a report from Councilor E. Denise Simmons, Chair and Councilor Sumbul Siddiqui of the Housing Committee for a public hearing held on June 12, 2018 to discuss the housing ombudsman position, receive a detailed update regarding the timeline and plan for the affordable housing overlay district, an update on the inclusionary housing report, and the map of all affordable housing in the city

Attachment A Crane, Paula From: Hirschi, Anna Lee Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2018 2:50 PM Crane, Paula To: Subject: Sumbul opening statement for 6/12 Housing Committee Hearing Hi everyone, welcome to today's Housing Committee meeting. The call is the following: The Housing Committee will conduct a public hearing to discuss the housing ombudsman position, receive a detailed update regarding the timeline and plan for the affordable housing overlay district, an update about the inclusionary housing report, and receive the map of all affordable housing in the city. All of us around this table see different gaps in our housing systems-- there is a need to collect data related to evictions, there is a need to understand what property is on the market and who is buying it, there is a desperate need for additional housing attorneys for Cambridge Legal Aid. Obviously, one additional staff member will not be able to solve all of these problems, no matter how experienced they are! I am hopeful this conversation can help us clearly identify how residents move through our systems when they are in a housing crisis, what housing-related resources exist, and which problems the ombudsperson position will address. In past 6 months, a few dozen people have called my office and asked for help navigating housing crises. Usually, I will refer them to legal aid, but Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services has only three housing attorneys plus an Americorps service attorney, none of which are exclusively dedicated to housing law. They are desperate for more staff, and can't always meet the immediate needs of constituents in Cambridge facing an emergency. Many times, our constituents are sent legal documents that require immediate action, but they do not have the experience or language capacity to understand it and often miss essential deadlines waiting for a family member, like a child off at college, to come home and translate it. Are our constituents most challenged by navigating the services landscape or the legal one? What is the current pathway for someone facing a housing crisis, and where in our systems is there the most pressure? I encourage my colleagues to also share how housing issues comes to their offices, as well as how they direct constituents to our City and non-profit services and support. When I look at the preliminary notes for position, it seem like a mix of a case manager position, and an inter- departmental management/policy role. While I understand the job description is still being drafted, I think this is a great opportunity to having a discussion about what issue this position will address and how it can help us meet our top housing priorities: The rest of this meeting will cover topics my co-chair wanted to raise, and will include an update on the affordable housing overlay plans (which we agreed would be done by the fall), and an update on the inclusionary zoning report and a map of affordable housing. Anna Lee Hirschi Aide to City Councillor Sumbul Siddiqui Office: [phone removed] Cambridge City Hall 1

795 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02139

Attachment B Zoning for New Affordable Housing Development OVERVIEW City staff are now developing a framework of changes to the Zoning Ordinance that could be considered to make new development of affordable housing more financially feasible for affordable housing developers in the current market and to encourage the development of affordable housing developments across the city, particularly in areas where there are fewer affordable units. BACKGROUND • In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for affordable housing developers to identify and propose new developments that would be entirely or mostly affordable. • Land acquisition and other development costs have made it difficult to identify sites which could accommodate new development within financial limitations of many typical funding sources. Affordable housing developers have been outbid by market purchasers or seen sites sold to buyers with fewer conditions (e.g. cash buyers) when offers have been made • Offers have been made for developments which are intended to be within or which come close to meeting dimensional standards of the Zoning Ordinance (i.e. if zoning relief is needed the request would be minimal). New development density (i.e. number of units and gross floor area is very limited for sites within Residence A and B districts when compared to the cost of land in these areas, making a financially feasible affordable development very unlikely under current standards even on larger lots. • All new affordable housing developments completed recently, or currently being advanced, have required some type of zoning approval (special permit, comprehensive permit, variances). • Appeal of discretionary approvals (PB and/or BZA) for affordable housing developments is a deterrent to new affordable developments that can add significant cost and long delays to new developments and present significant risk to affordable housing developers. Appeal delays can: • Add years to the development schedule, delaying the completion of new affordable units • Add significant legal and carrying costs to already expensive developments • Idle developer capacity while litigation is pending and create risk for housing developers • Jeopardize financing commitments from other public and private funders • Lead to increased construction costs resulting from price increases during a delay STATUS & CURRENT DISCUSSION CDD staff are now working with the Envision consultant team, Utile and HR&A Advisors, affordable housing developers, and the Affordable Housing Trust to develop, refine, and recommend a set of zoning strategies to the City Council. Ideas and questions include: 1. Affordable Housing Overlay District (AHOD) • Analysis now underway with Envision team, affordable housing developers, and Affordable Housing Trust to help determine standards needed to make affordable developments feasible in current market: June 2018

