I was traveling around Somerville and ran into what looked like a gut renovation of an entire lot at 38 Laurel Street in the Spring Hill neighborhood. And my first thought was: could this have been more?
38 Laurel Street, Circa 2025
This seems like fairly serious construction, and it’s changing this site from 3 homes to having... still 3 homes. That’s because the zoning of Neighborhood Residential (NR) doesn’t allow much more, even on this relatively large lot of almost 10,000 square feet. By comparison, a typical lot in the NR zone has a 2-family building on just 3,500 square feet.
All this construction means a lot of change and disruption has happened to the building and neighborhood, but as a city we have gained no new homes and hardly any additional tax revenue. So what could have been built here instead?
Let's look at a lot on Winter Hill that was designated Urban Residential (UR) during the zoning 2019 overhaul: 115 Thurston Street.
115 Thurston Street Circa 2025
This 5,700 square foot lot previously held a triple decker, but was completely rebuilt into a 9 home building. And because this is a UR project, our Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) policy took effect: one of these homes is permanently Affordable. And since they did not build a second Affordable home, the builder had to pay a large fee into our Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
If the Laurel St. site had been zoned UR as well, what could have been built there? It’s wide and deep enough to fit an “Apartment Building” building type which allows 4 stories of height and 65% lot coverage. That would be enough space for six 1,000 square foot homes on each floor with room to spare (for comparison, a standard triple decker has at least one 3 bedroom home around 1000 square feet). That would mean a total of 24 homes could have been built on this Laurel St. site, at least 4 of them permanently Affordable. Instead, we got 3 market rate homes and no Affordable homes at all.
A project of this scale a project would not even be out of place in the neighborhood around 38 Laurel St. Just a few doors down, in fact, is an building with 18 condos. At the top of Laurel St., there is a building with 22 apartments. A new 24-home building would fit right in.
We know from our previous analysis of the Thurston St. project that its homes are cheaper than what they replaced, and that was only 9 homes. A larger UR project at 38 Laurel St. would have been able to use its greater scale to provide even cheaper market rate homes to undercut competitors.
115 Thurston St. provides a possible model for densifying our city to provide more housing at better prices. It does come with the impact of construction in our neighborhoods and streets, but we get those construction impacts even if we do not allow an increase in the number of homes.
This weekly blog will be skipping the next two weeks for holidays. Stay warm and have a happy holiday season!