other personal circumstance will prevent her from running

Prove one false and there is a chance of someone else. Otherwise, it’s the Godmother.