Housing Board - Regular Meeting

Call this meeting to order.

Let me call the roll. Channing? Here. Ben?

Here.

Joe?

Here.

Yeah, me. I'm here, I think. Corrine's not here yet. She may be. Diane can make it. So Diane and presently Corrine are not here, but they may join us later. Brittany, we're still missing two.

Brittany's not coming. She just sent an email.

Okay. She may log in at 8.

She's stuck in on her commute home.

All right. Brittany is not here either. But still, we have a forum. We need seven. There's seven members, I think. And the rules read a majority of members. And four is the core. Four is that. So we are... We have a quorum. Okay, let me start the meeting. Could you go to the first slide?

Excuse me, Mr. Chairman. Just a notation, meeting opened at 7.08 p.m. All right.

Okay, let's start the meeting. This is just a list of deadlines for the warrant. I'm not sure that we want to submit anything, but they asked me to distribute it and there it is. We do have items that will end up going on a town meeting, of course, the rental assistance program. And I think, but I think that's probably for the spring, usual spring town meeting. We'll defer that to then, and I think, too, when it comes time, we should, for the spring meeting, consider whether we need to have a regular budget. In the past, we have not had a budget. We relied on the fact that we can draw funds from the Affordable Housing Trust, but the funds in the Affordable Housing Trust are getting down there, and we have other uses for them, so it might be worth considering, but not now. We don't need to do it now for the fall meeting. So let's have any questions. We'll move on to the next topic. Okay, here's the agenda and the minutes. Here's Channing has prepared the minutes. Has everybody had a chance to review the minutes?

My name's spelled wrong. There's an S on the end of it.

My name's also spelled wrong at the top of vermin, V-R-M-I-N. Okay.

Let me, let me.

But it's spelled correctly later in the notes, so.

Because I didn't catch, well, that's why, that's why I didn't catch it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben, is it close? What? Did I come close? Both notes are going. I know, I'm telling her.

Okay. The A gets sent to an I. What else, Wendy? Say it again. Your name is misspelled somewhere, you said.

Yeah, invitees present. There's an S at the end of trinks.

Oh. Yeah. Okay, I got that changed. Okay. Very well. I will entertain a motion to accept the minutes as modified. So moved. Do I have a second? Second.

Second.

All in favor, we'll have to do a roll call vote. Channing? Channing in favor. Ben?

Aye.

Me? Aye. Bill?

Aye.

Okay, the minutes are approved. Thank you very much. Okay, what do we got next here?

Do you want me to go up to the... Yeah.

The next item is under old business is Just to keep track, is there anything new, any response about the estate planning letter that we submitted some time ago? Ian, you're probably the person who knows best about that.

As of now, no. I'd be happy to continue to explore other options, but... I've reached out to, I think, two other folks at the EOHLC now, and I did call the general line twice and left an email on the general housing help email that they have there, and I haven't gotten anything. Mind you, that was last week, but... Yeah, I have not gotten anything there. I'm still happy to continue trying any new solutions if some members should have any, but it's...

I don't know the politics of HOC that well, but does anybody have any suggestions for anything else to try? It is an important issue. Maybe they're just trying to not deal with it. I don't know. It sounds like they're trying all the things I can think of, Ian. Well, okay.

If anybody can find a phone number, I'd be happy to call them. The only thing is I was calling a couple of the EOHLC numbers, including the one for questions. And I left several, a couple of voice messages. So if you can find a voice message for someone, I'd be happy to call them.

Well... Okay. Do we have, I mean, I don't, I haven't dealt with the group for a while. I'll look to the director and see if there's anybody in there yet still that I know. Is there anybody that is in town government that's likely to know of a name to call? I think it's a good suggestion, but it would be good to find out who would be a person who might return your call.

Yeah, I can. I should. I'll ask Alec if he has anyone. Really, I don't know. I mean, unless Wendy has someone, but. I can also go up the ladder and maybe try Stephanie and Amanda.

Stephanie might be a good source of information. She presumably deals with those folks more than we do.

Although I wouldn't be surprised if they just send me, probably one person they would send me to is Whitney, who I had been emailing five, six times over now.

Well, you never know. There might be somebody else. You might get some other guidance.

Yeah, that's a good, it's really one of the only options I can think of right now.

Well, good luck. Thank you very much for your effort.

Certainly could use it. Yeah, no problem.

Okay.

I think I'm up with the presentation.

Yes. Now, this is a separate packet, Wendy.

Yes, yep. Sorry for not getting this sooner. I was out for a few days.

So can you share? Yeah, can you take down your... I did. Okay.

Give me one second and I should be able to.

But you have the share feature.

Yep. And then I just need to, oh wait, come on.

All right. I should be able to do so now.

How does this look, guys?

Great. This is one thing we decided on at the last meeting that It seems zoning was an important factor, however, serious. So this is an educational effort on the part of Ian to help us navigate this difficult topic.

And this is off just a couple days of research, but also kind of a lot of conversations that I've had with Finn as she's come by the office. Channing and Al have kind of picked my brain about, and we have these several options that we've talked about, but it's good to kind of see them put on the table into one presentation like this. where I'd say Joe's presentation is kind of big idea options of like sell versus keep and keep and develop versus this is more just focused on rezoning and trying to answer the technical questions that the board may have as well as give these options in regards to rezoning this lot because we've been kind of asking ourselves or at least some folks have been asking me about them. So, I have six options that we're going to kind of go through. I kind of ordered them in most realistic, maybe most feasible to ones that have maybe more challenges, but we'll get through them and I'm happy to answer as many questions as I'm possibly able to get through on each of these. So, it's really just six slides after this, but let me begin. Option one is kind of a broad one that captures a couple of these different further options, but we'll just call it site-specific overlay zoning. So there's no real picture of how to demonstrate what an overlay zone may look like. There's overlay zones in Boston, just as there are overlay zones out in the Berkshires. It can really take any shape or form. And then the state also has their own overlay districts which are some of the options that we'll see later that's why I I was talking about that so the AR agricultural residential district will stay this middle layer this zoning layer and then we will kind of create from scratch our own overlay district to then put over this this 72-stow road property. And if we want the potential for future growth and there's spots nearby, then it may also be worthwhile to explore kind of beyond just that single parcel. But for the time being, it would definitely be over that single parcel. And we would need to very similar path for to the MBTA Communities District. The only thing is with the MBTA Communities District, we obviously had a lot of help and support from the EOHLC to shape up that language and to ensure that it would meet those state requirements. With a site-specific like local overlay district you could call it something like 72 stow road or stow road overlay district town center housing district we would be shaping those own requirements as we see fit so it can be as broad or as tight as we deem necessary giving us kind of the maximum control over this over this new zone, we'll call it. This would be a new zone. Really, only one of these options is to change it, but we'll get to that. So we'll talk about the trade-offs. Obviously, they're kind of simply put here. Requires a planning board hearing and a town meeting approval. Yeah, this needs to be, there are laws in place to make sure that we're not just kind of making these crazy districts that we would need to follow. So again, there would be some support from EOHLC, but we would have to go out and seek that. And we would be carrying most of this burden really between Alec and I. looking for a lot of help from the housing board and the planning board along the way to make sure this captures really what we're trying to go for. And a lot of the other options, some of the state routes, they offer a lot of support and even financial incentive to kind of choose their overlay growth district options. But yeah, happy to answer any questions before we move on to the next one.

Yeah, Ian, would zoning this as an MBTA district be part of the possibilities here?

Yes. Yeah, that's actually... So I wouldn't really call that an option one. Option one is also explored in several of these other options. I have MBTA communities district as another option that we can explore, as well as... two additional like chapter 40 R chapter 40 Z. So yes, you're right. Um, but the idea of this and kind of trying to separate it into a different category than MBTA community, smart growth and starter homes, um, would be kind of our own overlay district, um, with the definitions and requirements that we would see fit.

What about 40 Y zoning? Um, Is that one of the possibilities here? I mean, that's kind of an overlay. It is.

