Growth squared
Boston is set to launch a rezoning effort, dubbed ‘squares and streets’ to encourage growth in high-traffic neighborhood corridors
Boston is in a housing crisis, and Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration is firming up details of how to tackle it head on.
The Boston Planning and Development Agency is readying a plan that will pave the way for denser housing and mixed-use areas to be allowed by right — without special approvals for each project — within the zoning code that sets the rules for what can be built and where around the city.
The first step, which Wu is likely to discuss at her State of the City speech Tuesday evening, will be to shift Boston’s zoning code from its Byzantine, highly specific neighborhood standards to what’s called a “form-based” standard — essentially, a menu of options from which neighborhoods can choose the basic design of main streets and squares. By shifting toward these districts for neighborhoods all over the city, the Wu administration hopes to ease new construction, especially around transit, while still preserving unique community fabric.
It’s a process the city’s calling “squares and streets,” and they hope it serves as an example of how to both modernize the zoning code and to address community needs, all through a lens of long-term sustainability.
“The end goal is not about a static document,” Wu said in a September interview with The Boston Globe. “The goal is to have predictability with rules that match community needs.”
That predictability, in turn, should reduce the time it takes to permit new projects, and thus help lower the cost of development. City planners have been racing at breakneck pace to get a proposal outlining a change to “form-based” zoning ready to present next month to the Boston Zoning Commission.
The city has not specified which squares and streets it will rezone first, but there are examples of neighborhood centers — close to MBTA train stations or bus stops — that could house more density than they currently do.
Take Cleveland Circle. It has some fouror five-story buildings around the Green Line stop, but could easily support more, said BPDA director Arthur Jemison.
“In a neighborhood like that, the end result might be zoning that would enable some of that four- and five-story character to return,” Jemison said.
In other areas, where there’s already denser building, there could be taller templates to choose from, Jemison said. The
idea is to give examples of housing, or commercial space, that looks familiar, or has existed in the neighborhood historically so residents can wrap their heads around the types of changes that are coming.
“People say: ‘We’re interested in these two kinds of scale.’ We’ll show them examples, and then identify what zoning looks like that would enable those types of scales,” Jemison said.
If the draft squares and streets zoning plan is approved by the city’s Zoning Commission next month, communities and neighborhoods will be able to select from a “menu” of five proposed building types, from “transition residential” and “main street living” — housing and mixed-use buildings capped at 50 feet — to “active” zones allowing buildings as high as 85 feet with street-level retail with housing, office or other commercial space above.
Some advocates are pushing for a sixth possible zoning district — dubbed “Placemaker” in earlier BPDA presentations — would allow for taller, denser buildings. It won’t be in the first wave of districts, a city spokesperson said, but could be in the future.
It should be available from the start, said Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing MA. Creating a zoning district that allows for taller buildings and denser housing could ultimately help create more housing.
“Any reform of our zoning code that does create more consistency in neighborhoods across the city is important,” he said. “We’re actually setting a standard that doesn’t require these expensive variances to get anything done.”
Kanson-Benanav also advocated for using an objective perspective rather than “the same community engagement process that Boston and other cities have used for years” — a process that, he said, “prioritizes the interest of primarily incumbent homeowners who have the privilege and opportunity to participate in these conversations.”
“There needs to be some objective criteria, not just loud opposition from wealthy homeowners,” he said.
Of course, any substantial change to the city’s zoning code is likely to spark pushback from neighborhood and community groups. Such organizations — and individual residents — often sue to block zoning variances won by housing projects they object to, and which could be made simpler by the proposed squares and streets rezoning.
As one example: a board member of the independent Epiphany School next to the Shawmut MBTA Red Line Station in Dorchester told CommonWealth Beacon the zoning variance allowing a four-story, 72-unit apartment building near the station could face a lawsuit. Still, cleaning up that process could be a boon for housing development, said Rachel Heller, executive director the statewide Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association.
“Unfortunately, what we have for zoning across our state is that it’s a way of saying ‘no’ to things rather than a way of saying ‘yes,’” Heller said.
The BPDA is taking public comment on the Squares + Streets zoning through Jan. 28, and plans to roll out individual squares and streets discussions later this year.