WHEN FALL RIVER officials pushed for state approval to raze the 100-unit Watuppa Heights public housing development last summer, they bolstered their case with a consulting firm’s study that said the city had an “excess” supply of affordable housing. Not long before, a study by the same firm, RKG Associates, informed the town of Plymouth that high-end and age-restricted housing would generate the most property-tax dollars while causing the least strain on municipal services, especially schools. Then, last fall, RKG advised the city of Worcester to scale back its subsidized housing plans and instead try to “attract a higher class of people.”
for a “higher class of people.”
That comment drew fire from community leaders, who called it the height of insensitivity. “If you want to throw a bomb into a room, just say we need a ‘higher class of people,'” says City Councilor Dennis Irish, chairman of the council’s housing committee.
It also extended what some housing advocates see as a pattern. “There are more and more studies cropping up that are anti-family housing,” says Aaron Gornstein, of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, a Boston-based housing group. And a lot of them, he says, come from RKG. “They seem to be the consulting firm that’s used to rationalize a reduction in affordable housing in the cities.”
RKG officials offer no apologies for their analyses, or for the controversy they seem to kick up. “Sometimes it’s good to create a stir,” says RKG vice president Jeffrey Donohoe. “Not everything we have to say is popular, but we don’t mind that.”
Neither, it seems, do the municipal officials who have beaten a path to the door of the Durham, NH-based firm. More than a dozen Massachusetts communities have commissioned studies from RKG in recent years. That’s because RKG’s specialty is boiling down the effects of planning decisions to bottom-line numbers. “Because of budgetary issues, towns have gotten smarter about what the impacts are of various types of development,” says Donohoe.
But when it comes to the politics of housing, one person’s impact is another’s red flag. “I’m not surprised that their reports might generate controversy, because there’s an awful lot of passion and heat around the housing issue,” says Fall River Mayor Edward Lambert Jr., who has argued that cities like his shoulder more than their share of housing for the poor. Cities, he says, “need to maintain a middle class as well as service low-income families.”
RKG’s studies have come under scrutiny, as well. CHAPA, Gornstein’s housing group, claims that RKG’s Fall River study overstated the supply of affordable housing by double-counting units occupied by tenants with federal Section 8 vouchers as both private-market and assisted housing stock. Emily Achtenberg, the consultant hired by CHAPA to review the RKG report, says there seemed to be a “manipulation of the numbers” to “get a particular result that was wanted.”
“Maybe this study was a little crude in its conclusion.”
RKG’s Fred Pulitzer, who directed the Fall River study, disputes the charge, saying he didn’t intentionally double-count anything. As for the Worcester report, which he wrote as well, Pulitzer admits his “higher class of people” comment won’t win him any prize for diplomacy. “That was a mistake on my part,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to create class war or anything like that.” But in Worcester, as in Fall River, city officials have gotten the RKG message, even if they distance themselves from the language.
“Maybe this study was a little crude in its conclusion,” says Scott Hayman, Worcester’s housing director. But when it comes to pushing more market-rate housing, he says, “it’s absolutely critical that we do that.”
RKG officials insist the firm is no anti-affordable housing bogeyman. They point out they were hired by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development two years ago to assess the market for low-cost senior citizen housing in 11 Massachusetts communities. What’s more, they say, the latest idea for spreading the affordable-housing burden now floating around the Romney administration came from them.
In a December, Donohoe, the RKG vice president, sent a memo to state housing director Jane Gumble outlining a scheme to regionalize requirements of the state’s anti-snob zoning law, known as Chapter 40B. The law presently allows developers to bypass local zoning review for projects that set aside a quarter of units for affordable housing in communities where less than 10 percent of the existing housing stock is classified as affordable. Donohoe proposed a system of “affordable housing credits,” patterned after clean-air credits that are bought and sold by industry, which would allow communities below the 10 percent threshold to buy their way out of 40-B exposure by underwriting the school and other costs now borne by nearby municipalities that have more subsidized housing. Though high-toned communities would be able to avoid unwanted housing, Donohoe predicts that putting a price tag on the avoidance might convince town officials that affordable housing development isn’t such a bad idea for their community after all.
With a new state commission now examining reforms for Chapter 40B, Doug Foy, chief of the new Office of Commonwealth Development, has said the housing credit plan is worth exploring. And if there’s any exploring to be done, RKG would be all too happy to do it. “Our goal, of course,” says Donohoe, “is to get retained to do the analysis.”