At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Councilor John Drinkwater gave a comprehensive verbal report on the joint Housing and Zoning Subcommittee’s study of accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The subcommittee began its investigation of ADUs back on June 28, 2022, with that meeting being continued three times until it finally adjourned earlier Tuesday evening.
Drinkwater explained that the change the subcommittee was proposing to the city’s zoning ordinance would allow by right the permitting of accessory dwelling units with certain limitations. An ADU is an independent dwelling unit with its own kitchen, bathroom, sleeping, and living spaces that’s associated with a primary dwelling. Drinkwater said, “It’s a lot like putting an addition onto an existing house.” The main purpose is “to increase our affordable housing stock.”
There are several differences between a house addition or traditional in-law apartment and an ADU. For example, an ADU can have a locked door between the two units; the ADU can have a separate entrance; and the ADU can be rented. None of those things are allowed in the in-law apartments that are already permitted by the zoning code.
There will also be a number of requirements needed to qualify for an ADU:
The property owner must reside in either the primary dwelling or in the ADU, so it must be owner-occupied.
The ADU can’t be sold separately, as if it was half of a duplex.
The ADU must be clearly subordinate to the primary dwelling in size and usage.
The ADU may be attached to the primary dwelling but it must comply with all set back and side yard requirements of single family zones.
If the ADU is a detached structure, the structure must have been in existence for at least 10 years for it to be eligible for conversion to an ADU.
The ADU must have at least one off street parking space.
Any entrance used exclusively by the ADU shall not face the street.
The ADU shall be not less than 350 square feet in size and not more than 35 percent of the gross floor area of the principal dwelling.
The Subcommittee voted to recommend that the full council adopt this ordinance and that it be reviewed in one year. The council then adopted that recommendation. As I understand it, the proposed ordinance will now go to the Planning Board for review and discussion after which the Planning Board will issue a non-binding recommendation back to the Council. Upon receipt of that, the Council will hold a public hearing and then vote to enact or reject the proposal.
It’s tough to say what Councilors will do. Most rightly view this as a strategy to increase the number of affordable rental dwelling units in the city. Housing advocates see accessory dwelling units as a first step in addressing the crisis in availability and affordability of housing. Many others frame this as a way to keep aging parents living with their grown children and their families (although that really misconstrues the purpose of ADUs since that can already be done through the in-law apartment route).
The Council Subcommittee and those who have assisted have woven many safeguards into this proposal, all mentioned in Councilor Drinkwater’s report. However, these all depend on the city’s ability to enforce them, and as this Council has highlighted in other contexts, the city of Lowell doesn’t do enforcement or even routine tasks with much consistency. Consequently, enacting this measure because of the safeguards built in would be a leap of faith not entirely warranted by current experience. Still, the need for more housing that people can afford is great, and you have to start somewhere.
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Tuesday evening, a group of students from the Wang Middle School petitioned the Council to discuss the need for bike lanes in Lowell neighborhoods north of the Merrimack River. Several students spoke and made use of a PowerPoint presentation to make their case. They emphasized the nearly complete lack of bike infrastructure in that part of the city and how adding it would make life safer for everyone, particularly young people.
Councilors were solicitous towards the students, as Councilors typically are when people show up in person to address the Council. (Unless the speaker criticizes the Council in which case there is often an immediate and angry retort from Councilors). In the end, I believe Councilors referred this to the City Manager but were generally non-committal about bike lanes.
Bike lanes were a big thing a decade ago when Bernie Lynch was City Manager and Patrick Murphy was Mayor. Back then, there were a host of initiatives to make walking, biking, and using public transportation more convenient and safer, but most of those things became flash points in the “old Lowell” counterattack on Lynch and Murphy and were mostly abandoned and replaced with car-friendly/pedestrian hostile policies.
Coincidentally, Tuesday’s Boston Globe reported that between 2021 and 2022, pedestrian deaths jumped 35 percent in Massachusetts. (“Safety steps offered to reduce pedestrian fatalities”). Experts interviewed for the story identified five possible solutions to the rising death rate:
De-incentivize SUVs and other heavy vehicles
Install crossing islands and raised crosswalks
Improve speed limit enforcement
Allocate funding for cities and towns’ capital projects
Increase sidewalk width, bike and bus lanes
Here’s what was written about bike lanes:
Dedicating more space on roads exclusively for pedestrian, biker, and bus use simultaneously narrows streets, which experts say helps reduce fatalities by preventing cars from driving straight down roads at dangerous speeds.
“Rather than have the cycling lane in the roadway, take that portion of the roadway and elevate it and then separate it out so that it’s at sidewalk level and protected from traffic,” Aloisi said. “Give everyone who wants to walk and cycle a better chance to do it safely.”
