There’s so much happening today in the world’s cities—from climate change to a massive shortage of affordable housing—that the job of the city planner has become a furiously busy one, requiring a singular talent for multitasking and managing the needs of increasingly divided constituencies.

Planners have traditionally labored largely behind the scenes, but are emerging into a more visible role as they explain their work and try to keep the peace, said author Josh Stephens on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. Stephens interviewed 23 big-city planners for a new book, Planners Across America.

“Planning directors have huge influence over these cities . . . but they’re not necessarily well known. They are not on the level of a mayor or a city council person who are obviously elected officials, and by definition in the public spotlight; they’re not necessarily like a police chief who is always doing press conferences,” he said. “I think one thing that is very clear in these interviews is how earnest planning directors are about mediating, about figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and are willing to tolerate.”

Acknowledging the distrust that has grown particularly in communities of color, over urban renewal, highways through urban neighborhoods, and exclusionary zoning, Stephens said planners realize the importance of “listening to people, especially people who have historically been left out of the planning conversation.”

At the same time, planners must confront established residents fighting growth, in what is presented as a virtuous grassroots rebellion but is actually the manifestation of NIMBYism, standing for “not in my backyard.”

“Many communities are empowered, and some of that power is unevenly distributed to the extent that some communities have louder voices, and some communities will invoke people like Jane Jacobs in ways that are not necessarily beneficial for the city as a whole, or might even be disingenuous,” Stephens said.

As he spoke with planners, Stephens found widespread acceptance of the idea that most cities need a massive infusion of new housing supply including multifamily housing—and even high-end housing—to help bring prices down as a matter of basic economics. That’s been the aim of several statewide mandates requiring local governments to modify zoning.

“We do need to add luxury housing in high-cost places to accommodate the people who can afford it. I think ideally, that frees up space, and frees up capital and opportunity, and sometimes public funds to then also build deed-restricted affordable housing, and hopefully maintain a supply of naturally occurring affordable housing,” he said.

“You look at where the prices are highest, and that’s where you need to add housing. You need to add it at every level. There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as trickle-down housing. I don’t buy that. I live in Los Angeles, and there’s more than enough money to go around. If you don’t build luxury housing, that doesn’t mean that wealthy and high-income people are not going to move to LA. They’re simply going to move into whatever the next best housing is. That pushes people down, and eventually some people are left with no place to live.”

However, he said, there will be more post-pandemic movement, from hot-market cities to legacy cities, for example, suggesting the contours of a national housing market. “People have moved from LA to Phoenix, from San Francisco to Boise or Reno or Vegas, and there are other equivalents around the country. I think it’s going to be really interesting in the next decade to see how this filters out,” he said.

Josh Stephens is contributing editor of the California Planning & Development Report and previously edited The Planning Report and the Metro Investment Report, monthly publications covering, respectively, land use and infrastructure in Southern California. Planners Across America was published by Planetizen Press in 2022.

City and regional planning has been a major focus of the Lincoln Institute for many decades, from the annual gathering of 30-plus professionals in the Big City Planning Directors Institute, held in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, to the more recent promotion of exploratory scenario planning.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Five Ways Urban Planners Are Addressing a Legacy of Inequity (Land Lines)

Seven Need-to-Know Trends for Planners in 2023 (Land Lines/APA)

A Day in the Life of the City Planner (Princeton Review)

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Josh Stephens. Credit: Rich Schmitt Photography/Westside Urban Forum.

This article is reprinted with permission from Bloomberg CityLab, where it originally appeared.

It’s been a workhorse of affordable housing in urban New England for more than a century, and a building type that is as Boston as a Dunkin’ coffee. But in keeping with the city’s predilection for barstool debates, there’s disagreement about what to call it: Is it the triple-decker or the three-decker?

The only consensus may be that the correct pronunciation of the latter part of the term is “deckah.”

Either way, the triple-decker — let’s go with that — has endured since the turn of the last century as a sturdy, practical and even urbane form of housing, quietly prominent in the quintessential Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, South Boston, Charlestown and beyond.

