Driving through some parts of Massachusetts, amid quaint Main Street shops and apartments, there are seemingly more and more big, boxlike apartment buildings — much taller and much less in line with the local character. In downtown Falmouth, for example, there are new, looming apartment buildings sticking out from the older homes and offices around them — obelisks to an age of cheap development for fast money.
Many are 40Bs, a development tool passed by state lawmakers decades ago that was intended to help solve our housing crisis. Under the tool, developers are given more leeway to run roughshod over local zoning in order to cram more units into less space as long as a portion of the apartments would be set aside for affordable housing.
But these developments have issues: They often bulldoze over neighborhood concerns, they can rupture the character of downtowns, and, more importantly, they haven’t addressed the state’s housing shortage — by a long shot. Massachusetts has a goal of 10 percent of housing stock being made up of affordable housing, but most cities and towns haven’t hit that threshold, nor are even close.
On the Vineyard, the Island has so far been spared the ugly side of these developments. There are still 40Bs along our streets — Meshacket Commons was approved to deliver 40 units of housing in Edgartown, and Cat Hollow was recently approved by regulators in Tisbury. But these are much more in line with the Vineyard’s vibe; or at least there aren’t three-story, mega-apartment buildings dwarfing Katherine Cornell Theatre, or next to the Flying Horses.
The main reason is the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. While most municipalities in Massachusetts have little recourse to regulate 40B developments, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission has ruled with authority on these projects. As a mechanism to slow overdevelopment decades ago, the commission could reject projects that were out of place or too detrimental compared with the benefits.
Which is what they did, thankfully, for Edgartown Gardens — a development that was hoping to build nearly 60 units of housing, mostly for 55-year-olds and above, in downtown Edgartown near the Triangle.
On Thursday last week, the commission — in a rare unanimous vote — rejected the project outright. Commissioners argued that the detriments outweighed the benefits.
If they hadn’t rejected the project, we wonder why we would even have a commission.
While there is a great need for housing, the commission made the right decision, given the likely increase in traffic, the environmental detriments it could bring, and because the detriments are hardly worth what the Island would be getting in return — 11 units of affordable housing.
As for traffic, the developers comically submitted a traffic study that reviewed data in the off-season, when they found that traffic impacts would be negligible. You don’t need a scientist to know the traffic at the Triangle is already a quagmire. To have added nearly 100 more bedrooms would have made it more akin to the Bermuda Triangle.
There would also be potential environmental impacts, such as nitrogen loading of Edgartown Great Pond, a watershed already at a tipping point from overdevelopment. It was unclear if and when Edgartown Gardens would connect to the town’s sewer system, which would help mitigate the impacts. That uncertainty was enough to make this project fail the veritable smell test. And no sewers would have potentially had a detrimental impact on the great pond.
As noted by commissioners, the project would also be horribly out of line with the architectural history and character of Edgartown. It would be three stories, and nearly double the height of the Stop & Shop around the corner, as pointed out by one commissioner.
And with only 11 units of affordable housing, we would hardly be putting a dent in our housing crisis. Additionally, there were no protections in place that residents using the apartments couldn’t just turn around and put them on Airbnb — doing little to solve our problems.
There is still more to come on Edgartown Gardens, despite the rejection. The developers have filed a litany of legal filings for this project, as well as another 40B development they are pursuing in Oak Bluffs, Green Villa. The heart of their lawsuits goes to the heart of keeping the character and charm of Martha’s Vineyard intact. The developers are challenging the very authority of the commission to regulate 40Bs with such authority. To simplify the legal jargon, Massachusetts law gives 40B developers leeway to bypass local zoning regulators, emphasis on the local. Whether the commission is a local or regional regulatory body will be the question for a judge, and could decide its authority.
The developers also argue, and they make a good point, that because the Vineyard is so behind on affordable housing, these projects should be allowed to go through to increase our stock.
For the sake of the Island — to stop these obtrusive apartment buildings from carpeting downtown areas — the commission and their legal experts, and the whole Island, need to put their effort behind defeating this lawsuit. But at the same time, with the severe housing issues we face, there’s an equal obligation — one that has failed so far to address the crisis — to redevelop vacant or unused buildings for housing. To build housing sustainably. We can’t just sit back and say “No”; we need to be aggressive in forging new pathways to build affordable homes. We will have to rely on the commission to guide the way, and they got it right this time around.
Yes!
My biggest concern is after the building bubble burst, and I suspect in 5 years, these affordable neighborhoods with unemployed workers will become slums introducing crime to the Island.
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