Professor James Stockard, of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, led a group of over 50 housing advocates, municipal officials, and resource conservationists in lively discussion of draft MetroFuture recommendations around housing production and resource conservation.  

Presented by MAPC Housing Planner Jenny Raitt, the draft recommendations together strive to create enough affordable housing for the region, while at the same time preserving its land and resources.  They would boost housing production, including developing regional and local housing plans, increasing mechanisms for building affordable housing in the right places, and creating new partnerships that provide funding streams to support the production of affordable housing.  It also presented some recommendations of modifications to the existing zoning tools Chapters 40B and 40R to make them more effective tools for locating housing in the right places.  Click here to download the handout of draft recommendations used during this discussion.

Most of the attendees at the event agreed that affordable housing must be built in appropriate locations, and began to discuss what the specific criteria should be. 

Participants in the conversation expressed their frustration with the difficulty they were presented with in translating MetroFuture’s goal of 349,000 new units of housing for the region into a number that communities could use as a production goal.  They also foresaw a struggle to determine which multi-family projects were “good” and which were “bad” under MetroFuture.   Several participants in the session pointed out that municipalities lack the capacity to determine which developments should be encouraged and which should be discouraged, not to mention to actually encourage or discourage them, and identified the need for assistance.

This was the first of many conversations that will take place over the coming months and years as we all work to achieve MetroFuture’s housing production and resource conservation goals. 

Click here to download more complete notes of the discussion.