It is. Do you want me to, I'd be happy to hop around to them. It is option three. Option two is MBTA overlay.

Let's go straight through. All right, great.

Hold your horses. All right. So the next one is option two is the MBTA communities overlay district. And yeah. Yeah.

Could you go back to the first option, please?

Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm trying, not just in this case, but I guess the whole thing, to get some sort of baseline from which I can move forward step by step. On the overlay that you have there, something property, does that have certain aspects to it? Is that just ownership? Or is that town control? Or does the town control come in on the zoning part of it? And then the overlay comes in on some flexibility as to the zoning characteristics.

So I'd say the town ownership would actually come in at the property level because that changes just as property changes. The zoning itself is then enacted by the town, and it wouldn't impact necessarily our base zone, just as the MBTA communities is kind of a layer on top of that base zone up on the... whatever hill road uh those hill road apartments are are made for so to answer your question i think i think that answers some of it is the the ownership is on the property itself the zoning is then enacted by the town and the overlay zone is essentially another blanket of zoning that can further restrict or open up um kind of uses and allowances um within a zoning district which is also shown really, we understand that a lot more because we saw it happen with the MBTA overlay district. Does that make sense?

Why don't you keep going?

Okay, happy to. So this is the MBTA overlay district. There's less to talk about here because we know this and we've done it. And I will add that the planning board is bringing a very minor amendment to the current existing mbta communities overlay district that you see on this slide to their fall town meeting to make to get that final compliance there was a slight kind of error in the materials and the calculations that the state made so we're working to edit and adjust those but they're very very minor adjustments um anyway focusing on stowe road With this second option of continuing to expand the Box Boroughs MBTA community overlay district, we would be able to essentially either make a new MBTA communities overlay district. So very similar to how we have a business and a business one district. We could explore the option of making a second MBTA communities overlay district that is different than this first one we have up on Hill Road, or we could follow the current standards to a T, which would mean like 30 foot setback, or I believe it's two stories maximum of 30 feet height on the building, 1.5 parking space per unit, 10% affordability, where all of these options that we essentially codified into our bylaw at that point, zoning district on the north side of town. And it would be, if we do decide to explore this option, one of the first things we would need to do is checking whether or not the current restrictions and standards on that overlay district would be valuable to bring to the Stowe Road site, or if we would need to open up a new kind of MBTA communities district and the center of town. obviously we know it was it was uh an option from the start to have this um but if we yeah it's we we have kind of two options with this option but it's something that would come with more support from the eohlc of course it won't affect our standing compliance um as we continue to kind of expand this overlay district in one way or another. And let me see, anything big I'm missing? Not really. Yeah, that's important to know. Currently, we have it at about 13 units per acre as it stands. We're trying to adjust that very, very minorly. But if we were to explore this and want to move forward with this, then we would need to really study as to whether or not the current... the current standards of the Hill Road MBTA Communities Overlay District would be worth bringing to Stowe Road or if we would need to edit and kind of change around the language so that we can kind of see what we want built at Stowe Road and see what kind of fits the site. That's all I have for that. Happy to answer questions.

So if I understand this correctly, the option one, doing a separate local overlay, is kind of like a build-your-own zoning overlay?

Correct.

Okay, so we can kind of customize it. That's the customized overlay.

There's there's obviously some like standards and, you know, we can't just make it Disneyland overlay district or something like it has to come with. There has to be reason to it. And I forget what the exact language is, but it's something like economically feasible and developmentally feasible. viable. I'm almost positive that what we are looking to do with Stowe Road, we can have a lot of flexibility, at least with that first option. But the trade-off is obviously doing an MBTA Communities District, or I believe the next two that we're going through come with EOHLC support. And definitely with the first one, we will get less, and we will have to seek that out. But, yeah, so if there's no further questions, I will continue with Chapter 40Y, which was one of the options that came up. It's very new. And I believe that it was originally introduced in the 2022 Economic Development Package that was passed, I believe, by the Healy administration. It's a starter home district smaller price limited home ownership and I Dug into this quite a bit last week and today. I I'm not certain that it's up and running yet I'd be interested Joe if if you can contradict me on that but from what I read that they are still getting paperwork and permits and applications finished because a lot of those deadlines were saying like june 2025 and july 2026 this this stuff will become available so it's a very very new program but it might be it might be a really great fit but um i'm not seeing your hand up joe so i'll take that as a knower and i don't know but um

Yeah, so... Excuse me, I have one question. Jim over here had a question.

Oh, yeah.

What does EOHLC help mean? Is that money? Is that assistance permitted? What does that mean to the town?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the MBTA communities, like Overlay District, the one we were just looking at, came with a lot of support from the EOHLC. We got and unlocked grants that essentially gave... I don't know the exact amount of hours, but like X amount of hours of work. And it was definitely in the over a hundred, possibly in the several hundreds hours of work that folks from our regional planning commission was helping us make these calculations and do the outreach and, um, ensure that we were eventually going to be compliant. So they were actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting along with, I can't really claim any claim. I had any part in MBTA community since I only came on a year ago. But, um, with Alec, the director of land use and planning, he had, um, Aaron Cruz, he's a housing planner from the State Regional Planning Commission, and they unlocked those funds through the EOHLC. They essentially gave them funds. They said, you get up to this many hours of support, direct support of this gentleman, Aaron Cruz, from MAPC, working directly on whatever we needed to ensure that this came into fruition. As well as, like, if we were to do this again, we would have that option to continue to get support, be it through grants. But EOHLC has administrators of the MBTA Communities Act. They have an administrator just on this Chapter 40Y, as well as just on this Chapter 40R that we'll get to next. So it's essentially just a person I can pick up the phone and call or email anytime and they're an expert at this and I can ask any this, that, or the other question to have it answered on either Starter Homes, on MBTA Communities District, or on the Smart Growth 40R District. On top of that, there are requirements that the EOHLC needs Boxborough to hit to get approval on these districts. And with that, that's why they'll have some incentive to continue to work with us and kind of foster a relationship to make sure either this option, this option, or this option go through, but less so on this kind of custom option, we called it, the custom local option. But that's a great question. EOHLC support comes in many forms, and it especially comes through on these three middle options that are directly supported and kind of pushed by EOHLC.

Thank you. Yeah. So I have another question for the 40Y. Were you able to find out more information about the... Sewage and water? Yeah, the sewage and water requirement.

Yes, I did find language that said there was nothing that restricted it.

Okay, so it can be a private well, and that's fine.

Yes, that is what I found in the general language of the law that was passed. I will send that to you, but essentially right after I was looking that up, it sounds confusing at first, and I read it a couple times over, and it said that it's not restricted by those infrastructure needs.

Yeah. I feel like this... And like the more I've heard about it, the more I'm just like, this really feels like a good fit because that seems to be what, and we'll get to that information later, but that seems to be what people in Boxborough are asking more for is starter homes. And this is a great way to make that happen.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And one of the trade-offs, maybe one of the cons is though, we haven't seen this come to fruition because it's so new and we kind of be... kind of treading our own new steps, but it certainly seems like a really great program. And from what I could find, a lot of communities have been starting to do it. There's just no... Like, I wanted to show a picture of where a 40Y district was and what it looked like, like I did on this next one. This is a 40R home. But I simply couldn't because none of them have... fully become built yet. And it seems like within the next year or two, this is going to be a more accessible option in the, in the state should kind of finally flush out the, the final details of it. But as I said, this is very new. Um, and another, you know, as you can, I don't need to read this here, but it's ownership focused. Um, there are some bedroom requirements, um, and they are also, uh, a cap at the, the house Scott, the house size. Um, but 1800 fair, 1800 square feet, uh, is probably not going to restrict us too much if we're talking about starter homes, especially the amount that we might be wanting to see on this 11-acre parcel.

But the fact that it's new actually could be thought of as an advantage. It gives us a chance to mold it our way. Yeah, absolutely. Is there a density requirement of any kind associated with this? Yes.

