Town of Arlington, Fair Housing Action Plan (July 2021)

Citation: Town of Arlington, Fair Housing Action Plan (July 2021)
Jurisdiction: Arlington (municipal)
Source: Official source
Original Source: https://www.arlingtonma.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/57214/637641171662530000 ↗

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• pp.72-73 (Local Policies and Tools Recommendations):
• The recommendations in here look fantastic. I'm not sure they're going to be nearly enough, though? I think
we'll need - and ought to pursue - zoning changes.
• The traditional approach to this might be to switch some parts of town from (eg) R0/R1 zoning to R2, or
R2 to R3/R4, but I think it would be much better to redefine our zoning, so that, eg, R0 no longer means
"single family only", but something like "majority single-family with up to 25% 2-family". Similarly, alter
R2/R3 to allow some % of 4-to-6-unit buildings, etc. This has two big benefits: (1) Instead of drastically
transforming a few small neighborhoods, it spreads out more modest change across the entire town, which
is more equitable; and (2) Having homogenous blocks of higher-density or lower-density zoning creates
de facto class/income-based segregation - people who can't afford to live in a single-family home
simply cannot live in some areas of town right now - and class/income correlate highly with race and
other protected classes.
• (The latter is also a concern for any large affordable-housing projects - if you have all the low-income
people living in Area X and all the people who can afford more expensive housing living in different
Area Y, you get de facto segregation, and reinforcement of "that part of town" bias.)
• Ideally this additional, denser, housing would be buildable by right.
• There would need to be some consideration for what scale(s) the % would be measured on - "Up to 25%
across all R0 in the town" is a very different constraint than "Up to 25% on each block zoned R0".
Something closer to latter is probably more desirable to avoid massive clumping, but might need a higher
% cap because of rounding. (Eg: in an area with 10