'Child-proof' housing studied

By Anthony Flint, Globe Staff, 9/18/2003

Fearful that their schools will be flooded with students, officials in many Eastern Massachusetts suburbs have limited construction of new apartment and condominium complexes over the past decade to one- and two-bedrooms -- what housing advocates call "childproof" units.

While municipal officials say these limits are necessary to slow enrollment and help contain rising school costs, research by an advocacy group says the approach is closing the door on thousands of low- and moderate-income families who can't afford the price of single-family homes.

"The problem multifamily development faces is a perception that it brings in lots of kids," said Judith A. Barrett, chief author of "Housing the Commonwealth's School-Age Children," a report released this week by the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association. It is available at the organization's website, www.chapa.org.

Barrett, a planning consultant, found that more than three-quarters of condominium and apartment buildings built since 1990 in 41 communities studied only offered units with one or two bedrooms.

The research found, however, that the predominant form of housing in the suburbs is single-family homes, which generate more school-age children. "Multifamily housing is being unfairly targeted," Barrett said.

Local officials say that as they struggle to balance budgets in an era of rising school enrollments and reductions in state aid, they're forced to cut back where they can on housing that accommodates families.

"As the state cuts back on education funding, the money has to be made up somewhere," said Mark Rees, town manager for North Andover, which eliminated 38 positions this year in town government and the school system, while school enrollment increased 24 percent since 1990. "There are just very practical issues here, in terms of pressure on schools and all the municipal services we provide."

Together with the increasingly popular policy of limiting new residential development to "seniors-only" housing, the practice of restricting the number of bedrooms in multifamily housing could shut out thousands of families seeking to live in towns with good schools, Barrett said.

Limits on the number of bedrooms are confined to condominiums and rental apartments, which tend to be more affordable, and not single-family homes, Barrett said.

Development restrictions aimed at reducing the number of school-age children and keeping school budgets in check -- all legal under Massachusetts law -- have a wide impact on the social fabric of communities, say advocates and those who study housing.

As the availability of affordable, multiple-bedroom housing declines, "we will increase the odds that poor children and middle-class children start at a different place and end up even farther apart" from children from affluent families, said Nicholas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

"This is especially relevant given the children of new immigrants," Retsinas said.

Aaron Gornstein, executive director of the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association, which sponsored the report, said that "unless these practices are confronted, younger families will continue to leave the state, which will hurt our economy and reduce our workforce."

Towns should make sure they have "a diversity of housing types including rental and homeownership opportunities, and for smaller households and larger households," Gornstein said.

Of the 15,982 multifamily housing units in 41 communities that Barrett studied for the report, about 78 percent were in condominium and apartment complexes that had no units with three bedrooms or more -- living space generally considered more conducive to families.

Local officials have much greater control over the size and composition of multifamily housing, primarily through zoning, but also by negotiating privately with developers -- even in fast-tracked projects built under the state's affordable housing law, Chapter 40B.

Planning boards have less control over single-family homes, and cannot dictate how many bedrooms they contain. Municipal planners and town managers say they cannot open the floodgates to all types of new housing.

In Shrewsbury, less than 20 percent of the town's 12,696 housing units are condominiums and apartments, and the majority of those have only one or two bedrooms, according to Barrett's research. As a result, only 10 percent of the school population can be traced to multifamily units.

But Daniel Morgado, town manager for Shrewsbury, said the number of school-age children has risen so dramatically -- 1,100 since 1997, part of a 42 percent growth rate -- that the town has to draw the line somewhere. Shrewsbury built a new high school and elementary school, and plans to renovate two others.

"We're having difficulty keeping up now," Morgado said. "We have a diverse housing stock. But if we're going to build all types of new housing, there has to be some recognition of the fiscal consequences of this growth."

Rees, the town manager for North Andover, said there is widespread acknowledgment among local government officials that developments with no children "make money for the town" by generating tax revenue while placing less strain on municipal services. Housing that accommodates children, he said, tends to cost towns money.

Smaller-sized units and seniors-only housing are serving an important part of the market -- people without children, Rees said. He added that moderate-income families were not being shut out of North Andover because they can find choices in the existing rental stock in town, including three-deckers.

Housing advocates acknowledge that multifamily housing with three- and four-bedroom units will produce school-age children who will enter school systems. But they say multifamily housing isn't any more burdensome than single-family homes, and questioned the baseline formulas used to calculate the impact of new development on schools.

A report released earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts, also sponsored by the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association, found that local officials frequently predicted far more school-age children from new residential development than ended up being the case.

A common impression is that a 100-unit multifamily complex will bring 100 new schoolchildren, Barrett said, when her research showed that 24 school-age children live in the average complex with 100 units.

The basic character of communities will change if fewer children overall are allowed, said Barrett, and more towns resist housing of all kinds, including single-family homes, to keep school enrollments down.

"In towns with development potential left, to develop only [bedroom-restricted] housing, or over-55 housing, or no housing at all -- that's just a future that's completely different from the social fabric of these towns today," she said.

Anthony Flint can be reached at flint@globe.com