So you can do buy right four homes per acre, which fits really well, I think, with the property and the ideas that we had for it already, because we were thinking already with what's been, you know, with the work that's been done on the property that you were probably capped at about 10 or 12 units. Right. So that would be great because then you could get four.

I think there is a couple of drawbacks. One of them is that you think you're prohibitive. So I'm putting all your affordables in one district with 40 Y. And we would have to put all affordables on Snow Road. So I think there are some hookers. Is that true? I'm sorry, I missed that. After your email, I took the time to read the 13 pages of the document. And I think there are some problems with it. You're not the first by whom the newest tribe, right? But anyway, I don't mean to hold you up.

I personally have reservations about 40 Y. I remember seeing something in the regulations about the affordable units have to be integrated with all the other units, but nothing about them being aligned along Stowe Road. I don't remember that. Yeah, Channing, sorry.

I want to write it down so I can look it up and hopefully respond tomorrow. What was your concern? Is what with this exactly? They're all...

Yeah, I don't know if I can find it right off the bat. I may have to send it to you, Ian.

No, yeah, please do. Yeah, I'd be happy to look into it. This is the one that's newest to me. I didn't learn about it in school. I had to do my research over the past week or so and learn as much as possible. And there's still plenty that I don't know. Joe, did you have a question on this? I saw your hand up. It went down.

I'm good, Ian. Thanks.

All right. All right. Let's keep going through this. So 40R is a pretty well-established – rezoning overlay option. It's the Smart Growth District. The state has had this in place for, oh, I want to say well over 20 years now. It's been very successful in most areas. I'm sure there's probably been some pretty difficult areas to make it work within. But it is exactly what you would think of a multifamily zoning in a smart growth area. Usually it does prioritize ease of ease of access to like transportation. With that, we might be able to swing the, you know, the Mark bus over there. I'm sure if we're if we're looking to make this a smart growth district, then it certainly can stop over there just as it does here. some of our other housing complexes in town. But that's obviously not the only thing. There's a lot here with 40R. And just as with 40R, and I should probably go back because it's very important to add with 40Y, there are financial incentives. I believe it's $3,000 per unit. comes back to us, and I obviously need to learn more on that. It's not a crazy amount of money, but it's at least something to look at, and I believe it's the exact same amount for a 40R district. There's also the 40S, which is a program where we can kind of do this math to calculate how how much it burdens our school with new students, and then we can get further tax incentives or money back to our school system. But yeah, this is, in going through our 40R districts in the state on the EOHLC's website, a lot of them are much higher density than what we would be looking at for Stowe Road, which is kind of why I've put it down here. I'm not throwing it off the table. It's you guys' decision. There is a lot of red tape that comes with a 40R district. that we would have to figure out with the EOHLC to see if this is even a viable option for us. For example, they always put, you know, must be close to public transit. After more review, you can find out that, okay, maybe we don't need to be super close to public transit, but with that, you know, we'll need to do X, Y, Z, and then A, B, C twice over or something. A lot that comes with this. And yeah, as you can see, plenty of state review. And let me think of what else. Yeah, so like I said, most of them are much larger scale. Think of like driving through Cambridge and you see a lot of five over ones. Those are often associated with smart growth districts, very dense, and oftentimes a lot of the acreage was way above 11 acres like what we'll be working with, but it certainly does not rule this out. And certainly also not saying that we're gonna have a five over one here in Boxborough. It's obviously what we do with it. It's how we take this and mold the density requirements to meet the 40R requirements within this district. I see hands up, so I'm happy to answer them.

What are the difficulties associated with the first item under trade hopes?

Yes, and that's a great question. I think it's one of those, I think it's exactly that. It's a trade-off where this one, the 40Y, they were not concerned about the wastewater and the sewage being private. This one, the smart growth, it's something that they're going to look into and they're probably going to not be very attracted by it. I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but there are stricter requirements just across the board with this having been put in place over 20 years ago. Most of these developments are in kind of larger cities and even the smaller ones don't. So let me see if I have it in my notes here. Um, just off the quick search alone, it just says that we will need to certify that, like, our existing infrastructure, be it installed or it will be installed in the future, can adequately handle the load, um... required for whatever we plan on building. So it's going to present us with a pretty similar option that we're already exploring where we're constricted by nitrogen loading or how much the well is able to produce, the size of our septic. These are things that we're going to have to go through with whatever we develop. So going through them and exploring those options through 40R doesn't seem like it's going to be a terribly challenging option. It seems like we'll need to do that anyway. But this is something we would obviously explore before we get to the stage of putting together draft language to make this 40R district. We would have those meetings with EOHLC to make sure that... that whatever we're proposing will work for all of their requirements before anything is kind of put together. But it looks like we're not restricted by private wastewater and water conditions, the well and the septic. It just seems like they're going to need to check that a lot more than they have for MBTA communities. And it seems like more than they'll do for the starter homes district.

I feel like with the property we're dealing with, 20 units, being able to do 20 units per acre is just not going to be feasible for it at all.

Yeah, it is definitely a bit high and certainly higher than the starter homes and our current MBTA communities overlay.

Mm-hmm.

there's a good chance that if you were to put these on a spectrum, that this would be furthest to the denser side of the spectrum. But obviously a lot of these provide flexibility and we could put them really anywhere on that spectrum, but judging by, you know, not to look into a crystal ball, but I wouldn't imagine that, that a lot of folks would want to see higher than 20 units per developable acre.

I'd rather think people wouldn't want to see anything like that anywhere near it.

Yeah.

Okay, so... Just one question. Historically, you guys looked at the wells and the septic, and you had 12 to, was it 14 to 20 units or was what units? Something like that. That's when you say units, that's like bedrooms, right?

That's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. That's units. It's a mixed, I think that number was for a mix of two and three bedroom condos. I forgot what the data was. So that was units or bedrooms?

Units. Units. Okay. Units, obviously. Right, right. So something like that is going to be like, you're going to use two acres of the property and all the rest of the property is... something for well, right?

Yeah. Well, something else that might be an option is if we have extra land besides the building, is having something like a community center of some sort, which would be something that you would want for a model if you were going for like a co-housing community. And I feel like the starter, the 40Y overlay district works really well for that sort of, for a really small co-housing community like that.

What's number five?

Okay, friendly 40B, great. So this is an option I'd say we're probably all a lot more familiar with. What 40B is, it's similar to 40R, similar to 40Y. 40B is... specifically about affordable housing. And every town in the state needs to meet their requirement threshold of having 10 or more percent of their units of housing in town to be affordable. sorry and um what a friendly 40b is and sorry if it's below that 10 um a lot of uh affordable housing developers will often come in with plans um to build uh you know x amount of affordable houses even if it's just one or whatever to come in with these plans to develop affordable housing And the town is very, if you are below that 10%, the town is very limited in their ability to restrict a 40B development based on, you know, whatever they're asking for. Usually it's a comprehensive permit through the ZBA that really handles the majority of it. A friendly 40B is often brought to towns with over this 10% threshold. Like Boxborough, we are over that 10% threshold. And it's called the Local Initiative Program, and we would either seek out developers through an RFP process, and then these developers would come over and give us their – you know, their plan to develop a site and say, we are going to go through the exact same process that we would go through with 40B if you guys were below 10%. But it's a collaborative effort where usually the select board signs something into like policy first where they allow this exploration and process to happen in collaboration with one another so that it's not kind of a one-handed and one-sided approach that favors the developer, but the town of Boxborough will also be able to have a lot of say in how this site's built out and developed rather than just a developer kind of coming in and saying, this is what we would like to develop. We see you're under the 10% threshold. There's little you can do to stop or curb what we're suggesting. A friendly 40B invites affordable developers to come build affordable units in Boxborough, collaboratively between the ZBA, mostly the ZBA, but obviously in this case, with it being kind of the housing board's land, it would be through the housing board as well. And then the zoning or the planning board as well as needed. And I'm sure that we would seek out their opinions and advice as we would go through a process like this. This is a very, this is probably of all of these, the most common practice, the most commonly done practice. I do not have historical knowledge on how many times this has been done in Boxborough. I don't believe it will be the first time, but this is done all across the state every day or several times a year.