Attachment « Crane, Paula From: Brooke Murphy <[email removed]> Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2018 5:49 PM Crane, Paula To: Public Comments for 6/12 Housing Committee, re: ombudsman position Subject: Hi Paula, Please find my comments below... I hand-wrote them during the Housing Committee meeting and so l've included my comments as written below. Please excuse any grammatical errors but wanted the notes to remain authentic. I also recognize I probably did not say my notes verbatim... due to timing (and perhaps a bit of nerves). Although my input only represents my experience, I hope it can serve as a helpful perspective for the Housing Committee. Many thanks! Brooke Murphy [phone removed] "Hi my name is Brooke Murphy. I live and work in Cambridge. I work as a Housing Search Coordinator and have worked as a housing advocate and case manager in the past. I just have a few comments about the ombudsman position. I really appreciated the comments that alluded to allowing this position to not only provide advocacy to families and individuals in housing crisis but to investigate the systemic causes of housing crisis in Cambridge. I've heard back and forth questioning whether the greater need is for legal aid or housing search/case management services. As a direct services provider, I can offer you my perspective that the "big gap" is neither legal aid nor case management services... whats really missing is equitable and truly affordable housing attentive to the intersectional lived-experiences of families and individuals in our community. Understanding that there is, of course, a general need for more legal representation and quality housing search services, I'm concerned that this position will serve as an emergency response instead of a deliberately structured way to investigate and address the root causes of systemic housing crisis and housing needs. Focusing the ombudsman position on case management or legal services seems to suggest that the root of the housing crisis problem lies outside of our control; that housing crisis and homelessness is character-based or circumstantial and can be alleviated through services or advice. We have individuals and families who need legal aid and case management services directly because of policy choices; choices that we can change or reshape. This position could serve as a way to not only help advocate for those in crisis but as a way to investigate how our policy choices can better understand how to build intersectional- based responses that provide equitable opportunities and effective housing programs for our diverse community. There is no secret to what people need; people need truly affordable housing opportunities.As a direct service worker, we don't need more of us, we need our community to address why services are needed in the first place. I'm asking the committee to consider creating a position that will work with residents, listen to their lived-experiences... and also work with the many housing search experts, housing advocates, case managers, and legal advocates that already exist in our community.... we need to think big picture. My understanding of the ombudsman definition is that it intends to investigate maladministration by public authorities.... if that is so, the position should include investigating how public elected officials and our local government can do better to alleviate the housing crisis and create equitable housing opportunities. Ultimately, this position should aim not to just provide an emergency response, but to listen to lived-experiences in order to to hold our city accountable to its people and expand housing access." Brooke Murphy, Graduate Student University of Massachusetts Boston, Class of 2019 Master of Public Administration Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy Track Tel: [phone removed] [email removed] Preferred: [email removed]

Attachment D June 12, 2018 Cambridge City Council City Hall 794 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 RE: Public Comment To The Housing Committee June 12, 2018 To the Honorable; the City Council Housing Committee: In lieu of written comments regarding the worsening crisis in both affordable housing and housing affordability, and having referenced State Representative Denise Provost's research on related issues, and specifically on the issue of Airbnb, and the impact of short term rentals as regards removing units from the rental market at a rate that tends to nullify their replacement with new affordable housing units, I would appreciate Representative Provost's timely research being made part of the Housing Committee meeting record. Thank you for your attention to the above. Sincerely, Ken Eisenberg 200 Hampshire Street #1 Cambridge, MA 02139

