Waltham Pushes Back On 195-unit Apartment Project On 2nd Ave

WALTHAM, MA —After years of back and forth, Waltham's Zoning Board approved the application for an apartment building with units deemed "affordable" to be built at 341 Second Ave near Bear Hill Rd this week. But that was quickly met with a vote from the City Council to back the mayor's request to appeal that decision.

The city is directly appealing the Zoning Board of Appeals's issuance of the permit in court. Essentially, the city is suing its own board for approving the application.

City Councilor Robert Logan proposed the motion Monday night to back the mayor's request to appeal the ZBA's decision.

He said although the developer addressed some issues the city council raised, more could be done.

"I didn't want it to be construed as any criticism of the Zoning Board of Appeals; they did as much as they could have — given you don't really have a lot of leverage in this kind of situation," he said.

The "situation" he's talking about is that the project brought forward by Alliance Residential Co., a Phoenix-based developer, would be built using an affordable housing law that allows a developer to circumvent most local zoning as long as the project provides a percentage of units at rates deemed affordable according to state income guidelines. Chapter 40B (or 40B as its referred to) is a state law enacted in 1969 to address affordable housing shortages statewide.

It’s difficult for towns to fight a project planned under 40B.

The state defines affordable housing as an apartment or home that can be purchased or rented by a household making up to 80 percent of the median income of the area. Once a city meets certain requirements, such as having more than 10 percent of the town’s housing stock deemed affordable, developers can no longer use 40B.

Newton and Brookline have a number of such projects in the pipeline, but the last time a 40B project came to Waltham was in the early 2000s with The Ridge development.

The Second Avenue project would have 195 units including 49 deemed affordable. December 2015, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals denied Alliance’s application for a comprehensive permit to build 146 market-rate apartments and 49 affordable rental units at 341 Second Ave, which is in an area not zoned for residential living.

In 2015 the city said it believed it had more than the state minimum when it came to affordable housing. The state sided with the developer, but the Zoning Board of Appeals appealed the state agency's decision, which put the project on hold.

Some complaints about the project included the density of the development, which city councilors said exceeded anything that would otherwise be allowed by Waltham's Zoning board if the proposed location were to be residential. As it is, the project is proposed in a commercial district and while several buses come nearby (170Waltham Central Square Express, the Waltham Center Shuttle Route B, the 70, and the Alewife shuttle), none are exactly easy.

During the process there was some compromise: The units deemed affordable would only be set aside for 30 years. The city wanted to have them earmarked as affordable in perpetuity. The developer agreed to that change. Patch reached out to representatives from Alliance, but they did not immediately respond to request for comment.

But the mayor is hoping more of the 49 units to be set aside as "affordable" will be accessible to more needy people.

"It's kind of an unfortunate circumstance. The way the law is built it doesn't give the ZBA a lot of leverage. And then if we're not pleased with the way it turns out the only avenue for appeal is court. It's basically the city suing itself," said Logan. "It's just one of the peculiarities of the law."

Patch reached out to the law department at City Hall, but they declined to comment.

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