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Member Spotlight: Mark Pantano, Architect, Annum Architects
Mark discusses the value of talking with everyone; what motivates him; and what he'd like to improve for future practitioners in CRE.
January 23, 2025
By Scott Pollack
“The accretion of independently promulgated zoning, building, life safety, accessibility, and energy codes combined with far-flung financial, community participation and open space preservation regulations (among other things) has left but a tiny hole through which to thread the needle of compliance.
But sometimes, good things can and do happen.”
With so much going on, it’s easy to miss small but important news items. Last month, we wrote about MassInc’s finding that almost 60% of the current housing shortfall in Gateway cities could be met if their existing, long-term vacant housing was renovated and re-occupied. But I’ve yet to see any discussion on how that insight, which would quickly improve supply and avoid community character conflicts about – since the buildings are already there – is being used as an argument for setting aside renovation funding.
When I mention to friends other tidbits as they come across my radar, I’m met with surprise, interest, and even concern about these items. So, I thought I’d share them with y’all.
To restate the obvious, housing is an ecosystem that, like all complex systems, is highly reactive to small changes. The current state of housing supply and demand is the result of incremental, seemingly disconnected policy and demographics changes whose cumulative consequences have made housing incredibly hard and expensive to build. The accretion of independently promulgated zoning, building, life safety, accessibility, and energy codes combined with far-flung financial, community participation and open space preservation regulations (among other things) has left but a tiny hole through which to thread the needle of compliance.
But sometimes, good things can and do happen.
Nationally, North Carolina is about to become the first state to modify the International Residential Code (IRC) to include housing up to four, rather than the current two units. While this may not seem like a big change – it is. Allowing many traditional – dare I say community-character compliant – housing types to be built by under the residential code and by residential contractors is a major change that is likely to have outsized impacts.
When the International Building Code (IBC) was first adopted, the rules for building housing were split into the residential code (IRC) for up to 2 units and a commercial (IBC) code for everything else. Triple-deckers and four families became ‘commercial buildings’ governed by the same standards as large, multi-family buildings.
If building a triple decker to commercial standards doesn’t seem like a big deal – it is. Stairs are larger, eating up more of already small floor plates. Building assemblies, like walls and floors, are more complex and costly. Electrical and plumbing standards designed for bigger buildings come into play. And maybe most importantly many residential builders, who are used to the IRC, work on IBC buildings, limiting the number of contactors willing and able to build anything bigger than a duplex.
Let me be clear – I believe that most code updates have improved quality and life safety. The vast reduction of deaths in home fires and reduced energy use in my lifetime is proof of why changes were needed. But implementation was carried out seemingly without regard to cost or impacts on supply, and unintentionally – I hope – made our most traditional forms of naturally affordable, in-fill housing unaffordable or illegal. North Carolina is the first state to accept that competing priorities must be balanced to create affordability. As Voltaire said over 250 years ago: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Massachusetts has some of the oldest housing stock in the country and many older homes do not meet current codes or energy standards. But this residential/commercial distinction makes renovating three- and four-family buildings in many communities’ cost-prohibitive for homeowners and small landlords. We’ve effectively created a system in which homes that need improvement to remain habitable inevitably leave the workforce housing supply. While I’d love to see the IRC cover six- and even eight-unit buildings that are 3 stories or less, at least adopting North Carolina’s up-to-four-unit approach would create a simpler, less expensive route to bring older, long-term vacant, non-conforming buildings back on-line.
Wouldn’t that be better, and safer, than leaving them unimproved and/or vacant?
Closer to home, many of us have been concerned for years that zoning doesn’t allow people to build back if something catastrophic like what is happening in LA occurred here. The current zoning governing most towns and cities would not allow communities to put back what they most love about their neighborhoods. That is not what zoning should be.
Well, the City of Boston agrees. A November presentation of Boston Planning’s new ADU Guidebook clearly and unequivocally stated that “99% of residential parcels have zoning that fails to match what is there”. Based on the City’s own analysis, the existing housing stock does not “conform to unit count, lot size, floor area ratio, or yard requirements.” Put simply, the current “code does not match up well with the city’s existing fabric.”
The presentation goes further, discussing how “many homes that we know and love do not fit within the three-dimensional envelope created by the existing code,” and in particular that the “historic triple decker, a quintessential Boston housing typology, is not compliant with our current zoning code” because “front, rear, and side yard requirements are so extensive that the existing structure does not fit” and “maximum height limits and story limits are lower than the existing structure.”
This is a watershed moment and needs to be celebrated. Mayor Wu and Planning Director Kairos Shen should be lauded for acknowledging what many of us have known for a long time – that “without case-by-case zoning relief, the current zoning code effectively declares that nothing should be built in Boston that looks like what is currently in Boston.” While an obvious problem, very few people in the land-use community have been willing to talk publicly about this. Yet how can we possibly hope to fix housing policy if we can’t discuss its underlying problems?
The city plans to build off Mattapan’s new zoning so that all new zoning reforms start with a neighborhood’s existing characteristics. Applying this approach to the whole city will be a huge step forward, not only enabling more ADU’s, but creating a pathway to utilize all those small, vacant parcels that the Boston Foundation’s Housing Report Card discussed. It offers a blueprint on how we to create housing by locals, for locals – all the while keeping generational wealth in communities.
These two milestone events – one in Boston, one in North Carolina – will not fix everything. But they’re a damn good start, recognizing the need to repair unintended consequences of well-meaning but improper regulation. Quoting the City of Boston ADU Guidebook, they “provide predictability to the community at large around what is and is not acceptable, removing the case-by-case variance pattern of the current appeals process.” That will be better for all – cities, residents and businesses.
Please send any reactions, comments, or ideas to Scott at [email protected].
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