Not in Newton’s Back Yard: Affordable Housing in Newton
A longtime low-income-housing advocate and mayoral challenger, Alderman Ted Hess-Mahan, of West Newton, is well versed in NIMBY-ism. In the 1980s, he worked to find placements for adults with developmental disabilities. In his experience, less-prosperous communities embraced these residents, who were quickly integrated into their neighborhoods. The more-affluent communities, on the other hand, tended to isolate the developments.
To Hess-Mahan, the Engine 6 fiasco was garden-variety NIMBY-ism. “What bothers me is hearing from my liberal friends that yes, Newton is an expensive place to live and maybe it’s not as diverse, but that’s okay because I worked very hard to get here,” he says. It’s not uncommon, he claims, for people to want to close the city gates after they have arrived. But that doesn’t make it any less hypocritical. People resist change they can’t control, he adds. “People are afraid until they know more. They have the right values, but they don’t want it in their neighborhood.”
It later surfaced that two members of the yet-to-be-formed Waban Area Council met privately with Warren the day before he announced his Engine 6 decision. During the informal gathering, according to WAC meeting notes, “[Warren] also indicated that he would not sign off on the project if the community did not embrace it.”
Housing advocates blew a gasket. To Engine 6 supporters such as Hobson, Warren’s unilateral move to scrub the project was more than suspect—it was clear evidence of unfair housing practices. According to Henry Korman, former head of the Newton Housing Partnership and Fair Housing Committee, bowing to the opponents in this way constituted housing discrimination. In protest, Korman resigned immediately after Warren killed the proposal. “When a municipality makes a funding decision that excludes a protected group of people from housing based on the prejudices of the neighbors,” he says, “that is a violation of fair housing.” The neighbors have the right to say whatever they want about homeless people, he adds, but a mayor who controls federal funds earmarked for the creation of housing for the homeless does not have the right to cave in.
At the end of October 2013, Korman, Hobson, and Supporters of Engine 6 filed a letter of complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) alleging unfair housing practices based on the city’s handling of Engine 6. The Disability Law Center and the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston joined in the complaint.
The letter stated that the city’s decision to pull the plug on a project it had championed because of neighborhood protest constituted unfair treatment of the chronically homeless. The letter also requested that HUD review Newton’s compliance with its own five-year consolidated plan, which the city must submit to HUD in order to receive federal housing funds. The current plan, due to expire this year, specifies increasing permanent housing with services for the chronically homeless as a high priority. “We are obligated to create affordable housing with these funds,” Crossley says.
The problem is that the city has not tapped the funds to create even one unit of affordable housing for the very poor in years. For the past five years, Newton has received close to $2 million a year in CDBG, HOME, and ESG federal funds, or around $10 million. In that same time frame, Newton has created only seven affordable units with these federal dollars—not much progress on the goals stated in its own consolidated plan. Due to the secrecy of the HUD complaint process, it is unclear when the city’s conciliation with the agency will wrap up.
A light rain fell outside Newton’s City Hall last Christmas Eve as Warren, chairman of the prestigious Community and Housing Development Committee of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, tried to explain to me why he single-handedly killed an affordable-housing development in his own backyard.
It all started, he insisted, with his desire to keep his city open and diverse. He noted that his parents graduated from historically African-American colleges and moved to this area for graduate school. They bought a moderately priced home in Newtonville in 1972. “My parents were able to purchase it with a professor’s salary,” Warren said. “My mom at the time wasn’t working.” Warren said it’s important to him that couples like his parents still be able to afford to live in the area, and that he is working on a master plan that will enable the city to add 800 units of affordable housing by 2021. If successful, the initiative will push Newton over the 10 percent threshold. Given that Newton has not had even 10 new units in the past five years, the goal of building 800 in six years is wishful thinking. Whether Waban will be targeted as the site for affordable housing is unclear.
And yet, Warren said he does not regret shutting down the Engine 6 project as he did. He said he could not in good conscience sign over the bulk of Newton’s federal affordable-housing funds for the year to a project for which he says there was no coherent plan. And, in a refrain familiar to the NIMBY crowd, he claims the plans failed to include details on everything from transportation for the tenants to the necessary support services.
Warren’s justification has been met with incredulity. After Metro West’s option to purchase the Engine 6 property expired in October, Korman—the former head of Newton’s Fair Housing Committee—fired off a blistering letter to the city, saying that the mayor’s “stated reasons for witholding funds lack[ed] credibility” and that his actions were discriminatory to “individuals who experience difficulty navigating the housing market because of their disabilities and history of homelessness.” Alderman Crossley also disputes Warren’s explanation. The kinds of details Warren identified—like where residents would go for support-group meetings and mental health services—could have been filled in later, she says, as it is not uncommon for specifics to get worked out after construction begins. Newton-Wellesley Hospital, less than a block from the property, could have provided health services and even basic jobs and meals, according to Alderman Yates. He adds that the new bus route from Wellesley to Waban down Route 16 could have addressed the transportation issue.
In the wake of the Engine 6 debacle, Warren responded like a bureaucrat and, along with now-acting planning director James Freas, instituted an additional layer of review aimed at ensuring future projects will not get far without detailed programs in place.
In the months after the project was halted, I noticed that letters to the editor of the Newton Tab about Engine 6 began to swing subtly in favor of the development. “Reasonable people take longer to consider,” says Andrea Kelley, a landscape architect and member of Supporters of Engine 6. “The vehement opponents have no problem saying exactly what they think. Others take longer. It took us longer, because we were trying to listen.” Maybe Newton’s liberals were feeling guilty about having struck down a homeless development in their backyard. Or maybe it’s just a hell of a lot easier to support a project that has already been killed.
With an estimated 21,000 people now without housing in Massachusetts, the Engine 6 development was never going to strike a hard blow to the growing problem of homelessness. But it would have been something. And Waban would have been doing its part. “We can’t let our kids grow up here not knowing there is dirt under the grass,” says Crossley, and “not knowing what role they play in the larger human population.”
Today, Engine 6 sits forlorn and empty, with a giant dumpster parked out front. When Newton sold it off in 1968, Korman says, it did so under a city ordinance that carried a restriction that the property always be used for a public purpose. After the firehouse was decommissioned, its first uses—as space for the Boy Scouts and then as an office for a hospice—were deemed to fit that requirement. And the Engine 6 homeless development would have done the same.
Last year, however, Newton’s Zoning Board of Appeals granted relief from the ordinance so that Engine 6 no longer needed to serve the public good, clearing the way for developers to turn the historical firehouse into three luxury condominiums that are sure to hit high-six-figure price tags. “Beyond the loss of 10 units,” Korman says, “Engine 6 represents a betrayal of commitments made by the city, pointing to a much deeper and larger problem.”
Work has already begun on the condos, expected to be completed later this year—a sad denouement to an unfortunate chapter in Waban history. At press time, no one had demanded the future occupants be screened for mental illness, substance abuse, or a criminal record.
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