one of our safer or safest options i would say i have a question please so these are a bunch of different overlay districts is it is it would it make sense or is it a thing to combine overlay districts or would that be more of a kind of the

So, yeah, I will point out that this 40 B is technically not an overlay district. It is a comprehensive permit from the ZBA that essentially waives the existing zoning there and permits this comprehensive. project to take place wherever it is. Sorry, I got caught up on the overlay part. You said, would it be worthwhile to explore combining some of these options?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to that too much. I'm not certain that it's really been done anywhere. The MBTA overlay and the 40R overlay are really the only ones that have been... practiced and completed with, of course, as we know, the MBTA overlay is just a few years old. I'm sure that there are some overlap districts. Actually, I know for a fact that in Middleborough, they put their MBTA overlay districts and their 4DR district kind of on top of each other overlapping. So there are instances. However, it seems like I'm just not sure how it would work for Boxborough. I'm guessing it would probably be more work to combine some of these and not going to kind of... say that we can't do it. I just know that between Alec and myself, it would be probably a lot more to try to piecemeal some of these together than to kind of just go for one and focus on one alone. But it's certainly another option on the table that we can further explore if we like this part of that and this part of the other. But it also might be worthwhile if we like this part of one and this part of the other to explore this custom local zoning overlay that we would be able to kind of shape up ourselves. Okay, I got one more. Yeah, Channing, I heard you.

Yeah, I... I can wait or give this to you now, but I have the section of, where is it, 760-69, whatever it is.

Yeah, it's MGL, you're saying? It's in the text?

No, 760-CMR. It's the 40Y.

Gotcha. Okay. 760-CMR. I just want to be able to reference this later.

760-CMR 69.03. Thanks. That's the section. That'll work. Okay, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.

No worries. I appreciate it. And then this will be the last one. This is... This would... Let me be frank. This would be... These are all possible. None of them are impossible. This one would definitely kind of be the... the odd ball out I'd say. This is a zoning change. So if we go back and look at, technically all of these are zoning changes. They change our zoning bylaw one way or another. But see this purple layer in the middle? This last option is the option to change our zoning, our base zoning. So we'll go back here. It's done in every town. Every town and city changes their zoning. Here and there, every couple of years, there was just this past fall town meeting, there was a proposal to bring some of, it was the business, some of the industrial commercial district into the business or business one district. It didn't move forward, but it was on the table to begin with. I'll be frank, I don't think that this is a very viable option for us to explore. We don't have another district in our base zoning that is what we want to see at 72 Stowe Road. So it could also mean making a new zoning district, of which is not completely worthwhile, I'll say. But it's... It's... It's just a bit, we have other options that can bring us financial incentives or be a bit easier to accomplish. It seems like this would probably be one of the harder ones to accomplish. And we do have some, Legal, I mean, with all of them, we have to follow the law, but with this being one parcel, it can't be spot zoning, of which there could certainly be plenty of appeals. to call this spot zoning, which could of course take us to land court and none of us want that. But yeah, so we have the option to bring in Stowe Road into another district already in our zoning map or create a new residential district, one in the shape that we wanna see. But I do believe that if we wanted to do the latter of those two options to create a new district, it would probably be easier to do so through an overlay district. Um, but I'd be happy to talk about that more with you. I'd be happy to talk about any of these options. I've been talking for almost 30, 40 minutes now. So I am going to, um, let you guys continue to ask questions and, uh, yeah, that's pretty much it.

Thank you very much, Ian.

No problem. I hope that was comprehensive enough. I do wish I had a little more time to, to delve into them and, um, and learn as much as I could about them, but that's kind of more or less high-level knowledge about those. It'd be good to kind of see which ones pique our interest, and if there are any that we can outright say no to, we're not interested in, that would be, that'd probably be pretty worthwhile in the short term, but I will not speak for the board anymore. I will let you guys discuss.

Oh, thank you. It was very good. Well, Channing has some charts that we could have the session later in the meeting, I think. Sure. So we can talk about which of those things we like. So unless there's further questions about the presentation, we can move on to the rest of the meeting.

I had one question, further question about 40Y. I think one of the things that I don't necessarily like about it is that it's entirely focused on ownership i know a lot of people aren't asking for rentals but the reality is that people who are low income that and require and in need of affordable housing often can't meet the requirements for that and need to rest for a while before they can actually get that um like move toward you know ownership so they have to rent for a while anyway I don't necessarily want to see super dense rentals, but making a starter homes district where there are a few options for rentals or rental is an option for the affordable units. I think would be really great. I just don't know if that's really included in the 40. Why? Because the main focus is on. Yeah. People who need an affordable unit. Like, if you want to get into a 40B and you have a bunch of student, you know, a student loan debt, you might not be able to get approved for a mortgage, which is one of the, like, first things you have to do to be able to get in that.

I kind of talked a little bit to affordability, Ian, later on, and you're going to add to it. You and I talked about that earlier today.

Yeah, yeah. No, but yeah, Channing had a, I mean, it does relate to that, but I certainly understand it's a frustration and it's a drawback of going that route. What could be a very attractive option to take this state zoning route, that's definitely a restriction that I see. Yeah, Joe, I see you have your hand up.

Yeah, real quick. I just want to see, I don't know if you have time to do this, Ian, or if you're able to do this, but it'd be cool to see these in kind of a chart, maybe like on a landscape table so we can see density for each option. I don't know if you could do that quick. I don't even know if I can even ask you to do that. It's just something that would be helpful for us to process, I think. And then I just wanted to...

I got an extra graph of dentists to least-dents versus most-own-ownership versus most-renter. Yeah, I like that. I'll do that in advance of our next meeting, and I'll send it around.

Yeah. And then one thing I just wanted to clarify, I heard the question earlier, like, what is EOHLC? I want to just people make sure it's not the state housing finance agency, but it's the state housing administrator. So it used to be Department of Housing and Community Development Administration. It runs a number of programs, HOME, CDBG. It runs the local 40B housing. Now they just changed the name to Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, which just is another difficult acronym in our line of work.

Okay.

Thanks again.

No problem.

We can move on to the rest of the meeting. So Wendy, could you put the other side up? And go down to after the presentation. Keep going. Keep going. Oh, that's it. I don't know if we need to go through this in detail, but there is another issue that we need to resolve. Probably it's not a problem, but in fact, there are constraints associated with the land and with the account, really, that the money that we would use is in the Affordable Housing Trust. And the restrictions are that it'd be affordable to low and moderate income housing. No numbers, just that. It's not specific. Well, early on, a long time ago, we had that discussion in the SRCDC. What does this actually mean? What does it allow us to do? So we asked A&P for guidance, and their letter is included in a packet that I sent you Their answer was that it's okay. All the units don't have to be affordable, which you might suppose. It can be a friendly 40B, which is what we ended up proposing. But I think one thing that we need to worry about and perhaps seek another opinion about is exactly what does constitute conforming to all these requirements? Would a 40-wide development with 10% of the homes affordable comply? That question, as far as I know, has not been answered, at least to us by KNP. So I just wanted to include that as one of the things that we have to worry about is that we have to make sure What we do is legal and legally complies with the constraints of the Affordable Housing Trust and the land itself. And the stuff I sent out to you goes into a lot more detail than that. So that's all I wanted to say about that. Unless there are questions.

I have a question, Al. The letter from PMP from Jane and so forth is now 13 years old. Do you think that's at some point worth checking with them to see if it's still viable.

It might be, but I think we're going to have to check with them to see if we go with the 40Y route, I think we'll have to check with them to see if that's legal. Because that's different than a friendly 40B.

Well, since the friendly 40B isn't an overlay district, Conceivably, it could be a friendly 40B with the 40Y as an overlay district. Correct, Ian?

Potentially, this would all be questions for EOHLC, but I also would question is, you know, does one not restrict the other by what it requires? But yeah, I'd be, I'm not sure.

Well, I don't think 40Y is limited to 10% affordable units. You can have more than 10%.

We could have 25%.

