Somerville’s iconic triple-deckers are no longer outlaws.
For decades, the quintessentially Massachusetts style of three-floor home sat in an uneasy limbo – perhaps the most recognizable residential building structure in Greater Boston is not allowed to be built as-of-right in most of these communities. In Somerville, a years-long push to re-embrace the triple-decker dovetailed with a serious need for new housing units, and its city council voted in November to fully legalize new three-unit construction.
“It adds housing to the region, and it has this added bonus of a historic structure that is valued in the community and that, at least in my mind, most people don’t view as a blight anymore,” City Councilor Matt McLaughlin, who led the charge, said on The Codcast. “They view it as a unique characteristic to the region. So it adds housing, and it says what is can be.”
The three-unit structures, initially named “three-deckers” after three-decker warships, popped up all over New England in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were staples of the working class and immigrants – cheap enough to build, and the multi-unit layout meant that owners could either live in one unit and bring in rental income with the others or house multiple generations of family members within one compact building.
Sentiment turned on the triple-decker as the century progressed. Housing organizations, governments, and anti-immigrant groups characterized the three-deckers as tenement buildings, unsafe fire traps housing the unsavory. Bans on their construction flooded the region. Though the tide turned back in the 1960s and 1970s, and now a three-unit building is often a million-dollar stack of condominiums, the zoning lagged.
“People all across the region basically banned these structures using exclusionary zoning, which is something that’s still done to this day to basically discourage housing from being built,” McLaughlin said. “But that only made the triple-deckers more lucrative because now if, say, in Boston, a triple-decker burns to the ground, depending on where that place is, they can’t rebuild the triple-decker.”
Somerville wrapped some changes to triple-decker construction into a 2019 zoning overhaul package. One of the units in any new triple-decker had to be affordable, and it could only be built next to an existing triple-decker for consistency. McLaughlin himself supported the affordability changes at the time. But he and Jesse Kanson-Benanav of the pro-housing group Abundant Housing Massachusetts say the development costs of the well-meaning restrictions stifled any new construction.
“I think the examples from Somerville in these recent changes are really telling,” Kanson-Benanav said on The Codcast. “And the fact is that when Somerville had sort of a mandate that one of the three units had to be affordable, nothing was getting built.”
The main reason for taking another swing at the triple-decker rezoning was compliance with the MBTA Communities law, which requires cities and towns within a certain distance of public transit to zone for more multi-family housing.
“This seemed to be killing two birds with one stone or just the easiest solution to solve both problems,” McLaughlin said. “We need to add density to the map; we like triple-deckers. I find a lot of people who are resistant to development, or resistant to dense housing, like the triple-decker because their attitude is ‘that big ugly building doesn’t fit the community,’ and nothing fits the community more than a triple-decker in my mind.”
Neither McLaughlin nor Kanson-Benanav thinks the zoning change will suddenly flood the city with three-deckers – and the change applies to a variety of three-unit buildings even without the classic stacked design. But they say it offers a blueprint for encouraging tailored density in a state facing a 200,000-unit shortfall.
“This conversation around triple-deckers, or three-deckers, is an important entree into the broader conversation around missing middle housing in Greater Boston and throughout the Commonwealth,” Kanson-Benanav said. “It may be that the triple-decker makes sense in some communities. In other communities, adding additional units might make the most sense through accessory dwelling units – another type of lower cost-to-build housing that residents can do on their properties.”
For McLaughlin, who lives in a three-unit Somerville condo-ized building, the fight against triple-deckers is emblematic of some of the worst instincts of people trying to protect a certain kind of community feel at the expense of new housing, even if that type of housing was already embraced widely.
“Even in Somerville, Mass., where we’re very progressive when it comes to housing and trying to solve the housing crisis, a few years ago, this wouldn’t have passed,” McLaughlin said. “And this year it passed unanimously. And now I’m hoping that maybe the entire region will consider this.”