How Many Affordable Units?

August 2nd, 2021
housing
With last week's post on affordable housing I was wondering: if we did build out all the Somerville lots zoned for four stories (MR4) to be seven stories of affordable housing, how much housing would that be? I count 254 lots zoned MR4 with a total area of 1.8M sqft. Built out at seven stories and an average of 80% coverage that's 10M sqft of housing. Figure 10% for stairs, elevators, and hallways, and it's really 9M for units. Let's say you build:

bedrooms portion of construction unit size
2br 25% 850 sqft
3br 25% 1000 sqft
4br 25% 1100 sqft
5br 25% 1200 sqft

Then building all of this would give you:

bedrooms number of units
2br 2230
3br 2230
4br 2230
5br 2230

These properties currently comprise just under 1k units, so this is 7.9k new units of affordable housing and 1k units converted to affordable housing. This would bring Somerville from ~35k units to ~43k.

Referenced in: Affordable Housing Investment Fund

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