We could have 100% if we could figure out how to do it.

But the more affordable units are, the less attractive it becomes to developers. I mean, these are trade-offs you would have to think about.

That's why I'm like, just talk to the people who want the housing.

Right. But all I'm saying is this is an issue that we're going to have to worry about. Any other questions?

Just real quick, Al. To the point that the letter's a little dated, if we do ask for an update, could we ask the attorneys to analyze their update against the options that ian presented and that would help us uh not so much with the nuanced questions um in terms of could we do a hybrid overlay and whatnot but could we just ask the attorneys hey we want to make sure we're going to meet um the agreement and the affordability clause in the contract, the local contracts, you know, could you update your memo for our purposes? And, oh, by the way, could you look at these options that we're considering, 40Y, 40R, friendly 40B? Exactly.

That's what I think we're going to have to do. Although my opinion is that before we do that, we need to clarify our thinking as best we can but exactly how we'd like to implement these various options. Because my experience with all lawyers, probably K&P and Fickler, is the more precisely you can ask the question, the better guidance you'll get. So I think that's exactly what we should do, Joe. I agree. When the time comes. When the time comes. But I think we need to, if we can, I think we need to clarify our thinking on exactly what we would want under those various options before we seek that guidance, but I think we should. Yeah, I agree. Thank you. Okay, what do we got here? Okay. Moving on to the housing production plan. How are we doing there, Ian?

Good. Really few updates, but it'll be good to kind of talk about what we want to do for this next month. We haven't yet heard back from... the, oh goodness, I don't even know which department it is, and it might be several, but in March we applied for a grant through the Eco One Stop, which is different than the kind of grant portal that we applied for this healthy production plan grant with, but we did that in June. So for the open space plan, we applied to that in March, like I said. We still have yet to hear back, and they say that they're going to let us know in June, which... is very on on par with how they normally roll out these these grants and their announcements so we do look forward to hearing back from them on the open space one very soon but this would probably push the announcement of whether or not we received this state grant for the housing production plan uh... i believe the original month that they said was September following the June application. So I wouldn't expect it until at least November is probably more realistic by how they're moving. But who knows? So that's the update on kind of where the grant is. Regardless, I think the plan has always been to continue moving forward with this, anticipating that we receive that and only readjusting once we receive the hopefully good news on that later this year. We do have a housing production forum planned for our next August meeting. I would like to spend a little time just openly talking about that. Al, I'd hope you and maybe if any of the additional board members would like to put some time and energy towards that in the next month, then I think that's definitely worthwhile. I do want to kind of emphasize that the way I see this next month's meeting going is about housing production. And I think Stowe Road should have a part in that. But I want to make sure that we that we don't focus entirely on Stow Road. Um, or if we would like, we can have an additional meeting sometime in September or August, um, where we do focus on Stow Road. Um, but for right now, I believe the current plan we have was to, um, make up an agenda on some topics and items that we wanted to discuss. Um, a lot of which surrounding the visioning exercise that we did at, um, Fight First Day and at one of the town meeting events. Talk broadly about those. Try to invite some, potentially invite some committee representatives from the EDC, the Planning Board, the Select Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals and such, as well as, of course, the open public and try to receive as much feedback as possible from folks. But that's a pretty high level

look at it i'd be happy to answer any questions or openly discuss this um well right now it sounds like what we need to do is convene a small group to uh put together what we need to do with the hearing the meeting yeah anybody interested when's the meeting

August 25th, I believe. Is that our next scheduled meeting normally?

Oh, right, right, right. That's what we're doing. I remember now.

Yeah.

Oh, I like this. Any other? Oh, Shannon. Oh, my goodness, Shannon. Shannon raised his hand. Hey, I've been all the way on this.

okay thank you i i don't hear anyone else so i'll assume it's you two folks for now but um with that i don't i'm not sure we'll need to post anything or create a working group or anything we can we should be able to meet informally um and i'll double check the the requirements for that but we should be good on that um great okay so we can begin putting some stuff together um on that and uh Yeah, we'll also invite individual members of the board if they have any opinions or ideas of things that we should be doing. Then they can reach out to me, not the board, as I would be discussing in violating open meeting law. But if you do have any ideas that you'd like us to bring and set up for... next month's housing forum, then please let me know. Um, and I will bring them to Al and Channing as we work on this, but I think it should be a good opportunity, um, to focus on, you know, the needs broader of the, uh, the, the town, hopefully get some, some input.

I think what you just said is, uh, You would like, and it's a really good idea for any housing board member, even if you're not on this planning group, to send suggestions of what should be included and how to go about it to you and Fannie. And we can talk about it when we get together. Right. Is that right?

It could also be a great time to show off our dream house quilt that Finn and Brittany did so good on. Did a great job at putting together, getting folks to buy into that.

Okay.

Okay.

So we'll be informed, Al, you, Ian, and myself will be informed as to what our next step is. Yep.

Yeah, let me just look at my calendar. Probably next week would probably, yep, very open next week. So, yeah, maybe sometime next week to meet and discuss some of the options to present and talk about and discuss there. But also within that time, I'll try to put together some promotional material as well that we can get to Wendy to send out, that we can get to the board to send out, and that I'll get to town administrator, town clerk, and make sure that it's as publicly available as possible. Get as many voices as possible. It will be hybrid. I will be in person this time for that. But yeah, we should, I'd hope that we have several folks attend. And while we're still on it, and I mentioned it briefly, but I didn't get any confirmation earlier, maybe last month or the month before we talked about, we talked about inviting committees. Did we want, Is it good if I start reaching out to said committees and inviting a representative for them to join and be a part of this discussion? Or is that something that we'd like to push further out, focus on just residents for this next one, and have a future meeting to discuss with board and committee representatives?

I think residents is what we want to focus on at this stage.

I think That's right, too. I mean, one thing that might happen if we get a whole bunch of committee people, we have all these committee people and maybe one or two residents, I think they might be discriminating.

Yeah, that's a great point. My fear is that we don't get enough residents. And then we're, but we don't have to, we'll be hopeful and we'll do our outreach.

We should have goodies or refreshments or something.

Yeah, offer some refreshments.

I'll look into that. Yeah, we can definitely get some refreshments.

We can do that. All right. Very good. And the whole program, I'm not sure there's anything going there. Anything for... Wendy?

The only thing, there hasn't been any new applications, but I got the last, just today, I got the last invoice of number four application. So we've given out, you know, almost the $8,000. This was for gutters to prevent ice dams. Nice. Yeah. Okay. So I have not received any new applications since probably April 1st.

When did we originally send out the information about the program?

I think it was the very end of December. Right. And I got, you know, I got two or three right away, then another one, then that one.

Yeah. I think it'd be a good thing to do during the summertime to, you know, do a blast and remind people of the program.

That's not my, that's not my, that's not my position. Yeah. That's not something that I do. That's a housing board thing.

Oh, okay. So we should do that again then. Put that notice out that, you know, hey, this is on a rotating basis if you need anything. Because then if anybody needs to do any kind of maintenance work in preparation for the upcoming seasons... Maybe we should discuss that next meeting.

It probably depends on what... There's a budgetary question too. I mean, you know... How much money should we allocate? Things like that. So let's put that on the agenda for the next meeting.

So, Al, you're saying a budgetary thing, but I mean, all the 20 people are or whatever are allocated the 2K. So. I mean, there's still there wasn't a time limit to it, was there? I mean.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

If there's money that's still available, it might be worth it to remind people of the program since it's like more than six months later. Right. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. They might be newly aware of things that they weren't aware of, you know, in December when they first got notified.

Well, let's put it on the agenda for the next meeting. All right. And the mental assistance program?

Yeah, there was something I wanted to ask, and now I can't remember. But we still have a waiting list. We're still vetting people that are in the program. I think there's 15 people right now. So we keep on plugging away and I can't believe I forgot. It's been very, very, very, very busy this summer. And so I can't remember exactly what that question was.

Okay. Well, if you think of it.

Yeah, I will.

We'll come back around to it.

