In a study by a group of Harvard Kennedy School graduate students, developers highlighted permitting as a “critical constraint” in Belmont.
“The cost essentially increases because the permitting is unpredictable,” grad student Josh Young told the Select Board earlier this month.
On May 11, the student group presented to the town for the second time, this time to share its findings on the development feasibility of the Brighton Street Corridor. Previously, the students offered insight into the Belmont Center overlay, which was approved by Town Meeting earlier this year.
According to the town, the purpose of the zoning effort is to facilitate redevelopment, identify opportunities for streetscape and transportation improvements, encourage a wider variety of amenity options. and create better connections within the Brighton Street Corridor and to other areas in the region. Unique to this corridor is the potential for a “community-path oriented district,” said Planning and Building Director Chris Ryan.
As part of their research, the students contacted 13 area developers and held “substantive conversations” with seven of them.
“Permitting is really a critical piece of this puzzle,” Young said. “Getting developers to want to do the actual construction in Belmont, that timeline makes them want to raise the return more to be willing to do it. They can’t reasonably predict how long it’s going to take them, so to take that risk to build here, they require more return. So if we can shorten that process, they can shorten how much capital they would need.”
The multiple board review of a project with no guaranteed timeline plays into this, he said.
According to Wenyu Zhu, permitting timelines were indicated in every developer interview.
“If we reduce the pre-construction time, we can lift the IRRs (internal rate of return) by several percentage points,” she said.
In an interview after the presentation, Planning and Building Director Chris Ryan said there were “very few surprises” in the feasibility study the students presented.
“I know they had a faculty member who is a developer, so I think he was able to keep them focused and make sure that what they came up with was relevant and connected to the question we were asking, which was ‘How can we assess development feasibility when we get materials from a developer?’”
Ryan said he was impressed and surprised by the dashboard the students developed to show how various factors affected a developer’s financial return. As for permitting, he said it’s an issue the town is “very familiar with.” He understands wanting to not make the review periods too lengthy.
“I think that’s understandable, and we’re sensitive to that. We feel we don’t want our process to be onerous or extremely lengthy; we want it to be reasonable. We want it to be a period of time where the staff and Planning Board have a reasonable amount of time to review materials and provide feedback, but we also don’t want to sit on it,” he said.
One step toward combating lengthier-than-average review times—a revision to the site plan review chapter—is expected to be considered next month during the annual Town Meeting season.
“We have a new permit tracking system called Open Gov, which we hope will allow us to be more efficient and time sensitive,” he said.
If approved in June, the new tracking system would allow for a more transparent process, wherein everyone in the pipeline would be able to see where things stand in the process, or where paperwork and reviews are held up.
Right now, he said, the permitting process can take as long as a quarter of a calendar year, but for larger projects that require multiple public hearings, it can take longer.
“Zoning is about matching what residents want with what developers will build, knowing that developer economics change over time,” Select Board Vice Chair Taylor Yates said. “That means sometimes we expect something to happen in the long run, and sometimes we expect something to happen in the short run.”