Thomas Breen photo
City Deputy Director of Zoning Jenna Montesano (second from left) with Harvard interns Lauren Lombardo, Peggy Moriarty, and Ian Cutler.
Tucked away on the fifth floor of City Hall, three Harvard graduate school students are wrapping up a special mission: to help the new mayoral administration launch a quick affordable-housing plan amidst the current market-rate construction boom.
The Harvard Kennedy School students, Peggy Moriarty, Lauren Lombardo, and Ian Cutler, have taken a break from their formal classroom studies in Cambridge for the past week and a half to intern with New Haven’s City Plan department.
Under the supervision of City Plan Director Aïcha Woods and Deputy Director of Zoning Jenna Montesano, the three public policy graduate students have focused their attentions on the city’s prospective new inclusionary zoning ordinance: A municipal law that would require private housing developers to set aside a certain percentage of apartments in new complexes at affordable rates.
Specifically, the Harvard students have been researching which cities around the country have been successful and unsuccessful in their own inclusionary zoning experiments.
They’ve been gathering data on income levels throughout the city as well as where planned, approved, and newly built market-rate apartment complexes have been sprouting up.
And they’ve been establishing a set of evaluation criteria for the City Plan department to use later this month when it goes out to hire a third-party consultant to conduct a formal, months-long citywide inclusionary zoning study.
“The goal is to have a recommendation for a phase one or interim ordinance on the books or at least before the Board of Alders within Mayor [Justin] Elicker’s first 100 days,” Montesano said.
The three interns are all participants in the Taubman Center for State and Local Government’s Transition Term program. The program pays for Harvard graduate students to work in the offices of newly elected first-term mayors to focus on short projects aimed at helping solve vexing, structural municipal issues.
They all started their internships with the city on Jan. 2, and will all be leaving City Hall on Friday.
Moriarty, a first-year graduate student working on a dual business and public policy degree, said that the research and recommendations provided by her graduate student team as well as the more comprehensive review under taken by a third-party contractor should allow the city “to have a data driven approach to setting some of the numbers, rather just taking a stab in the dark.”
Elicker reached out to her professor and secured the Harvard-paid internships soon after he attended a Harvard Kennedy School-hosted conference for newly elected mayors.
Affordability Push
This isn’t the first time the city has looked to Harvard graduate students for policy help. Nor is it the first time the city has broached the topic of an inclusionary zoning ordinance.
For months, the City Plan department, City Plan Commission, and city residents debated as to whether or not to include a 10 percent mandated affordable set aside in the city’s “commercial corridor” rezoning initiative for parts of Whalley Avenue, Dixwell Avenue, and Grand Avenue.
The city and the Board of Alders ultimately decided to drop not just Dixwell Avenue and Grand Avenue from that pilot because of neighborhood concerns about potential gentrification. They also dropped the 10 percent affordable mandate with the explicit intention of re-introducing a citywide inclusionary zoning law after a more formal study had been completed.
An inclusionary zoning ordinance was one of the top recommendations of last year’s Affordable Housing Task Force report.
Montesano and Moriarty said that the City Plan department will likely recommend that the city adopt some kind of interim or phase one inclusionary zoning ordinance even before the third-party contractor completes their citywide study. The city would then encourage the alders to amend and refine that prospective interim ordinance to account for the findings of the consultant.
“All the research shows that the more quickly you implement this,” Montesano said about an inclusionary zoning ordinance, “the more time you’re capturing where affordable housing is required.”
As Go Cambridge, Newark, Burlington …
The new Audubon Square complex: built pre-inclusionary zoning.
Moriarty said that her research into inclusionary zoning ordinances around the country has led her to a number of conclusions about what works, what doesn’t, and where to look for examples of success.
For one, she said, “optional” inclusionary zoning doesn’t cut it. Developers historically have not responded to cities’ bids to entice private affordable apartment set asides through incentives. “Mandatory policies have been by far the most successful,” she said.
She also pointed out that some cities, like Detroit, simply do not have a strong enough housing market to support inclusionary zoning requirements. That’s apparently because the city-imposed affordable requirements have been too onerous in comparison to the willingness of investors to pour money into new housing construction in the city.
“The good news is that New Haven is in a very different market situations than Detroit is,” she said. “I think it has more of an ability to sustain” inclusionary requirements.
Moriarty and Montesano singled out three cities that could prove to be models for what New Haven ultimately decides to do with its own inclusionary zoning measures.
The first is the interns’ academic hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While the Cambridge and Greater Boston housing market is still quite a bit pricier and more active than New Haven’s, she said, the city of Cambridge went about adopting and refining a policy in a way that might prove successful in New Haven, too.
The city first adopted an inclusionary zoning ordinance in 1998. That initial law required that market-rate developments of 10 or more units set aside 15 percent of new units at affordable rates. According to a 2018 city report, that mandated set aside was closer to 11 or 12 percent of units after factoring in density bonuses.
After tracking the progress of the law over two decades and gauging the impact on the local housing market, the City Council in 2017 amended the law to require an affordable set aside of 20 percent of total dwelling unit net floor area, rather than pinning the affordable requirement to the number of units.
Moriarty said the city also provides rent subsidies for low-income tenants. “The city has guaranteed that they’ll provide a certain floor for those developers so that they can get the funding they need from banks to finance the cost of development.”
Montesano said that one of the recommendations included in the mayoral transition team’s report is that the city create some kind of local fund to help subsidize the creation and maintenance of affordable housing. The newly passed tax assessment deferral program also includes reference to just such a fund.
Moriarty and Montesano also pointed to Newark, N.J., and Burlington, Vermont as potential models for how New Haven could do inclusionary zoning.
Burlington requires that new market-rate developments of five or more units set aside 15 to 25 percent of their units at affordable rates, with the higher set-aside percentages reserved for the most expensive new developments.
And Newark requires that large new housing projects of 30 units or greater set aside 20 percent of their units at affordable rates.
Newark’s definition of “affordable” ranges from 40 percent to 80 percent of the area median income. Burlington defines affordable at 75 percent or less of the area median income. And Cambridge defines affordable as 80 percent or less of the area median income.
Moriarty said that Cambridge, which claims that the inclusionary zoning ordinance has led to the creation of over 1,100 new units of affordable housing in that city, has been successful in part because it set the definition of “affordable” at the relatively high rate of 80 percent of AMI.
“It’s not exclusive to the lowest income communities,” she said. “That has made it more feasible for the developers to get income from those units.”
I'm fine with requiring some affordable housing for new developments. But the impact of such a requirement would be quite modest. During the recent boom, the city has seen as many as 500 units added per year in large developments. If this continues and the city requires that 10% to 20% of the units be affordable, this will be 50 to 100 units per year. The city has about 59,000 housing units.
As a complement to this initiative, I would like to see the city work to reduce the number of units that become uninhabitable or are otherwise removed from the market. This would require a mix of code enforcement and incentives for building owners. I also think the Affordable Housing Task Force had good ideas on amending the zoning ordinance to make it easier to develop vacant lots.