Okay.

Okay. Well, the next part of the meeting, I think I will let, Channing had before. Channing, if you could go down the stack, there's a couple of visuals Channing might want to use in his talk. Is it this? Well, I don't see anything yet. A little, are you pardon? What? What do I need?

I just don't know what you want me to show.

Do you want me to show something?

Go back to the deck, original deck. Go back to Elle's email.

The deck you were showing. The collection of slides that you were showing.

Okay, so not the packet.

Go back to the packet.

Oh, I was just in the packet. Hold on.

I believe it's the last pages on the packet.

The last pages on the packet. Oh, okay. I just have to share it again. Is that what happened? I stopped sharing. All right. I got it.

Okay.

Do you want the other one too, Channing?

The one before, I think it's probably the one right after.

Yeah, I got it. This one?

Yeah, that's fine. Thank you. Ian, do you want to Make any comments at all about that as we spoke earlier?

Yeah, I'll give the high-level detail on it. So we had this... We had this... this poster at two town events. The first one was a town meeting info session. Um, and I don't believe it was for annual town meeting. I believe it was a first special town meeting. So that would have been in March. Um, and with that, I did not remove the suggestions or the dots, but I brought them back to Pfeiffer's day. And, uh, In my short count, I believe we had about 19 or so at the first event that we did. And then at the end of Pfeiffer's Day, we had a total of 89 entries. So that would be about, what is that, 60 or 70 people who came by at Pfeiffer's Day to give their opinions on this. There are some sticky notes that were put on there of priorities and options for housing that were not originally put on there. And one of the struggles, you know, you get with this as a statistician looking at that as well okay this option in the sticky note was not presented to everybody at the same exact time it wasn't there at the beginning but rather somebody put that in halfway through or towards the tail end and so um Yeah, that's pretty much the high level and the technical of it. But I was very happy when Channing asked for that data and was able to kind of make this thing we see next. But essentially, you obviously see them ranked here from starter homes to affordable housing to middle income, all being really, really high priorities for the residents of Boxborough who responded to this visioning poster. So yeah, that's all I'll say. I'll pass it back to Channing.

One question, is it at all legitimate to combine the starter homes and middle income housing homes categories?

In my opinion, I don't think that's unheard of. I do think that it could go either way. I think you could... staunchly defend that starter homes are separate than middle-income housing and should be treated as such. But I also definitely understand that there are a lot of similarities between starter homes and middle-income housing. As we've seen the housing market kind of change, especially over the past 10 years, those two things kind of blend together, where now a lot of younger middle-income people, per se... have a very hard time of attaining any regular house and then would hence need starter homes. So it could go either way. That's my look at it.

I forgot that board, but was the nature of it such that a given person could vote for both starter homes and middle income housing?

They were told to put one on. I'm not sure how it went at Pfeiffer's Day, but Finn was there. So, Finn, I'm not sure if you had people putting a couple on. We weren't super strict about it. We weren't going to peel stickers off.

I think I wasn't paying too close of attention. I think Brittany might have been more alert to that.

The question is, what is your number one housing priority? I would hope that would sway folks to just vote for one as well.

I do remember the wheelchair accessibility one was actually from a family that had the child with them that was in a wheelchair at the event. They said they were in a unit in Beaver Brook? Is that the one that I'm thinking of? The one that's not verbal or something? I can't remember exactly.

Codman Hill or Swanson River?

No, not Codman Hill.

Brook Village or Hartford Bridge.

Thanks. I tried to account for it by including what would have been obvious multiple selections on that list. In other words, climate appropriate materials. Well, let's say that would be across the board, okay? I mean, what else would it be? You're not gonna separate those out. Work wheelchair accessible, that's gonna apply to everything and so forth. So I tried to account for that through an adjustment and the list came out pretty much the way it is anyway. which I then extracted onto this grid here, which maybe I can talk to now, but if there are more questions, go ahead. But this is an explanatory note to that. Okay. Okay, the grid. Does everybody have a copy of it? Do you need one? I've got one here if you need one. No? I didn't send one to you. In other words, I'd like to, okay, we'll leave that then. Let me make a couple of preface, let me preface this, when the preface is probably going to be longer than the period comment, so granted. In an effort to deal with the results of the survey and also to remove some of the kaleidoscopic elements of this whole puzzle that we're faced with. I took the most frequently mentioned categories and tried to apply some decision criteria to them. Before I get to the decision criteria, let me say as to the categories, starting from the top, starter homes. At 19, that was the largest and most frequently mentioned category. Affordable, then middle-income housing, then more rental. But rental is a new issue now because Acton Housing Authority has told me they're not interested in building anything now. And we are not equipped to manage any rental properties on that or any other So I'm afraid rentals, unless somebody knows more than I do, dug the window. And housing for seniors is number eight. And co-op and community residential property is number five. So that's kind of at the tag end of it. So that's how I rank them. And then I try to apply these decision criteria. I am not predisposed for 40Y, so you'll have to override my decision on that one. But what I would like to talk to primarily at this point is starter funds. And that is where the low-income people are also the neediest people, and that is where Boxborough has its share of them, even though we have to put this up for lottery. But I do, I think, have a thought to introduce here. And that is, instead of giving up the land on Stowe Road, either giving it up to Habitat, for example, or selling it to a developer, we don't do either. We create a land lease and we keep the land. Now, the advantages of that, as I see it, are that the value of the land comes out of the selling price of the residence. So the only thing that's being purchased is the structure. Now this is something that's quite prevalent in Maryland.

It's not a new thing.

And the advantage to the purchaser is they don't have to pay for the land and they don't have to pay a tax on the land. Okay? And we don't pay a tax on the land because the housing is not available. So we're not going to pay taxes.

Yeah.

So the town just misses out on the revenue of those buildings.

Well, the town isn't going to be spending an awful lot of money on it anyway. But they're going to, five years from now, they're going to miss their revenue pension. Anyway, so that would lower the price by $160,000 an acre. Okay. So if you put one house on that acre, the price comes down by $160,000. If you put two houses on that acre, it comes down by $80,000 and so on and so forth, depending on how many units you put on the acre, which is why zoning comes into the issue, I think. But the advantage is you really lower the price of a starter home down to where people who really don't have a lot of money presumably can afford it. Now, pricing, price points, price points for middle income people, all of that has to be worked through. But I think the concept is sound. And I've taken the liberty of talking to Stephanie Peterson at Metro West to see if she has any insight. She's researching it. I spoke to Ian this afternoon. Ian's thinking about it, too. I don't believe there's any prohibition in Massachusetts about doing something like that. Although if we chose to pursue it, we would have to have a legal opinion on it. But I think it does lower the price of an affordable unit to a really manageable level for somebody somewhere on the AMI spectrum or continuum. Household of two would not be overly mortgage burdened at $170,000 house, maybe. We might even be able to do better with reframed housing, modular housing on there somehow, or some other technique, I don't know. But that's where my starting point is, and I think I'm just sort of taking a liberty. I think the liberty of advocating for it now and jumping the gun maybe, I don't know. But that's where I'm coming from. Who would we lease it to? We don't lease it to anybody. They just get the right to have their house on there.

Yeah, so the homeowners would own the houses, but the town would maintain ownership of the land, is my understanding there.

Now, depending on what the economics of the whole thing turn out to be, we could say that, yeah, there will be a lease of some amount, but that amount might be, could be zero, or it could be some very small amount that would help pay for a preservation sinking fund We know what those are about. Or it could be something that would help fund BRAC.

So my question about the land lease is, if we went that route and we put a septic and a well on the property, does that then mean that the town of Boxborough is responsible for maintaining those?

That's a very good point. Maybe.

Yeah. So I feel like there would have to be some amount paid. to the lease to make sure that we're able to continue funding the maintenance.

There probably would have to be something, yeah. But I think the thrust of it is to get the price of the housing down.

Yeah, I can see that. And I think I've also heard about this. I think that was one of the groups in the Housing Leadership Academy out in Western Mass was doing something similar as a community housing trust. And we have the Affordable Housing Trust. I don't know if that's somehow different than that, but I think the land lease is kind of part of what they were talking about. I don't know much about it.

