If you are a renter or a homebuyer struggling to stay in Boston where the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is over $3,000 and starter homes are out of reach for all but the most affluent, the last thing you need is for new lab space to make the situation worse. This is especially true for Black, Latinx, and Asian renters whose household incomes are roughly one third the incomes of White renters. Lab and life sciences development can be a benefit to all, but it must come with new private sector Linkage resources to offset its potentially destabilizing effects.
Linkage is a very targeted Development Impact Fee designed specifically to help fund affordable housing and job training. Our government must strengthen the policy to ensure that it more adequately addresses housing costs directly attributable to projected commercial development and enables our neighbors to train for family sustaining jobs. Without the right housing and job training supports, our residents won’t get the high paying jobs coming to our neighborhoods. Instead, we will see increased housing competition force more of us out of the city.
A recent study commissioned by the Boston Planning and Development Agency quantifies the effect of future commercial development on Boston’s affordable housing and job training needs. It concludes that a Linkage fee of $80.20 per square foot (sf) would be required to offset added government housing costs. According to the same study, an additional $4.19 to $5.32 would be needed to fund job training programs to prepare our community members for promising careers in new labs and other newly constructed work spaces. Mayor Wu is asking the development community to bear about one third of that cost through a new Linkage fee of $30.78/sf for research and development labs, and a fee of $23.09/sf for other commercial buildings.
Instead of agreeing to increase their commitment to alleviate the undesirable impacts of their projects, developers and their lobbyists are falsely claiming that these Linkage adjustments will sink all development in the city. They have sought to sow doubt by raising questions as to whether the modest increases Mayor Wu has proposed would cause developers to go elsewhere, but they have not publicly presented evidence that these fees would be a significant factor in location decisions or the viability of projects. The BPDA study shows that the facts are squarely on the side of the mayor’s proposal.
The proposed changes are an important step toward a more appropriate development policy. We believe additional action should be taken to further strengthen the policy. As it stands now, long-term development projects scheduled to be built over 20 or 30 years can lock in their linkage rates when the initial proposal is filed. This will result in some of our largest developments paying Linkage fees that are years or even decades out of date. Eliminating this loophole would level the playing field for developers and allow Linkage payments to adjust as market conditions change over time.
We have the ability to ensure that our residents – including our Black, Latinx, and Asian neighbors – benefit from new industry coming to Boston. It’s time for Linkage to do more of what it was designed to do – mitigate the increased housing pressure and displacement of low- and moderate-income residents caused by large-scale commercial development, and train people for better jobs in new buildings. We urge the Boston Planning and Development Agency and the Zoning Commission to immediately adopt Mayor Wu’s modest proposal, and we hope our elected leaders will continue to update Linkage as market conditions change.
Symone Crawford is the executive director of the Dorchester-based Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance.
