Corrected and updated March 13, 2009
On Monday, Oak Hill Road resident Lou Russo of Wheeler Realty Trust Inc. won a special permit from the Planning Board to build 42 affordable, age-restricted rental apartments and a 20,000-square-foot retail-commercial space with pharmacy or bank drive-through rights on Ayer Road. The project’s location, near the west-bound exit from Route 2, already contains the Wheeler-built Dunkin’ Donuts, a dry cleaner, and the Maugel Architects office building, where Russo’s general contractor and construction management business, L. D. Russo Inc., is also located.
The Planning Board, while acknowledging some drawbacks to the plan, was attracted by the affordable, age-restricted rental apartments and by a two-year moratorium on new Chapter 40B applications that it could bring to Harvard. Though the development is not a 40B project, its 42 affordable rental apartments would, by state law, allow Harvard to impose the two-year moratorium.
If Wheeler Realty Trust receives the financing package it seeks, including federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, private financing, and a $200,000 contribution it has requested from Harvard’s Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, the plans can go forward, and the town could benefit from a two-year planning period to address its affordable housing deficit.
The Planning Board approved the apartments and office-retail space on Monday under the Ayer Road Village zoning bylaw, which allows mixed-use, dense development in parts of the commercial district. “The major benefit is the affordable housing and the retail space. The major drawback is traffic,” said Planning Board Chairman Joe Sudol on Tuesday.
Benefits
The age-restricted apartments with rents (heat included) between $965 and $1,200 would provide material and strategic benefits, Sudol said. Rentals are not plentiful in Harvard, and the apartments could fill a need for some townspeople, though Russo said his marketing study showed that mostly out-of-towners would populate the units. And the two-year moratorium “gives us a golden opportunity to start looking at other potential ways of getting to our affordable goal,” Sudol said.
The moratorium on new 40B applications is allowed by state law. Any town in the state that meets its yearly goal of affordable units—16 per year in Harvard—can automatically reject any new 40B application that surfaces within that two-year window. Previously approved 40B projects or those with viable applications remain in play.
Sudol says that the Planning Board views the two-year respite as a chance to revamp Harvard’s affordable housing strategy for the 10-year update of the town’s Master Plan, due in 2012. “If we can’t work together to build a better strategy in this two-year window,” Sudol said, referring to the selectmen, Planning Board, Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, and Master Plan Implementation Committee, “then we should hang it up. I believe we can and must get this done right.”
Indeed, the strategy outlined in the 2002 Master Plan and the associated Harvard Affordable Housing Plan has not yielded hoped-for results. In the past 10 years, according to Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) statistics, Harvard has never met the yearly 16-unit goal, with a peak gain of three units a few years ago. The state mandates that 10 percent of a municipality’s housing stock meet state-defined affordability definitions. Harvard stands at 3.2 percent, with 69 affordable units and 156 more to build, according to recent DHCD figures. The 2010 census could move the 156 target, based on the number of Harvard’s year-round homes.
Drawbacks
The Dunkin’ Donuts driveway has been the scene of seven reported accidents—two involving injuries—between 2005 and 2007, according to a 2007 Route 2 corridor traffic study completed for Harvard by CDM of Providence, R.I. CDM recommends lowering the speed limit to 35 mph in the area. It does not recommend a traffic light. Planning Board traffic consultants EarthTech AECOM of Concord found in a December 2008 study that only one of the four thresholds for a traffic light was met, and noted that a light, if required in the future, could create backups from cars exiting Route 2. EarthTech AECOM recommends an additional right-turn exit lane, signs, improved lane paint, and plastic pavement markers to identify the southbound Ayer Road turning lane, which currently consists of faded lane markings. The consultants said a warning beacon light near the intersection “should be considered.” The location of a beacon is not specified in the consultant’s report or in the Planning Board’s special permit.
Sudol noted several other drawbacks that he said were addressed to the best of the board’s ability. “The fact is, as town counsel pointed out during the hearings, this application exposed a loophole in our zoning as to building size.” The three-story apartment house is 44,000 square feet, more than the allowable 30,000 square feet. However, the building is divided with a firewall; under state building codes, this technically makes it two buildings, not one. In December, Selectman Tim Clark, one of the originators of Ayer Road Village zoning, first noted the problem and said at a hearing that dividing an oversize building with a firewall circumvented the spirit of the bylaw, which was to avoid massive buildings in the mixed-use zone. But on town counsel’s advice, the firewall solution was thought to be allowed. This week, Clark said he disagreed with the solution, saying that he believed the board had the discretion to turn down the firewall work-around. “By allowing this,” said Clark, “it opens up a free-for-all psychology. How many firewalls is too many?”
Although Sudol agreed that the solution was wrought through a loophole, hearings show that planners were satisfied with mitigation proposed by the architect to minimize the boxy mass of the oversize apartment house. At a December hearing, architect Brent Maugel presented a re-design that showed an L-shaped building with articulated corners and a roofline with false mansards and chimneys to avoid a flat roof. Glass panels at the building’s center would give the impression of an atrium, he said, further fooling the eye. Furthermore, he said, the apartment house would sit on land 10 feet lower than the Dunkin’ Donuts building.
Another concern voiced by some was that the developer could, after 15 years, sell the building and cause the apartments to lose their affordable status. This week, in a brief interview, affordable housing expert Toby Kramer of Riverside Consulting in Concord spoke in general terms about the tax-credit program. Kramer said that recipients of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, as dispensed in Massachusetts, would have to guarantee no less than 30-year affordability. “It’s a federal program,’ she said, “but subject to state-imposed law.” Massachusetts requires 30 years of affordability for developers who finance through tax credits, she said, but other states are more lenient. “It is a federal tax program, and complex,” he said, and that the state requirements imposed over the credits sometimes lead to confusion about affordability requirements. According to the website of the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, projects that receive the tax credits must retain affordability for “at least 30 years.”
Financing in today’s economy
Russo did not return phone calls asking for information about the status of his financing, but the economic downturn could affect the timing of his project. For instance, Russo applied in October for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the federal tax program administered by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development. The program, according to DHCD spokesman Phil Hailer, is suffering from dried-up investor demand for tax credits.
On Tuesday, Hailer said that the latest award of credits, for which Russo has applied, is delayed. He said that previously approved applications from 2007 and 2008 that had stalled from the downturn would likely receive relief from the latest federal stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Hailer said that tax experts at DHCD were still working to determine whether pending applications would benefit from the package. Hailer would not speak about specific, pending applications, such as Russo’s.
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected and updated. The original version referred to affordable housing expert Toby Kramer as a “he.” She isn’t.