Did I understand you say that somebody's actually doing this?

If I remember correctly, I think so. I'm getting a ton of information at this Housing Leadership Academy, and I'm only absorbing a percentage of it.

That would be very useful. You want to track down if somebody's doing it,

to see how it's doable as a it's a community land trust a clt and um housing trusts are able to do that just exactly how channing described yeah yeah my my main question would be would the town be responsible for the the septic and the well maintenance and if so you know what would that cost be to the town and then

Well, I could go to the price of the house to actually leasehold improvement. There's some way to look at it.

That's a good point. I kind of assumed in this that the town would kind of donate the land at cost or at no cost. So if that was the case when they're building, there is no and the homeowner is assuming the mortgage. He is paying the mortgage for the value of the property that gets built. The structure is only the structure. Right. But then, I guess, again, my problem is, I think, if you go to town and say, we're going to build 12,000 on this, but we're not going to get any tax to support the schools or anything out of that. I just think you're dead town. I don't see how that could ever pass the town meeting, to be honest.

If it's all affordable units, though.

So I guess the point I'm making is, yeah, I mean, it's affordable or not. The town's going to, I mean, those people that move to those units are going to have kids that are in schools. How are they not, how is the town, how come they don't have to pay taxes to send their kids to school? when I do.

They'd have to pay taxes on the structure. That's right, they would pay the property tax. So they're going to be paying some taxes. They're going to pay property tax. They're going to own the land, they're going to pay property tax. The answer to that one is, those kids are marginal, they're going to pay it anyway, they're right over the margin. You know, you've got fixed costs right there, these are just variables, we're going to make a difference. Don't worry, I'm kidding. Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, you can apply that. I'm going to try to do that. Well, anyway, you're thinking outside the box here. So that's my story. I'm going to stick to it. The other part of it is that at least you try to find out what the decision criteria are and see what approach is going to work with them or won't work with them and so forth. So this was an attempt to try to at least get on paper what... but these various choices that were, or preferences that were selected, what are the various elements that they have to satisfy in order to fly? And that's really what I was trying to do. Whether I succeeded, I guess up to the board's deliberation, but if these criteria don't work, I'm sure there are others that would be useful instead. But my main selling point here is to get a reasonable number of low-cost affordable houses on Stowe Road, that Stowe Road lot, and a ground lease would be one way to at least get a good step on it, I think. And it doesn't mean we couldn't charge them something.

It just would be a modest, as an assessor, I'm one of the board of assessors. So unless the town owns the land, Somehow. I mean, they're going to look at the land and say, this is the value. The taxes are based on the value of the property. If they own the land, then that's definitely certain. Well, you know, they don't get any tax on the land. That's, again, I think that would just be a child.

I don't think it's the accounts for all I've said. You know, the accounting department.

Well, I will say I do like this. I mean, to me, it seems like to me that not being on the planning board is that planning board needs to kind of come up with a vision for what they want that property to look like. And I mean, I think what Jannie's describing is that if it's a property that has eight or 10 or 12 individual homes, that some are starter homes, they're all affordable. Some of them are built with accessibility for seniors. I think that's a nice vision that

seems that would work work well for the town and i think you could you it would sell at the time well you know there's a question too of availability not as well as affordability i mean the plain fact is that starter homes are not very available in boxborough so even having a starter home that would not be designed to be affordable I think would be a benefit to Boxborough. Because we don't have many of them. It's fairly impossible to find one.

They've got to be affordable.

No, I think some fraction of them have to be affordable.

There is, I think, a social benefit to the property having mixed income. Because if it's all 100% low income or affordable, that keeps you more socially isolated. When you have mixed income and you have people of different income levels all interacting in the community, I think you get the most benefit out of that.

Well, you could have affordable homes that would Pushed it right. But I'm not going to be willing to stand up in front of the town meeting and try to sell it.

Tell me a starter home for $600,000.

Yeah, well, there's an affordable house here for $600,000. Folks, you can all buy it, right? Yeah.

I think an argument could be made, but this is something that the spectrum of how there's a real weakness in the spectrum of housing that's available in Boxborough. And we're trying to, you know, fix that.

And by going two per acre or something like that, that pays the equation. We're all on acre minimum lots. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's why I really like 40Y.

Yeah, 40Y is attractive to me because, I mean, that's what the survey said. And I think, personally, as far as I can tell anecdotally, that is something that Boxborough family needs is...

You know, like a starter home, whatever you call them. I think, you know, 40 Y is new, and I missed the part about the municipal water and so forth, but I really tried to pin the presenter down when we were up at Devon Smith. I thought I had the right answers, but I think some careful reading of the statute I just read is that the minimum density where you are is four units per acre. Yeah.

Which sounds pretty feasible for that property.

So we've got eight acres. So you've got eight times 32. And you're going to have eight times 32 times two kids in your school.

So I'm getting careful with those numbers because there's constraints on radius and wellhead and ledge and all that. So we can't fit... Eight times four.

Yeah, yeah. But I don't think...

So anyway, we can...

I'm saying for the acreage that we have, there's about... At that rate, use about three acres of it for housing, and then the rest of it for other amenities.

But you won't farm it. That won't work. We've got eight acres now that are development homes for housing. I think it's eight.

I think that's what we figured. We haven't done an analysis. There might be leads and everything else.

That would be 24 units, and that's way beyond the capacity of the land.

What we could do is to say we can only build on this portion of the land for geographical reasons and donate the rest of it to the town for municipal purposes.

Right, yeah.

which makes sense to me because we can't build them.

And I'm saying like if you use like a co-housing model and you had a building that was the community center that had multiple purposes, you could collaborate with the town on that. The town could use it for different things. Like most of the co-housing communities in the area also like host other groups and events and stuff in their common house because it's a great resource.

And also we need some of the other, quite a bit of the other land for wells and septic system too. I mean, we can't, I don't know quite how much that is, probably around five or six acres that we need for that. So, I mean, with the housing, we might have room for a community center, we might not, but I think we could comfortably use all the land that we have.

Well, I think the town or the town, you know, the economic committee, the conservation committee, et cetera, et cetera, all have some ideas as to how that extra, so to speak, land could be used and what trails or whatever.

Yeah, well, sometimes things come like a town essentially. So if you use three acres of it for 40-y housing, you have the rest of the acreage for whatever else.

Well, excuse me, plus whatever it takes for septic as well.

Oh, yeah, that's it.

So that's going to take community center. We've got to have some septic system in there.

Yeah.

Requirements for a community center for that are not as stressful as those for a dwelling. So probably that's not going to add too much load.

Yeah.

I mean, but.

So I have a lot of things to think about. You know, maybe what you're saying is right. I don't know. I don't think we need to have a commercial development in order to get on there what we want to have done. But I may be wrong. I don't really have to work through some pricing and some alternatives and say, well, what is the market really able to sustain? And, you know, it's going to come in and someone's going to say, well, it's going to be affordable. And, you know, for a four-family, a four- or six-person household, you know, they're Annual income could be, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars. And if you can afford that amount of money, you can afford a $500,000 to $400,000 home. And, you know, you've got to convince everybody that's what we want to do. And, you know, and they're going to want to say, sure, I'm going to try to have it.

Like I did tell you that I have kids and $500,000 a home or $600,000 is a bargain right now.

You know?

Yeah.

You have the money.

It is.

Yeah.

Apparently, it still makes my eyes bug out thinking about those numbers because I'm just like... Yeah, well, I think if Massachusetts says, gee, we've got to have affordable housing to keep technical people here, but I've never met a company yet that wouldn't pay up for the technical people that they wanted.

Well, you work in tech, but sure, it's fine. There is a lack of...

People throw around the term affordable, but there's a lack of precision about what they mean.

Yeah. Because affordable here, by and large, when we say what our affordable units are in Boxborough, most of it's 40B.