Tens of thousands of triple-deckers were built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries across New England, in surrounding cities like Worcester, Lowell, Lawrence and Fall River. The simplicity of the design is its calling card. The three floor-through living units stacked on top of each other — initially likened to British sailing warships that had three decks of armament — had kitchens and bathrooms at the same spot on each level, to consolidate plumbing and electricity in one vertical duct.

Invariably simple-wood-frame construction, these free-standing buildings had generally identical floor plans, succinct balconies and small backyards, a mix of flat and gable roofs, and abundant fenestration, to bring in fresh air and natural light. A single front door leading to an internal staircase usually served residents of all three levels; others boasted two front entrances, with one reserved for the ground-floor occupants (often the building’s owner), and another for those upstairs.

The triple-decker building boom was a very pragmatic response to a housing crush in this fast-industrializing region. Waves of newcomers, often immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, were drawn to the factories and textile mills of New England during the second half of the 19th century. Many had been staying in stables and tents or were crowded in substandard conditions. Business leaders had a need, and private developers bought up parcels and built the supply.

Despite their modest roots as cheap housing for low-income families, triple-deckers boasted up-to-date amenities and a touch of style that allowed them to blend into a mix of urban and suburban contexts. As groups like the New Haven Preservation Trust have documented, ornamentation followed the architectural tastes of the era: Earlier triple-deckers might include Queen Anne-style elements like decorative shingles and elaborate turned porch balusters and railings; later, the Colonial Revival style, with its plain clapboard siding and more staid details, predominated. Most had bay windows facing the street, to maximize interior lighting; a larger trio of decks invariably hung from the house’s rear.

Inside, a typical floor plan called for two bedrooms, living and dining rooms, a generous kitchen and a full bathroom with a tub. 

Long before contemporary urbanist catchphrases like “gentle density” and “missing middle” housing were invoked to promote modestly scaled multifamily construction, triple-deckers embodied the idea. The original threeplex. (Oh no, another label option!) Packed tightly onto narrow lots, sometimes in semi-detached pairs known as “perfect sixes,” the boxy structures — close to workplaces or linked to public transit— offered an attainable alternative to more expensive single-family homes, all in service to a healthy local economy. This was state-of-the-art workforce housing, New England-style. 

“The three-decker is democratic architecture,” wrote architectural historian Arthur Krim in his 1977 survey of the form, The Three-Deckers of Dorchester. “It was neither tenement nor mansion, but rather good solid housing. It was large enough to raise a host of children around the dining room table, but small enough to keep a pot of flowers on the back porch.”

A Multi-Level Menance

In a parallel with the current affordable housing policy debate, three-deckers eventually drew a backlash.

What today we see as an elegant housing solution was greeted as scourge by the established order in Boston and environs, precisely because of who was moving in. The triple-decker was targeted as part of the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment at the turn of the 20th century, blocked from spreading farther, either by code tweaks that prohibited cooking on the second floor — the wood-framed buildings were described by opponents as fire-prone — or by outright construction bans, as cities began to curate restrictive land use regulations via the newly embraced concept of local zoning.

By about 1920, 36 municipalities in Massachusetts outlawed new triple-deckers, according to the New England Historical Society. Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island, followed suit. Commentators in an organized public-relations campaign railed against the “three-decker menace.”

Imagine that — a not-in-my-backyard rebellion against density, with the building itself cast as the villain — just like those caricatures of monster-scaled apartment towers with fierce teeth that today’s NIMBYs brandish at protests. Then as now, the resistance was less about the structures and more about the people who would live in them. 

By the 1930s, the bans had succeeded in halting triple-decker construction, choking off the supply of what ended up being naturally occurring affordable housing. Boston and many other cities ultimately began building public housing developments to house lower-income families, which due to a variety of reasons in design and policies ended up riddled with problems.