Bike lanes also provide better sightlines for pedestrians and drivers to see each other, according to Thompson.
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s chief of streets, told the Globe the city aims to beef up public, non-vehicular transport options to increase safety.
“Part of our goal ... is to shift more of our trips out of private automobiles, onto transit, onto bikes, on foot,” Franklin-Hodge said. “Part of the effort around safety is really allocating space in a way that makes people feel comfortable with alternatives to driving a car.”
This week’s Council packet did contain the minutes of a March 28, 2023, meeting of the Council’s Transportation Subcommittee which indicate that the Council and the city’s Planning Department are pursuing strategies to make roads safer. These include reducing the citywide speed limit from 30mph to 25mph; installing temporary speed bumps in certain locations; and using traffic circles and chicanes as traffic calming measures. (A chicane is a series of alternating mid-block curb extensions or islands that narrow the roadway and require vehicles to follow a curving, S-shaped path, discouraging speeding, sort of like a slalom course for cars.) The minutes indicate the Councilors were understandably concerned with how these things will be communicated in advance to residents so they will be ready for them when they are installed.
The traffic engineer told Councilors that “once contracts are signed, they will begin rollout” so implementation does not appear imminent. Most people react negatively to change so there will be pushback once this stuff gets implemented. Hopefully Councilors will have the fortitude to withstand the negative feedback and give these things time to work rather than cause them to be rolled back at the first sign of a hostile response.
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Speaking of a hostile response, what a difference a week makes when it comes to residential parking permits. As I wrote last week, when a resident complained at the meeting that the police were not consistently ticketing cars that parked in his “reserved” curbside spot, several Councilors criticized the police and called for stricter enforcement.
At the end of that segment of last week’s meeting, Councilor Paul Yem said there was another side to this story but added nothing further. In this week’s meeting, there was a response to the resident’s petition from City Manager Golden that gave a history of the policy and a copy of the policy itself. The response added that the case of the petitioner who spoke at the Council meeting had been referred to the Law Department for further investigation.
However, there was clearly additional information conveyed to Councilors that wasn’t included in the written report, because their collective attitude on this issue had spun 180 degrees. Instead of talking of the need to strictly enforce the policy, Councilors this week complained about parking permit holders who purposely park their own vehicles in a driveway or elsewhere on the road and rely on the reserved parking space sign to keep anyone from parking in front of the permit-holder’s house. By the end of the discussion, Councilors seemed ready to eliminate the entire permit program, or at least raise the $10 fee considerably and limit it to residents who completely lack other parking options.
Few things have illustrated the reactionary tendencies of this Council more than the handling of this issue from one week to the next.
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The local real estate market is still puttering along although the continuing increase in interest rates has caused the volume of activity to drop substantially. For instance, in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022, the total number of documents recorded at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds was down 35 percent (9,278 in 2023 vs 14,194 in 2022); the number of deeds was down 18 percent (1,282 in 2023 vs 1,566 in 2022); and the number of mortgages was down 49 percent (1,402 in 2023 vs 2,727 in 2022). The steady march of interest rates upward has all but eliminated home refinancings which, in normal times, account for almost half of all mortgages recorded.
However, recordings for March show that the decline might be slowing a bit. Deeds were down just eight percent compared to last March and the total number of documents was down 23 percent which is significantly better – or less bad – than in the two prior months (January down 38 percent; February down 43 percent). This might indicate that the sales market is leveling off, which would be a positive development.
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A reminder that I’ll be leading walking tours of Lowell Cemetery on Saturday, April 29, 2023, and on Sunday, April 30, 2023, both beginning at 10am from the Lawrence Street Gate which is 1020 Lawrence Street in Lowell for GPS purposes. (Both tours cover the same content).
Lowell Cemetery was founded in 1842 as one of New England's earliest garden-style cemeteries. It covers 88 acres of beautifully landscaped terrain along the Concord River. This tour will last 90 minutes and involves walking through the cemetery while I tell stories about notable Lowellians buried there. Although the decedents discussed were from Lowell, their stories are national and even global. The tour is free, requires no advance registration, and involves a moderate amount of walking.
The vast majority of ADUs are rented to friends or relatives due to the owner-occupancy requirement and sharing of utilities. I'd imagine it would be a nightmare for a rogue out-of-town investor to try and divvy up utility bills among unacquainted tenants.
ADUs are a better version of an in-law apartment since they give families the independence most people crave. I love my in-laws but I don't want to share living space with them.
It's instructive to me that many cities and towns typically pass a somewhat restrictive ADU ordinance and after a period of time make them more permissible due to them being unobtrusive and politically popular.