Affordable 
     Housing
  Development        Competition
    2003

The Sponsor

Cagatay Ozkul is a project manager at the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation in Boston. He worked with the student team on the Norfolk Corner proposal.

Codman Square, Dorchester.

Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC) is a community-based nonprofit organization. We provide affordable-housing development, housing services, community organization and resources, and economic-development services in the Dorchester section of Boston. Over the past 20 years, we've created more than 650 units of affordable housing and a lot of commercial developments. We started a renaissance in Codman Square.

When the Affordable Housing Development Competition was first started in 2001, I was a student in the urban and environmental policy and planning department at Tufts University. I was a participant in the first competition. I had a really good experience with the competition.

From the day I began working here in September 2002, I started to think about a project that could participate in the competition. When the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and Citizens' Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA) sent out solicitations for developers for the competition, I thought we should participate with our Norfolk Triangle Project. This was a project that was already in the works.

We called it the Norfolk Triangle Project, but the students wanted to change the name to Norfolk Corners. The Norfolk Triangle is actually in the heart of our service area and just a block from our office.

In the winter of 2002, Codman Square NDC's real-estate-development department and the community organizing and resident resources department started working together on the project. The project was part of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations' Ricanne Hadrian Initiative for Community Organizing (RHICO), which requires community-organizing departments of CDCs to work with development departments to ensure that initiatives are resident-driven in addition to development-department driven.

Residents have the right to say what they want to see in their area — for example, housing, parks, open space, or industrial uses. So our community-organizing department was already working with the residents to form a residents' association that would give them more say over what happens in their area.

The Norfolk Corners proposal calls for new housing on this vacant lot.

When I first started working here I identified potential land that could be developed as housing. When we decided to participate in the competition, the Triangle Project was just standing there. We were having meetings with the residents but we didn't have a development plan. That's why we decided to take the project to the competition.

The Norfolk Triangle neighborhood is mostly zoned for residential use, but a small part of it is zoned for light industrial. Since the area is zoned mostly for residential, we thought we should have housing there. During our meetings with the area's residents, we asked them what they wanted to see in the area. They said they wanted open space and that they wanted to get rid of the auto-related uses. They said they didn't want housing that would depreciate the value of their homes and said they didn't want very dense, multifamily housing.

The Neighborhood
The neighborhood consists of approximately seven or eight blocks. It's mostly residential, but there are also a couple of auto-related uses. There is also a lot of vacant land, which is owned by the city, the church, and private owners.

When you walk through the neighborhood it doesn't look stable. A lot of dumping goes on in the neighborhood because of the vacant land and the auto-related uses. The vacant lots became dumping sites for the auto-related businesses, which dumped tires, old batteries, everything, and it looks awful.

It's a neighborhood of families. Residents who attend our meetings include workers and retired people, but mostly low- and moderate-income people. Neighborhood residents are mostly African American and West Indian now.

When we first presented our projects to the students, I told them that this is not just a housing-development process but one in which they would be working very closely with the residents on a comprehensive plan for the neighborhood. They said they would still be interested in working with us.

Our community organizer, Carlos Rosales, was already organizing monthly meetings with the residents, so we invited the students to those meetings. We sent out fliers to the neighborhood to let the residents know about the competition and what the students would be doing.

The residents met the students and the students explained to them what they wanted to achieve at the end of the process. Then they started working together. The students identified the vacant lots and came up with a couple of solutions. For example, they would show the residents a vacant lot and suggest that it could be used for housing. Then they would ask the residents what they wanted to see happen on the land.

The residents had a really good relationship with the students. They told the students their ideas. The students had models and maps that the residents experimented with to come up with a plan, so it was actually the residents who came up with the final plan.

What the Residents Wanted
The residents said they didn't want to see big ugly apartments with hundreds of people living inside them. They said their priority was green space and a clean and safe neighborhood. They wanted a stable neighborhood.

View of Codman Square, Dorchester.

In their meetings with the residents, the students explained how good new housing could appreciate the value of their housing. They talked about the different aspects of their proposal and how they would incorporate green design into their project. The residents liked the idea.

The residents were concerned about density, so the students decreased the number of floors and units in order to come up with something the residents liked.

After five or six meetings with the residents, the students made up their minds about what the residents wanted. They spotted some vacant land that they thought would be good for two-family housing and some land that would be good for six-family triple-deckers. The students took those ideas to their workshop and worked on the design.

When they started working on the proposal, the students did an inventory of the houses in the area. They went out and took pictures and showed them to the residents. They said, "OK, these are the types of houses in your area. The new buildings will look like the ones next door. They're not going to be awfully different."

After the students and residents decided on the type and design of the housing, we helped the students come up with numbers that would make the deal work — for example, the kind of money they would need and what they would have to spend on specific line items. We helped them with the pro formas and the financing scenarios. We discussed all of this with them.

Prior to the competition, we had some ideas for the area but we didn't have time to put those ideas down on paper. The students did the planning and came up with a development proposal for almost half of the triangle. Right now we have an idea of what to do with the other part.

Since this is a resident-driven process, we have now created some leadership among the residents. We know which residents are interested and committed to the process. This will make it much easier for us to do planning for the rest of the triangle.

We have also started to think about putting this project in our development pipeline. We are in the process of identifying the next step. We want to put this project in our work plan for the next couple of years.

It was great to have the students working with us because they have great ideas. When you are working in housing development you have a lot of constraints, but students are still free to be very creative. It was also very good to have the residents working with us and to have identified leaders among them.