The triple-deckers that were built remained in place, and went through various iterations. Many deteriorated badly after World War II, as neighborhoods suffered through the economic turmoil of manufacturing and population loss. Some were bulldozed amid “urban renewal” efforts of the 1950s and ’60s, relegating the style to a signpost of blight in what had become beaten-down neighborhoods.

But thousands survived, becoming entry-level home ownership that had the added benefit of potential rental income.

Survival and Revival

By the 1980s and ’90s, some triple-deckers in rebounding neighborhoods like Charlestown and South Boston were were being snapped up by developers, turned into condominiums, or sold as townhouses to single families who could afford them.

Carol Wideman bought her 1905 Dorchester triple-decker in 1980. A single parent, she let the tenants in the first and third floors remain until they moved elsewhere, then installed her sisters and parents in those spaces.

“They’d be here for transitional times until they got back on their feet,” Wideman says, referring to extended family who on occasion gratefully took advantage of the lodging. The modest rental income helped out with utility bills and upkeep. “It’s comfortable,” she says. “I like the idea I can provide a place for family. It was a nice feeling for my parents as they got older.”

That’s the thing about living in a triple-decker. The common floor plan can conjure a sense of community among each building’s residents, whether they’re related or not, that somehow feels more right-sized than living in a larger apartment building. Because each level follows the same floor plan, the only difference between units is each family’s furnishings and interior décor. (Thanks to stacked kitchen locations, lower-floor triple-decker denizens are likely to also share the cooking smells that waft upwards.) Despite their modest roots, the roomy, light-filled living spaces remain appealing to modern homebuyers.

The building form has clearly been worth saving. After a fire in 2019, Wideman’s home was renovated for the popular TV show This Old House, in a glorious demonstration of how the original configuration works so well. The structure got the full treatment, retrofitted down to the studs, with new wiring, heating system, plumbing and more. The show’s Boston-bred host, Kevin O’Connor, was thrilled to do the work, having lived in a triple-decker himself for a few years. “These are extremely durable homes,” he says.

Finding the ‘Future-Decker’

Keeping Boston’s stock of roughly 10,000 triple-deckers alive is also a priority for the city, which is grappling with a severe shortage of affordable housing. 

Wandy Pascoal, the Housing Innovation Design Fellow at the Mayor’s Housing Innovation Lab, has been studying the life and times of the triple-decker — both to reuse and renovate the existing housing stock and to promote new models of simple multifamily housing that capture some of its virtues. When speaking with residents about their experiences living in three-deckers, Pascoal found that, far from being a sinister monster, the triple-decker was a versatile home style that could accommodate housing needs at different stages of life.

“The scale and abundance of the triple-decker allowed for the creation of truly intergenerational communities who not only knew each other but also came to grow alongside one another,” she says. “We heard from those who grew up in them, newer residents who came to appreciate the personal value of the building type, and even those who never lived in one but would often visit family members who did. A story we frequently heard was of an older grandparent, typically a grandmother, who upon migrating to the United States would soon after purchase a triple-decker. While living in one of the apartments, the grandparent would offer the remaining two to extended family or rent them out at an affordable price to those who needed a home.”
 

Several triple-deckers have been renovated with the support of city-sponsored programs such as the Boston Home Center’s HomeWorks Home Equity Loan Program

And something else came along fairly recently that put the triple-decker in the spotlight: As more communities looked to the building sector for solutions to the climate crisis, these drafty old houses became great candidates for clean-energy retrofits. Local designers are participating in competitions like the Massachusetts Clean Energy Coalition’s Triple-Decker Energy Challenge and Co-Creating Boston’s Future-Decker, sponsored by the City of Boston and the Boston Society for Architecture, to come up with retrofit protocols. Oil-heated original homes are being converted to electric heat and given green add-ons like solar panels and charging ports.

Such retrofits can be expensive, further boosting the values for what was cheap housing. A triple-decker in Dorchester is listed at $1.2 million for the entire building; the floor-through apartments, sold as individual condos, routinely go for $700,000 and up. Still, adapting older homes is inherently efficient as a matter of carbon emissions: As O’Connor, and many others point out, the greenest building is the one that already exists.

