Consultant: Disguise Housing Density In West Chatham

CHATHAM – In considering new zoning rules for the West Chatham village center, the planning board has a tall order to fill: allow space for many new future housing units without using big apartment buildings or other structures that feel out of scale with the village. Simple, right?

 The town has recently retained the services of Rhode Island-based Union Studio Architecture and Community Design, which is working with Orleans and several other Cape towns on affordable housing developments and zoning initiatives. Principal Jeremy Lake said his firm is building on a Cape Cod Commission study predicting that housing costs will continue to increase in the years to come while available housing stock becomes more scarce. In planned housing developments, like that at the former Governor Prence property in Orleans, Union Studio has a reputation for designing buildings that fit with community character. In Chatham, it has been hired to help the planning board revise zoning for the West Chatham village center in a way that will best shape possible future development.

 In light of the housing crisis, communities around the Cape are looking to create housing stock in the areas that border commercial zones, encouraging the construction of a sufficient number of units to meet the enormous need. 

 “The big scary thing that we started to talk about was density,” Lake said. Their message was that big apartment buildings aren’t the only way to concentrate housing units on a parcel of land, when it’s easier to line up public support for other housing designs. “Our job was to talk people back off the ledge,” he quipped.

 After World War II, new zoning rules created a housing dichotomy, Lake said. “You’re either single-family, like a unit per acre, or you’re multifamily at 20 units to an acre,” he said. In between those two extremes is what’s been described as the “missing middle,” ranging from accessory dwelling units and cottage colonies to duplexes, townhouses, triple deckers and manor houses. There are various ways to achieve housing density, each with a different look. Ultimately, surveys show that residents care “about the form of these things and whether or not they feel like they fit in,” he said. “The density underlying it is important to understand, but you can’t always judge a book by that initial calculation.” 

 In the next six weeks, Union Studio will be creating visual mock-ups of the kinds of buildings that would be encouraged by the most recent draft zoning being advanced by the planning board. Their work will focus on three potential projects judged to be ripe for redevelopment: the land east of Ocean State Job Lot at 1652 Main St., the post office plaza at 1671 Main St., and the Shop Ahoy plaza at 1589 Main St.

 The current draft zoning bylaw was created over many months and involved revisions based on input from community surveys. It divides development zones into the areas adjacent to Main Street, where mixed-use commercial and residential development would be encouraged, and the areas behind those, where higher-density residential development would provide a “transition” to the single-family homes just outside the village center.

 Despite a recent study showing that West Chatham could theoretically host 322 new homes at buildout, “it has never been the position of this board that we’re trying to maximize the number of housing units in the West Chatham neighborhood center,” planning board member Warren Chane said. Some of the housing densities in Lake’s presentation are “two or three times more than the highest density that we’re wrestling with here,” which is set at 12 units per acre under the proposed zoning, he said.

 But planning board members said they’re eager to see Union Studio’s vision for building designs that can accommodate those 12 units per acre.

 “I’m really encouraged by your designs,” member Bob Wirtshafter said. “But is it something that a developer could actually afford to build at something less than $2 million a unit?” he quipped. Lake said the zoning studies represent a “stress test” that identifies the highest density development allowed by the regulations, and his designs will show what that might look like.

 Planning board member Charleen Greenhalgh said the consultants don’t yet have all the information they need to create those designs. “We need to give staff guidance so they can work with the consultant to come up with the vision that I know we’re going to get,” she said. Specifically, the planning board needs to decide the exact size of the zone immediately adjacent to the street, the amount of commercial development that would be allowed there, and the maximum allowable units per acre.

 Community Development Director Kathleen Donovan said the planning board needs to make those decisions quickly in order to give Union Studio time to work up designs before the May annual town meeting, when the zoning rules will be considered.

 Once the ideal designs are complete, Chane said, “we’d like all the help we can get on how you sell this to the town voters. Because if you say ‘density,’ the answer’s ‘no.’” Wirtshafter agreed.

 “They have to be, ‘Wow, wouldn’t that be so much better than what we have right now?’” he said.