The Planning Board has launched a new housing preferences survey as part of its ongoing initiative to prepare a senior housing bylaw for the 2021 Spring Town Meeting. In a Dec. 8 interview, Planning Board member Jane Biering discussed the board’s goals for the survey and the project as a whole.
The new survey, available at the town’s website, www.harvard.ma.us, is intended for Harvard residents of all ages, and will be available from Dec. 8 to Dec. 22. It focuses on senior housing but also asks questions relevant to other types of housing.
The board has already conducted a similar survey aimed at older citizens themselves, which closed Nov. 27. According to Biering, the board was impressed by the quality of feedback the first survey generated. A third and final survey will open soon, which will attempt to judge responders’ visual preferences. To do this, it will ask them to rate sample images of potential housing designs. Biering praised the preliminary version of the third survey, saying “You may learn something about your own preferences from taking it.”
The Planning Board has been working on writing a senior housing bylaw for several months. Members considered presenting a version at the 2020 Fall Town Meeting, but they decided to wait until spring 2021 to gather more community feedback. The board laid out a multistep process for rewriting the bylaw, with the current survey as one of the steps.
By the end of December, the board hopes to complete all surveys. It will then spend January meeting with focus groups made up of seniors, real estate professionals, and other interested parties. During February, the board will rewrite the bylaw to incorporate the gathered feedback. The plan then leaves the remaining time before the 2021 Spring Town Meeting in May for public outreach. Biering said the project is currently on schedule.
According to Biering, the challenge in crafting the bylaw is balancing two important goals. On one hand, the board is determined to provide better housing to Harvard’s older citizens, many of whom have reported being forced to leave town because of the financial burden of the large houses that dominate Harvard’s housing market. On the other hand, the board is determined to protect Harvard’s rural character from aggressive housing development. Biering said the results of the first survey indicate that seniors themselves value this rural character very highly. One of the goals of the surveys is to find housing types that would prove helpful to older people while still fitting people’s image of what Harvard should look like.
Biering urged citizens to remember that the Planning Board is not a developer. It is not in the business of choosing specific parcels as the sites of specific projects. Instead, it makes the rules that developers use when making those decisions about individual projects. Her goal for the new bylaw is to encourage developers to build the types of housing that are most helpful to seniors while preventing anything damaging to Harvard’s traditional aesthetic.