There is nothing like a preserved triple-decker — or even better, a whole block of them — to stir appreciation of graceful density and urbanity. Being 100 years old, their presence connotes a certain pride in the region’s history. Yes, they look essentially the same, one after the other. But that uniformity has a certain functional beauty. 

Indeed, the fate of the triple-decker might well inform the emerging critique that new multifamily developments all look alike. (It remains to be seen if future generations will look back at today’s “five-over-one” complexes with similar appreciation.) Just like the elegant curve of townhouses in Bath, the blunt symmetry of triple-deckers sends a message: There’s plenty of room here for people to live.

And what to call them? Wideman, the owner of the Dorchester building, says she was only vaguely aware of the three-decker versus triple-decker debate.

“Either one is fine for me,” she says. “The main point is that it works.”

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land LInes.

Lead Image: An East Boston neighborhood showcases its stock of triple-deckers. Credit: DenisTangneyJr/iStockphoto via Getty Images
 

Aftab Pureval, elected in 2021, is making history as Cincinnati’s first Asian American mayor. He was raised in Southwest Ohio, the son of first-generation Americans, and worked at a toy store when he was in middle school. After graduating from the Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati Law School, Pureval held several positions including as counsel at Procter & Gamble before entering public service. He served as Hamilton County Clerk of Courts from 2016 to 2021, and was the first Democrat to hold that office in over 100 years. Pureval resides in the north Cincinnati neighborhood of Clifton with his wife and their two sons and, as has become evident during his time in office, is a big-time Cincinnati Bengals fan. He spoke with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint earlier this year for the Land Matters podcast

Anthony Flint: You’ve attracted a lot of attention for what some have called a “heroic undertaking” to preserve the city’s single-family housing stock and keep it out of the hands of outside investors. Briefly, walk us through what was accomplished in coordination with the Port of Cincinnati.

Aftab Pureval: Just to provide a little more context, Cincinnati is a legacy city. We have a proud, long tradition of being the final destination from the Underground Railroad. We were the doorstep to freedom for so many slaves who were escaping that horrific experience. We have a lot of historic neighborhoods, a lot of historic buildings, and we have a lot of aging infrastructure and aging single-family homes, which—paired with the fact that we are an incredibly affordable city in the national context—makes us a prime target for institutional investors.

Unfortunately, Cincinnati is on national list after national list about the rate of increase for our rents. It’s primarily being driven by these out-of-town investors—who have no interest, frankly, in the well-being of Cincinnati or their tenants—buying up cheap single-family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, but overnight doubling or tripling the rents, which is pricing out a lot of our communities, particularly our vulnerable, impoverished communities.

The City is doing a lot of things through litigation, through code enforcement. In fact, we sued two of our largest institutional investors, Vinebrook and the owners of Williamsburg, to let them know that we’re not playing around. If you’re going to exercise predatory behavior in our community, we’re not going to stand for it.

We’ve also done things on the front end to prevent this from happening by partnering with the Port . . . . When several properties went up for sale because an institutional investor put them on the selling block, the Port spent $14.5 million to buy over 190 single-family homes, outbidding 13 other institutional investors.

Over the past year, the Port has been working to bring those properties into compliance, dealing with the various code violations that the investor left behind, pairing these homes once they’re fixed up with qualified buyers, oftentimes folks who are working in poverty or lower middle-class who’ve never owned a home before.

Just this year we’re making three of those 194 available for sale. It’s a huge success across the board . . .  but it’s just one tool that the Port and the City are working on to increase affordability of housing in all of our neighborhoods.

AF: What did you learn from this that might be transferable to other cities? It takes a lot of capital to outbid an institutional investor.

AP: It does require a lot of funds. That’s why we need more flexibility from the federal government and the state government to provide municipalities with the tools to prevent this from happening in the first place. Now once an institutional investor gets their claws into a community, there’s very little that the city can do to hold them accountable.

