Who does two-family ordinance benefit?
I’m not sure where Northampton city councilors got the idea that it’s somehow more affordable to build a two-family dwelling. The argument that waiving a site plan review process makes building a new two-family home more “affordable” is misplaced. It’s simply more expensive to build these days overall.
Affordable housing and market rate housing are different things, so let’s make sure we’re talking apples to apples here. “Affordable housing” refers to housing that a household earning less than 80% of the area median income can afford (the AMI in Northampton for a 4-person household is $119,000). The development of affordable housing already comes with incentives and zoning waivers for developers to encourage such development. Opposed to that, the market value of the average single-family home or condo in Northampton is well over $400,000. One look at real estate ads reflects that many new homes are easily twice that.
It’s still profitable for developers who exploit well-intentioned in-filling ordinances, to snap up old single-family homes in disrepair, demolish them and build in their place multi-unit dwellings which they then sell as condos. A two-family sold as individual condos at $700,000-plus is by no means “affordable” and does nothing to address the explosive increase in market value people often have in mind when talking about affordability.
We need to be honest here. The new ordinance will be exploited by some developers in the same way in-filling ordinances have been in the past few years. The ordinance is a big pass for the developers who find abutter comments and planning or zoning board review a pesky, irritating part of the process of developing a property that cuts into their profitability. The removal of the cap for review under this ordinance benefits those developers and will not bring Northampton closer to affordable housing than in-filling ordinances did. To say otherwise is nonsense.
Maura Bradford
Florence