The public was brought up to speed on new zoning laws at a recent Somerville by Design workshop.
— Photo by Douglas Yu

By Douglas Yu

After a series of discussions on Union Square redevelopment, the Green Line Extension Project and Powder House Community School redevelopment, the City of Somerville once again directed the community’s attention to the city’s new zoning ordinance.

Last  Thursday, Somerville by Design hosted a workshop-style public meeting to allow Somerville residents to brainstorm ideas for the city’s redevelopment.

“In the interest of providing some perspectives on what types of benefits the community might want to see, I thought one of the more logical things to do was to look at what we’ve achieved,” the Director of Planning, George Proakis said. He opened the public meeting by reviewing how the city in the past a couple of years met of the goals of SomerVision, a strategic plan for the city’s development based on community-generated values.

In SomerVision, the citywide goals include adding 30,000 jobs and 125 acres of new public accessible open space for the neighborhood.

Today, public accessible open space has reached about 180 acres in Somerville, according to Proakis. “We are also adding 6,000 new housing units to the existing 34,000 housing units,” he said, among which 1,200 of them are Affordable Housing.

Senior Planner Dan Bartman explained the Floor Area Ratio (FAR), a metric that certain zoning codes use to tell how much building you can put up within a certain size of a piece of land.

“When FAR was created, it was a multiplier based on how much land you have. So if you take your land area of your parcel and multiply by some number somebody made up, it will tell you how much floor space you can go with,” Bartman said. “However, FAR doesn’t tell you the shape of building, so you can stack it real tall or spread it real wide or it can be somewhere in the middle.”

During the workshop, one resident brought up that Somerville has failed to provide open space for a long time. In response to the resident’s concern, Proakis said, “The city is working towards SomerVision’s goal on providing more open space by investing more money on spaces, such as parks.”

Another local resident talked about the difference between city-owned public spaces, such as Trum Field, where there is a shortage of space and the city has to schedule the usage of it, and the private-owned open space.

“Some areas that the public can go into, I’m just not counting,” Proakis said. He added that the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development was doing research on the functions of public spaces, and trying to find out the what type of open space the city should invest in, and which part of the neighborhood has the most need.

In Massachusetts, as Proakis mentioned, the cities are not allowed to collect a development impact fee for developing an open space, which means the open space has to be explored based on the community’s benefits. However, there are two places in the state where development impact fees are permitted.

“One is Barnstable County, which is part of the Cape Cod Commission. The mission of development impact fee is to protect the environmental quality of Cape Cod,” Bartman said. “And the other is Medford, which filed for a Home Rule Petition to have developers create new parks.”

The other side of the development impact fee is the affordable housing equation. There are two types of the impact fee program for developing the affordable housing. “One is inclusionary housing which develops a certain percentage of new affordable housing, and the other is linkage, where new job-creating businesses provide money to the city, and it goes to the affordable housing trust fund to help offset the impact created by commercial activities,” Proakis said.

In fact, Somerville is expecting to see both commercial-related and affordable housing-related development in the near future. Proakis also mentioned that there is a Home Rule Petition pending in the state legislature to use linkage to fund job training for Somerville residents.

“If we know what benefits us the most in the community, Somerville residents can submit zoning ideas until September and we can keep working on them,” Proakis said.

 See details about this workshop serires: Visit the Somerville by Design blog.

Schedule of future meetings:

August 7  Square, Main Streets, Jobs, & the Somerville Economy

August 14  Zoning for Businesses

August 21  Signs, Lighting, & Site Development

August 28  Administration & Permitting

4:00-7:30pm,  50 Middlesex Avenue (behind Style Cafe in the ‘Public Storage’ building at Assembly Square)