A large chunk of it's 40B. But if you're offering a home that would market at $800,000 and selling it for $600,000, could you call that affordable? No. I don't know. It seems reasonable.

I mean, is that 80% AMI?

110% of AMI for a six-person household? Eight-person household?

This 80% AMI is not in any of the... People don't get that numerically. You talk about it.

That's unclear.

Affordable means less than the market price to most people.

Yeah.

Well, there you have it. Well, it's something to think about. Are you still out there? Ian, you still there?

I am. My take on it is we should look into 40Y. I think 40, to me, 40Y is a good fit. Maybe there are some problems with it that I haven't caught or we don't know about, but I think digging a bit deep into 40Y to see what really is possible or whether it is the fit it seems to be would make sense for us. That's what my opinion is.

I agree. No, you just have to analyze it and see.

Would the board like me to set up a meeting sometime over the next few weeks to discuss this with whoever the 40Y coordinator at EOHLC is? Given I can get a hold of them and schedule some time.

It looks good to me, but maybe it wouldn't be. Like Shannon said, maybe when we look into it in more detail, we find, you know, it's not that good.

And I'll bet that that person might be able to actually look at what we have and be able to tell us if it's very feasible or not.

Yeah. Because what everybody complains about and what the data shows, as a matter of fact, is that we need starter homes in Boxborough. And what's wrong with that? I mean, Those are homes for families, for young people and everything else. We're all a bunch of old-agers. I mean, you know, it would be good for box play, in my opinion.

I mean, I think it would be great to have it half and half, like, geared towards starter homes for young families and the other half of it more towards seniors who are sizing down. Right? Like, that seems to be kind of the needs of the town. Because I hear both sides.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. How do we answer the question? I guess that's a good question. Ian, do you want somebody to sort it through?

You know, yeah, that's what I think. Ian, I think Ian ought to do that myself. I think let's look into 40Y. You can be part of the group that looks into 40Y and see if there's

And then if we find that there's some aspect of it that doesn't really quite work for our town specifically, maybe then we could go with option one and do kind of a modified 40Y of some sort.

We just, as long as the process keeps moving along so that we can either discard or we really just can't handle because it's either too complicated or too lengthy or whatever. can do.

Another possibility and one advantage of talking to a person about it is, as Ian points out, 40Y is kind of new and in the process of formation. I mean, we might actually be able to influence the way the program is structured by telling them our situation.

I think it's a good opportunity.

Yeah. So we could take advantage of the fact that things are quite not quite worked out in 40Y land.

Have some plasticity.

So do we all have it? Well, it's up to you guys. I'll tell you what I think. What does everybody else think?

Well, I'm glad to take another look at the DMR, whatever it is, 69. Highlight what I think of the problems. And then if someone thinks that they can solve the problems, that's an action item for them, I guess, because I really don't want to fool around with 40 wives. No, you know, I don't want to be the one that gets tangled in the spaghetti trying to sort through it. And the density bothers me. But, you know, I wonder if the four houses breakers include septic as well. Well, there is a wastewater issue, I think. There always is the municipal thing. But I'm just one voice in this.

Jim, you mentioned that you like option five. I could see that since option five isn't actually an overlay, that it can conceivably be combined with 40. I don't really see why not.

I mean, I just think that I guess for me, I'm a longtime resident, so I'm not I'm not looking for affordable housing, but it seems like to me, you've got a nice parcel. You have space. Why are you trying to jam everything together? Like you could take the houses, maybe spread them out a little, maybe two per acre or something like that. And then, yeah, you've got to do the well and stuff. It just seems like to me, you're trying to jam it all on an acre, jam it all on an acre. And then, yeah, it just doesn't seem, it doesn't seem consistent with the town rule character that we like to claim. And I know that there's a lot of developments that are much tighter than that, you know, but you know, we're, we're limited in how many units we can put up by well as septic. So why are we trying to like jam them all on three acres of it or two acres of it?

That's, that's kind of my feeling. And if that's the case, then you could do,

What do they call it? I'll make sure to call it the right option five, which was the friendly chapter would be.

Yes.

Well, that's what the, uh, the ages ago decided on. That's what, that's what we decided. But I really think I like Ian's idea of tracking down somebody who could talk to us about 40 wide and we could just have a informal discussion with them about what we are thinking and find out what they're thinking.

Mm-hmm.

So shall we go forward with that?

I think so. And that doesn't exclude the possibility of still doing, you know, the friendly 40B or doing it in combination with it.

No, indeed, it might actually do in the whole 40Y thing. If we find something we don't like that's untenable, then we'll stop talking about it.

I guess that's your action item, Ian.

I'm on it. I'll reach out to him tomorrow. I'm certain that the 40-wide page does have a contact at the bottom, so I'll start that ASAP. Because we know how long it can take to hear back from them.

I'll bet Brittany has better notes from the last ARHC meeting and has the contact jotted down for us.

Oh, perfect. I didn't know that they did something at the... Yeah, yeah, they did a presentation. Oh, awesome.

That's where I first learned about it. And then in the Housing Leadership Academy thing, one of the locations out in... It's a town that begins with R out in North Shore, but they were working on trying to apply that in their town.

Nice.

Okay, great. Thank you. Is that all, Jenny? Yeah. Okay. The final item. Is the letter to the tenants out of there, or what is the status on that? I know we looked at the letter last week.

Yeah. I don't think we ended up sending it out. I might have dropped the ball on that. Was I supposed to have sent that to you, and then maybe I didn't?

I think so. Ian and I briefly touched base on it like a week or two ago. But I think we were supposed to get something.

Yeah, I had finished it. I had finished editing it, but I'm not sure if I... I'm not sure where its final draft is. I'll put that on my agenda to find or at least... find what I can for tomorrow morning.

Well, my memory is we were pretty happy with the, yeah.

We're talking about the letter that we had at the, um, at Piper's day at the table.

Right.

Yeah.

So, uh, okay. So you two are going to work on getting it out of here. Yeah.

And this also, this also has on it that we invited, we're inviting people to the housing board meeting on the fourth Tuesday of of each month and specifically the one on the 25th.

Okay, that's sort of that's if I got it straight, that's kind of a dual action item between Wendy and you, Wendy and Ian. Yeah, I believe so.

Yep.

Okay, well, let's see if we get this out of here. Um, let's see. Oh, huh. it would be actually good to get more people in at the August meeting. Does the board feel that we can just, you know, make editorial changes and get it out of here without further approval by the board?

I think so. I'm going to go ahead and send this as a link to Ian and Dan.

If that's okay, I think that's what we should do. Otherwise, we won't get it out in a timely way for the next meeting. So unless I enter your objections, we'll figure out how to get it out of here, make the corrections, and then send it out. Yeah, I think that's fine.

Sounds good.

Well, I think that's all we have. Certainly been an interesting meeting. We learned a lot. As always, facts produce more questions than answers, but that's the way it is.

Well, excuse me. I'm sorry. When's the next meeting? August 25th.

So I do just want to confirm that we are not planning to have a second meeting in the month of August, but instead we're just opting for the one housing production forum to finish off the summer.

Wait, is that on August 25th? Yes, August 25th. It's going to be a housing production forum.

Al, I'll reach out to you in Channing over the next week. We can set up a time to meet. In the meantime, I'll get some promotional materials in the hands of those who need it.

Okay, so do I keep that on the calendar and is there going to be an agenda? Because there's

There will be... Yes. Yeah. For the time being, just assume it's a regular meeting.

That's a regular time, right? The 4th?

Yeah. Are you talking about the town calendar?

Yeah, the town calendar.

If you have it up there, it wouldn't hurt just to say Boxborough Housing Board Meeting slash Housing Production Forum.

Okay. I can just change the name. It's probably already up there because I set it for every 4th Tuesday.

Perfect.

So say housing... production form?

Yep. And I think if items accumulate that we need to deal with in a timely fashion, we might have a meeting here in August, but let's not plan it now. Let's see how many items accumulate and only meet if we need to. So with that being said, do I hear a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second? All right. Channing? In favor, aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Joe?

Aye. Okay. Therefore,