The better strategy as we’ve seen this time is to, on the front end, buy up properties. A lot of cities have a lot of dollars from the federal government through ARP [American Recovery Plan]. We have used a lot of ARP dollars not just to get money into the hands of people who need it most, which is critically important in this time, but also to partner with other private-public partnerships or the Port to give them the resources necessary to buy up the land and hold it.

That has been part of our strategy with ARP. This is a unique time in cities where they have more flexibility [with] the resources coming from the federal government. I would encourage any mayor, any council, to really think critically about using the funds not just in the short term but also in the long term to address some of these macroeconomic forces.

AF: Cincinnati has become a more popular place to live, and the population has increased slightly after years of decline. Do you consider Cincinnati a pandemic or climate haven? What are the implications of that growth?

AP: What I love about my job as mayor is my focus isn’t necessarily on the next two or four years, but the next 100 years. Right now, we are living through a paradigm shift because of the pandemic. The way we live, work, and play is just completely changing. Remote work is completely altering our economic lifestyle throughout the entire country, but particularly here in the Midwest.

What I am convinced of is because of climate change, because of the rising cost of living on the coast, there will be an inward migration. I don’t know if it’s in the next 50 or 75 years, but it will happen. We’re already seeing large businesses making decisions based on climate change. Just two hours north of Cincinnati, Intel is making a $200 billion investment to create the largest semiconductor plant in the country.

Two of the reasons they chose just north of Cincinnati are access to fresh water, the Ohio River in the south and the Great Lakes in the north, and our region’s climate resiliency. Now, don’t get me wrong: we’re all affected by climate change. We’re not all affected equally—our impoverished and disadvantaged communities are more affected disproportionately than others—but in Ohio and Cincinnati, we’re not seeing the wildfires, the droughts, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the coastal erosion that we’re seeing in other parts of the country, which makes us a climate-change safe haven not just for business investment but also for people. Cincinnati is partly growing because our economy’s on fire right now, but we’re going to really see, I believe, exponential growth over the next few decades because of these massive factors pushing people into the middle of the country.

The investments that we make right now to help our legacy communities and legacy residents stay in their homes and continue to make Cincinnati an affordable place for them, while also keeping in mind these future residents, is a really challenging topic. While Cincinnati right now is very affordable in the national context, it’s not affordable for all Cincinnati residents because our housing supply has not kept up with population growth and our incomes have not kept up with housing prices.

In order to make sure that the investments in the future and the population growth in the future does not displace our current residents, we’ve got to stabilize our market now and be prepared for that growth.

AF: What are the land use changes and transportation improvements that you’re concentrating on accordingly?

AP: Oftentimes, people ask mayors about their legacy, and the third rail of local politics is zoning. If we’re going to get this right, then we have to have a comprehensive review and reform of our land use policies. When I talk about legacy, that’s what I’m talking about.

We have, for over a year now, been having meetings with stakeholders to [explore what] a modern Cincinnati looks like. I believe it looks like a dense, diverse neighborhood that’s walkable, with good public transportation and investments in public art. Right now, the City of Cincinnati’s zoning is not encouraging those kinds of neighborhoods. Close to 70 percent of our city is zoned for single-family use exclusively, which is putting an artificial cap on the amount of supply that we can create, which is artificially increasing rents and artificially increasing property taxes, which is causing a lot of our legacy residents, who even own their homes, to be displaced.

If we’re serious about deconcentrating poverty and desegregating our city, then we’ve got to take a look at multifamily unit prohibitions. We’ve got to take a look at parking requirements for both businesses and homes. We’ve got to look at transit-oriented development along our bus rapid transit lines. We’ve got to look at creative opportunities to create more housing like auxiliary dwelling units, but none of this is easy.

It’s not easy because NIMBYism is real, and we’ve got to convince people that I’m not going to put a 20-floor condo building on your residential cul-de-sac . . . . Zoning is very, very difficult because change is very difficult, and people are afraid of what that will turn the city into. That’s why we’ve been doing a year-long worth of community engagement, and I am confident we can make some substantive changes to our zoning code to encourage more affordability, encourage more public transportation, and just be a greener city.

