Written by the corporate communications staff of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston.

Back

A proposal to develop 70 units of affordable housing in Boston's Dorchester section received first prize in the 2003 Affordable Housing Development Competition. Sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, the Boston Foundation, and Citizens' Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), the competition gives graduate students the chance to gain real-life experience developing affordable housing in the Boston area.

The competition winners were announced at an awards ceremony at the Boston Foundation on May 5. At the ceremony, students presented their proposals to their peers and heard from sponsors and other speakers, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA-4).

In remarks to the students, Mr. Frank noted that while government funding is a critical ingredient of affordable-housing construction, support for federal housing programs hasn't been strong among Washington policymakers. He also commended the Bank and CHAPA for their longstanding support for affordable housing and praised the competition for training a new generation of developers of affordable housing.

"I welcome this competition," Mr. Frank said, "because even if we had all of the money tomorrow, it would be important to have ways to spend it that are both efficient and able to produce housing that is attractive."

How the Competition Works
Key to the success of the competition is the pairing of students with local community-development organizations. Students are eager to obtain firsthand development experience, and the sponsoring nonprofits take advantage of the students' diverse skills to get much-needed community-development initiatives off the ground.

To develop their proposals, students meet with sponsors and neighborhood residents, calculate the costs and funding sources for their proposals, and draw up design plans for the site.

Each team is made up of students drawn from different local universities and with diverse development skills. This year's participants attended Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Boston University. The teams included students studying architecture, public policy, and real-estate development.

A first-place prize of $10,000 will be divided between the developer and the winning team, with $5,000 to the developer and $5,000 to the students. The second-place proposal will receive $6,000 and also be divided between the developer and the students.

The five teams generated proposals to develop housing and mixed-use developments in East Boston, Allston-Brighton, Dorchester, Mattapan, and the North Common section of Lawrence. Many of these neighborhoods have large immigrant populations and a growing need for affordable housing.

David P. Parish, senior vice president / housing and community investment at the Bank, noted that the competition continues to evolve. He said that this year, the students had access to an expanded array of administrative and educational resources, including faculty and students from earlier competitions who offered guidance to the teams.

Aaron Gornstein, executive director of CHAPA, added that the competition "fosters relationships between local communities and universities in the Boston area and provides assistance to the nonprofits."

That assistance, in some cases, eventually makes the proposals a reality. In May, for example, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for Roxbury's Hotel Dartmouth, a proposal for affordable housing and commercial-space that took second-place honors in the 2001 competition.

The Winning Proposal
The first-place winner in this year's competition is a proposal to develop 70 units of new affordable housing in multiple buildings in the Codman Square section of Dorchester.

Developed by students from MIT and Harvard University in collaboration with the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation, the Norfolk Corners plan mixes rental, ownership, and commercial property in a multiphase project to revive the Norfolk Triangle section of the neighborhood. A goal of the team was to design affordable housing that would be indistinguishable from market-rate homes.

In years past, the Codman Square neighborhood experienced a series of arsons and demolitions that left the neighborhood scarred by vacant lots strewn with tires and other refuse. Over time, declining land values started to many attract many auto-related businesses to the neighborhood.

In addition to creating multiple forms of housing, the Norfolk Corners proposal builds on the neighborhood's existing commercial activity by developing an auto mall to house up to five of the auto-related businesses currently operating in the community.

"The competition was wonderfully useful," said Will Bradshaw, a member of the winning team and a candidate for dual graduate degrees in real estate and urban studies and planning at MIT. "It's a real thing, with real people and a real CDC. There's no way to simulate that in the classroom."

Although the students working on the Codman Square proposal were at times overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems they found in the neighborhood, they challenged each other to surmount those obstacles, believing that the neighborhood had the potential to "become something else," said Mr. Bradshaw.

Members of the first-place team were Will Bradshaw, Benjamin Forman, Hung-Tsung Lin, Zoe Weinrobe, Susana Williams, and Mark Wiranowski. The team's faculty advisor was Langley Keyes, who is Ford professor of city and regional planning at MIT.

Second Place
While this year's first-place team was challenged to address longstanding problems facing a struggling Boston neighborhood, the second-place winner faced similar challenges in the North Common section of Lawrence, where residents must spend a high percentage of their limited incomes on rent.

Over the years, the North Common neighborhood has become one of the most blighted sections of the city, with a third of the land and buildings in the community either vacant or abandoned. A traditional destination for immigrants, Lawrence has experienced the gradual loss of its manufacturing base. Meanwhile, Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean have migrated to the city.

To increase the amount of affordable housing and to complement an ongoing effort to revive the neighborhood, a student team from MIT, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Harvard University developed the Vista Verde proposal.

Developed in collaboration with Lawrence Community Works by team members James Alexander, Jen Daily, Meghan Fennelly, Jeff Levy, Todd Lieberman, and John Parker, the Vista Verde proposal calls for 32 affordable-housing units in townhouses, flats, and stacked duplexes on three underutilized parcels. In addition to housing, the proposal also includes plans for an active community space to serve as a meeting ground and a host for community functions.

The proposal includes designs to maximize energy efficiency and minimize natural resource consumption throughout the life cycle of the development. Because Lawrence is a former industrial city, the team also conducted preliminary environmental research to ensure that contamination doesn't exist on the site.

Debra Fox, director of real estate development at Lawrence Community Works, said the students' work on the Vista Verde plan will likely bear fruit in the future because her organization recently gained control of at least half of the site.

"I think we'll use some of their ideas," said Ms. Fox. "They came up with a project that was very responsive to the issues the community raised."

The Other Teams
In addition to the two winning teams, teams submitted affordable-housing proposals for sites in three other Boston neighborhoods.

The 20 Maverick Square proposal calls for a five-story, mixed-use complex containing 55 units of mixed-income housing, commercial space, and a community center. The complex would be built on a site currently used as a parking lot in the commercial center of East Boston.

The Generations House at Union Square proposal calls for the renovation of the former Union Square Nursing Home in the Allston-Brighton section of the city. The renovation would create 24 units of affordable housing for grandparents who are bringing up their grandchildren. The Union Square proposal also includes community meeting space and space for social services.

The Gateway Development at Mattapan Square proposal would create mixed-use, mixed-income housing and commercial space on a site currently used as a parking lot in Boston's Mattapan Square. It calls for retail space on the street-level, office space on the second floor, and five floors of housing.

Building on Experience
"Each year the proposals seem to get more comprehensive," said James G. Stockard, curator of the Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the advisor for the Vista Verde team.

Mr. Stockard said the participating students are getting more involved in the neighborhoods where they are working and are spending more time with the sponsoring community-development corporations. The contest, he says, provides students with "a very solid foundation for a real project" and a valuable asset as they build their careers.

"I think the Bank's contribution to this is just one more part of the nurturing of affordable housing in [the Boston-area] community," said Mr. Stockard, who added that Boston is taking a leadership role nationally in the development of affordable housing.

"Affordable housing is the cornerstone of community revitalization and economic strength, not only here in Boston, but in every city in this country," added Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation. "I believe that imaginative initiatives like the Greater Boston Affordable Housing Development Competition can play an important role in encouraging the next generation of creative thinkers in this realm."