Affordable 
     Housing
  Development        Competition
    2003

The Advisor

Langley Keyes is the Ford professor of city planning in the department of urban studies and planning at MIT. He was the faculty advisor for the first-place Norfolk Corners team.

I was brought in to represent MIT when the competition was being set up. The organizers wanted to know what I thought about the idea. I have to say I was reasonably skeptical in the beginning. I worried about how it was going to hold together and who was going to make it happen. But I've been wondrously surprised at how terrific it's been.

What often happens is that these things tend to get out of control. It's not clear who is in charge or how the work is going to get done or if there'll be a product in the end. I can tell you 800 reasons why these things don't work. But I think the organizers of this one really figured out how to make this happen.

I work in the housing, community, and economic development section of the planning department. We focus on working in neighborhoods. Our department is working on what we're calling a practicum, which requires all of the students to have an experience working in the community. The students' work in the competition is exactly the kind of work we want them to be doing in the community. It's perfect because it allows them to apply some of the stuff we talk about in the classroom.

As the Norfolk Corner team's advisor, I talked to the students about their proposal in the beginning and read a first draft. I responded with some rather detailed comments. After that, the team showed me another draft.

These students are really self-starters. They were just a terrific group of people to work with, and they loved taking part in the competition. These are some of our best students. They brought real skills to the agenda and had a great time with each other. Zoey Weinrobe worked with a private company in Washington and had a lot of experience doing housing development. Will Bradshaw was a development guy who worked for a community- development corporation. Ben Forman had a lot of experience making presentations and pulling stuff together at the Urban Institute.

A street in the Norfolk Triangle section of Dorchester.

Affordable-housing issues are at the center of what we're doing in the department. If this were Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Indianapolis, it might be less of an issue; but here in Boston, housing issues are very important.

I think the competition is becoming wonderfully institutionalized. It allows students to apply not only their community and technical skills but also their presentation skills to put these fabulous proposals together.

To be good in the planning business, you have to be able to put together pro formas. The team's site design was very specific. If you look at the project's financing, they're leveraging public and private sources. They've got a land trust. They've got specific numbers. They've got predevelopment financing. It's very specific around the phasing and so forth.

You've got to know about housing development and have development skills to do this kind of work. You certainly need to know about site design and site work. And you've got to be able to work with folks in the community. It's also important to be able to present the proposal orally at a community meeting and in written documents.

The department of urban studies and planning collaborates often with Boston-area community-development corporations (CDCs). Dozens of students who have graduated from this program are working in CDCs and many are doing internships. So there's a very close, long-term connection between the community organizations and the university. What the competition provides is a very intense group experience around a very specific project.

I'm enormously impressed with the people who put this competition together. I was worried that it was going to fly apart, but some of our best students are taking part in it. I don't always sound this way — I'm perfectly capable of being critical of things — but I really think it has been terrific.