On that note, we have made a commitment that we will only buy city vehicles that are electric vehicles when they become available. We have the largest city-led solar farm in the entire country, which is significantly contributing to our energy consumption.

AF: A little bit of this is back to the future, because the city had streetcars. Do you have the sense that there’s an appreciation for that, that those times actually made the city function better?

AP: The city used to be dense, used to have incredible streetcars, public transportation, and then, unfortunately, cities—not just Cincinnati but across the country—saw a steady decline of population, losing folks to the suburbs. Now people want to come back into the city, but now we have the hard work of undoing what a lot of cities tried to do, which was create suburban neighborhoods within a city to attract those suburban people back, right? It’s a little bit undoing the past while also focusing on what used to exist. When I share this vision with people, they say, “Yes, that’s a no-brainer, of course, I want to do that,” but they don’t want to do it on their street.

AF: What worries you most about this kind of transition, and what do you identify as the major issues facing lower-income and communities of color in Cincinnati?

AP: Displacement. If we cannot be a city that our current residents can afford, they will leave, which hurts everything. If the city is not growing, then a city our size, where we’re located in the country, we are dying, and we are dying quickly. Cities our size have to grow, and in order to grow, not only do we need to recruit talent, but we have to preserve the families and the legacy communities that have been here in the first place.

No city in the country has figured out a way to grow without displacement. The market factors, the economic factors are so profound and so hard to influence, and the City’s resources are so limited, it’s really difficult. Getting back to our institutional investor problem, the City doesn’t have the resources to just go up and buy property and make sure that we’re selling to good-faith owners, right? If we had that power, that market influence, we would do it. Oftentimes, I guess I get frustrated that I don’t have enough resources, enough authority to make a meaningful impact on the macroeconomic forces that are coming into the city. Because if we get our dream, which is more investment, more growth, that comes with negative consequences, and it’s really difficult to manage both.

AF: Finally, back to climate change, the mayor’s website says Cincinnati is well-positioned to be a leader in climate change at home and abroad. What do you think the city has to offer that’s distinctive in terms of climate action?

AP: All of our policy initiatives are looked at through two lenses. The first is racial equity and the second is climate. Everything that we do, whether it’s our urban forestry assessment, looking at a heat map of our city and investing in trees to not just clean the air but also cool our neighborhoods, [or] our investments in biochar. We are one of only seven cities in the entire world that received a huge grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies to continue to innovate in the world of biochar, which is a byproduct of burning wood, which is an incredible carbon magnet that helps with stormwater runoff but also pulls carbon out of the air.

Our parks department, which is one of the best in the country, continues to innovate on that front . . . . Continuing to have some of the best testing and best preservation in the country for our water supply will be important. Ultimately, businesses and people who are looking to the future consider climate change in that future. If you’re looking for a city that is climate-resilient but also making massive investments in climate technology, then Cincinnati is that destination for you.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval. Credit: © Amanda Rossmann – USA TODAY NETWORK.

If history is any guide, Maryland’s new Purple Line—a 16.2-mile light-rail expansion linking several suburbs of Washington, DC—seemed destined to push up nearby property values and rents, and to push out longtime residents who could no longer afford to pay them. That’s often the unintended consequence of new transit systems and other infrastructure improvements.

Aiming to derail that displacement, a broad local coalition—with some help from the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Community Investment (CCI) and health-care giant Kaiser Permanente—set a goal of preserving or creating 17,000 affordable homes along the new transit corridor. As the rail project chugs along toward its 2027 completion date, some 3,000 affordable homes are already in the planning, production, or preservation stage, as detailed in a new CCI case study. 