From the Office of Rep. Denise Provost: The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities recently sent out this "Mass Moments eMoment," recounting an event in Massachusetts history: "On [May 19] in 1713, more than 200 people rioted on Boston Common over the high price of bread...This was the third such riot in four years. With grain in short supply, merchants were hoarding it to drive up prices. If they exported the grain to the West Indies, they could make even greater profits by selling to the sugar planters there. Boston selectmen tried without success to restrict grain sales to the domestic market. The riots helped persuade the colonial legislature to pass regulations designed to manage food shortages. Even with these laws on the books, however, hoarding and food riots continued throughout the eighteenth century [when] Boston's economy was stagnant .... There was an ever-wider gulf between the "haves" and the "have-nots." From our perspective, some things have changed over 400 years, some not so much. Our local economy is far from stagnant, yet Massachusetts is one of the nation's leaders in income inequality. While some people suffer food insecurity and even hunger, we don't see the sort of widespread. unalleviated food shortages which lead to civil unrest. We do, however, suffer from a serious shortage of housing where even working people can afford to live. Recently, an eighth-grader visiting the State House told me: "My family is paying $4,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. If our rent goes up again. I don't know what we'll do." People desperately working to afford housing, or searching for places they can afford, don't have the time to riot on the Boston Common. This student lives in Dorchester, but the situation in Somerville is similar; I hear regularly from people imperiled by rising rents, and displacement. Somerville has welcomed the construction of more housing: adopted the Community Preservation Act, inclusionary zoning, and other measures to create housing for the non-wealthy. Yet, as Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards publicly pronounced in Somerville recently, "we can't build our way out of the problem [of affordability]." Like Councilor Edwards, I agree that increasing housing supply alone will not solve our affordability problem. At the same time, I recognize that adequate housing supply is an essential need. I've been digging through housing data, trying to understand the contours of both problems. One excellent data set is embodied in London's 2017 Housing Data Report. While London is much bigger than metro Boston (more populous than Massachusetts, in fact), it is, like Greater Boston. constrained by the supply of buildable land. Like Boston, housing is in short supply, and expensive. even for people earning a decent living. From this report. I learned that. . "in 2015 there were 24,390 gross completions (i.e. not adjusted for demolitions) of new build homes in London....[But] over the last decade an average of 20,030 homes have been built each year...." So, there's a fairly stable rate of production; just over 20.000 units a year. Then. I discovered that "The number of London properties listed on Airbnb has grown 168% in just 18 months, from 18.440 in April 2015 to 49,350 in October 2016 "(according to data from Inside Airbnb, a monitoring site). "In the last year alone the number of listings has almost doubled. Entire homes comprised 51% of the listings in October 2016...." I let that fact sink in - the number of "entire homes" in the short term rental market had, by 2016, exceeded London's total production of housing

units built in a year. A newspaper story I happened to see in January, 2018, reported that London's single-biggest Airbnb landlord owned almost 900 units of housing. My curiosity piqued, I started looking closer to home. In Cambridge, 1 discovered that 1.356 units of housing were built between 2010 and 2015. AIRDNA, a short-term rental industry website reports that Cambridge currently has 1,45l active rental units, and 50% of these (725) "entire homes." not rooms in someone's house or apartment. So, effectively, more than two and a half years of Cambridge housing production is unavailable to ordinary tenants or owners, instead serving non- residents as short-term rentals - and the annual growth of units available on Airbnb in Cambridge is 35% annually, since about 2013. Somerville's situation is not quite as bad; in our city. 1.210 new units of housing were built between 2011 and 2017, an average of 242 a year. Right now, 700 units are Airbnb rentals: so even though only 32% (about 224) are entire homes, that number represents about a year's worth of new housing production in Somerville. (https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/somervision- comprehensive-plan.pdf) However, Somerville's rate of growth for putting housing units into the short term rental market is slightly higher than that of Cambridge (39%; also since 2013), and, like Cambridge's, the Somerville market's percentage of "professional hosts" - those who own and rent multiple units - is over 60%. Boston has three times the rate of investor-owned units on short term rental platforms as most other cities, and is suffering in the usual ways from this burgeoning. unregulated industry. as documented in this thoughtful piece of reporting in the Commonwealth magazine: A "conservative" estimate is that 4,000 housing units in Boston have been removed from the housing inventory and turned into short-term rental units. In addition to restricting the already limited housing supply, independent research from UMass Boston recently demonstrated that the presence of short term rentals across Boston has inflated rents by an overall average of $93 per unit. A recent report on the impact of Airbnb on New York City rents found that for each 1% of residential units in a neighborhood listed on Airbnb, rental rates went up by 1.58%. Overall, it found that between 2009 and 2016, about 9.2% of citywide rent increases could be attributed to Airbnb. "New York City renters had to pay an additional $616 million in 2016 due to price pressures created by Airbnb," the comptroller's report said. https://usat.ly/2scqSRA Massachusetts does not yet tax short term rentals (House and Senate bills to do so are in conference committee), so they are highly profitable here. While I think it is only fair to tax short term rentals. I don't believe that taxation alone will affect their widespread presence and fast growth. Short term rentals seems to be accelerating the forces of speculation, gentrification and displacement which are putting tremendous pressure on our communities, even as the Baker administration and various statewide organizations push us to build more housing. to address our "regional housing shortage." The continuing displacement of local residents in favor of tourists and other transient populations is affecting the functionality our housing market -because while housing is not exportable, people are extremely mobile. The gap between rich and poor continues to grow: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/05/03/most-massachusetts-families-household- income-below-average-yes-check-math/WrzXLUoHg9i5mmUfimK0p6l/story.html Housing in the urban core is increasingly out of reach, even for people earning a decent living: https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/housing-needs-assessment-2015.pdf

The growth in the short term rentals market. with its heavy penetration by investor-owners, brings to mind the 17th century grain merchants in Boston, who sold their product to the West Indies planters. to get a higher price. While I am not advocating the abolition of short term rentals, 1 am advocating that Somerville. like other cities, take better stock of this phenomenon and how it impacts our housing supply and its costs. and take appropriate action.