Anyone in the public will soon be able to fiddle around with things like building height and dimensions, setbacks and parking requirements to see how financially feasible certain projects may be to a developer in Belmont.
The digital feasibility tool is being developed at no cost to the town by Harvard Kennedy School graduate Joshua Young, as town officials work with residents to create a new overlay zoning district in the Brighton Street corridor area. Known as the Hill’s Crossing Overlay District, the proposal includes several subdistricts, each with a different set of zoning principles, whether for residential or commercial development.
The tool will “show two different measures: internal rate of return, which is the annualized return on a project over time held — the higher the better — and the return on cost, which is the annual income, or developer profit divided by total development cost, which is how the invested dollars work,” said Planning and Building Director Chris Ryan.
In addition to Young’s tool, the town may also consider the use of a feasibility tool developed by an MIT startup called Tangible Impacts, which would provide 3D modeling, fiscal impact analysis, water-use analysis, and parking and traffic generation analysis That tool, however, would come at a cost to the town, Ryan said. The town also has its own model, developed as an alternative to the tool previously created by RKG Associates.
Precinct 6 Town Meeting member Doug Koplow has frequently spoken about the need for fiscal impact and feasibility analyses in the overlay creation process.
“These tools can be very useful, but they need to be tested and vetted,” he said. “That requires them to be available publicly, and with ample lead time prior to votes so people can go through them and test a range of data and assumptions.”
He noted that with a variety of models to consider, “being able to see and evaluate core assumptions is key.”
Which tool the town will ultimately rely on remains to be determined, Ryan said. And if the respective tools provide different feedback sets, a range could be used as a measure.
In the meantime, the hope is to have Young’s interactive tool up and running this month, according to Young, who is developing the tool as part of a grant he received from the Rappaport Institute.
Young was among the group of graduate students from the Harvard Kennedy School who began developing the tool as part of a field study of the Hill’s Crossing Overlay District. The group presented to the Select Board on May 11.
“The town pays nothing,” he said. “This is all funded by the Rappaport Institute, or by Harvard, generally. The town is committing staff resources, but they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t see its value.”
The tool incorporates data from CoStar (a financial tool developers use for construction cost estimates), interviews with developers, Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), parking data, and a weighted average of parking costs using comprehensive analyses from the state and a real estate database.
“Things don’t change drastically, so it’ll give you a good feel for whether or not a project is feasible, but it may not be to the decimal,” Young said.
Echoing Young, Ryan said the tool isn’t a precision tool, but rather something that can show where there may be sensitivities in zoning. For example, maybe five stories with 10 parking spaces works, but with more or fewer parking spaces, the project does not pencil out.
Ryan went on to explain further: “From our end, do we have our zoning right? Are we asking for enough bulk and floor area so that these things can pencil out for a developer? On the other side of the equation is the fiscal impact. We’re trying to balance that.”
Fiscal impacts considered include tax benefit, school-age children and cost per pupil. Fiscal impacts that aren’t necessarily provided by the tool include benefits from hotel/motel taxes, meals taxes, and one-time permitting fees.
In addition to the interactive tool, or dashboard, a downloadable spreadsheet with all the potential scenarios will be available for residents, similar to what was offered as part of the Belmont Center zoning overlay project.
“I think the main thing is that everybody can speak the same language with this and have defensible things to point to, and come to empathetic compromises — or maybe not compromises — but at least now everybody understands why things aren’t getting built or how things can get built,” Young said.