Some of CCI’s earliest work focused on equitable transit-oriented development in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Denver, says Executive Director Robin Hacke, “so we knew how important it is, when you build a new transit line, to pay attention to who’s living there now and at risk of displacement.” When Kaiser Permanente chose the Purple Line corridor—site of its regional headquarters—as a geographic focus for its participation in CCI’s Accelerating Investments for Healthy Communities initiative, Hacke says, “the stars lined up.” AIHC was a three-year program that helped hospitals and health systems “invest upstream in the root causes of good health,” Hacke notes, focusing on affordable and equitable housing solutions.

With Kaiser’s involvement adding new energy to the Purple Line Corridor Coalition (PLCC), Hacke says, the group put key elements of CCI’s capital absorption framework into practice. That generally begins with a community setting an ambitious shared priority, “and using that to organize people to get beyond business as usual,” she says. Members of the coalition—which includes nonprofits, local governments, and businesses—“were able to organize the pipeline of affordable housing transactions that they could work on, as well as improve what we call the enabling environment, which is all the things that determine whether the pipeline moves or dies, in a way that allowed them to make a whole bunch of progress.”

Much of that progress was helped by PLCC’s hiring of a full-time coordinator, Vonnette Harris, who has played a pivotal role in creating a pipeline of over 1,000 affordable housing projects by connecting nonprofits, municipalities, developers, lenders, and faith communities to each other and to the resources they need to get projects underway and keep them going. “Making the pipeline visible, and helping people see what is about to happen, is really an important part of the capital absorption methodology,” Hacke says. “Because otherwise, you’re in deal-by-deal land, and deal-by deal-land is never going to add up to the breadth and depth of ambitions that communities have for themselves.”

Meanwhile, consultants and Prince George’s County staff helped to implement a dormant “right of first refusal” law from 2013, a strategy that’s helped to preserve more than 1,200 existing affordable housing units in two years. When a large, affordable multifamily building goes under agreement, the law gives the county the right, for a limited time, to step into the buyer’s shoes and make the purchase instead, on whatever terms the buyer negotiated.

The county wasn’t in a position to purchase, rehab, and maintain apartment buildings by itself. But CCI consultants helped the county issue an RFP and assemble a pool of more than a dozen qualified affordable housing developers who can act as partners on any such deals. “The county can actually exercise its right to buy the property, and then they can have a back-to-back agreement with an affordable housing developer, who will finance the property, do whatever rehab is necessary, and keep the property affordable for the longer term,” Hacke says. The coalition also persuaded the county to use $15 million from the American Rescue Plan Act to create a fund that helps those developers secure flexible financing; the state of Maryland then kicked in another $10 million.

Even if the county doesn’t exercise its right of first refusal, the mere existence of the option has helped keep hundreds of units affordable for the next 15 or 20 years. “The big ‘aha’ was that, if you have the policy, you have an invitation to a conversation,” Hacke explains. “The county can then have a conversation with the buyer that says, ‘Hey, you really want this property, here’s what we’d like you to do in terms of preserving affordability.’ And many times that’s a productive enough conversation and everybody goes home happy.”

The county first exercised its right by means of negotiation in early 2021, convincing the buyer of a 36-unit building to keep all the units affordable for 15 years. In August 2021, the county took things a step further, coordinating with a developer from the pool to purchase a 245-unit building in Hyattsville that was about to be sold, ensuring 184 units will remain affordable for 20 years. 

When it comes to preventing such naturally occurring affordable housing from getting redeveloped into high-priced rentals and condos, timing is everything. After all, once rents have climbed along the corridor, “there won’t be anything to preserve,” says Aspasia Xypolia, director of the county’s Department of Housing and Community Development. “Once that housing becomes unaffordable, it’s too late.”

With only a few more years before the Purple Line’s slated completion, the coalition will need to continue collaborating across sectors to meet its ambitious affordable housing target. “Preserving existing buildings is part of it, developing new buildings is another part of it, and as the rail line comes closer and closer to being opened, the pressure on the market is going to grow,” Hacke says. “So getting as much done as early as possible is really important.”

Read the Center for Community Investment’s full case study here.