AI-generated transcript of City Council Planning and Permitting Committee 12-16-25

[Kit Collins]: forward for even a second.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah.

[Marie Izzo]: Oh yeah, no, I didn't yet know that I haven't seen everybody to tell them that. Yeah, I'm doing that. Yeah, the mayor's great plan was to have you all share a desk. Well, we should wait all one. We all share one desk. Each two people share one desk. What?

[Kit Collins]: No, that would be dead right now.

[Marie Izzo]: Yeah, well, that's That's the mayor's plan.

[Kit Collins]: All right, good to go. Sorry, I closed something I need. Okay. There will be a meeting of the Medford City Council Planning and Permitting Committee, December 16th, 2025. This meeting will take place at 6 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, second floor, Medford City Hall, 85 George B. Hassett Drive, Medford MA and via Zoom. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Callahan. Councilor Callahan is absent. Councilor Leming. Councilor Scarpelli. Councilor Scarpelli is absent. President Bears. Present. Vice President Collins.

[Kit Collins]: Present. Three present, two absent. The meeting is called to order. Thank you all for being here. People were clamoring for one final planning and permitting committee meeting before we closed out this term, so I had to oblige. The action and discussion item, thank you for laughing, Simon. The action discussion item for tonight's meeting is paper 22-321, a condominium conversion ordinance. This is something that we have not talked about in a little while. It's been on the council's radar for a couple of terms now. This was brought up in the context, initially this was brought up as an idea before the council in the context of one of the mass displacement events in Medford in recent years when a couple dozen tenants were evicted, no fault, from the Bradley Road rental building. In 2022, this is brought up as one possible strategy that Medford could look into as a strategy that many municipalities have pursued as a way of protecting the stock of rental units within a city. There are many strategies that have to work together to preserve affordable housing and to preserve rental housing stock within a municipality. This is one that actually many of our neighbors here in Massachusetts have used and have adapted and have adapted to fit their unique needs. And so in 2022, we had a couple of initial meetings on this idea. We gathered and looked at together some initial research, compared what some of our neighbors do and don't do through their condo conversion ordinances. and put together a framework from which we would make a draft ordinance in those couple preliminary meetings which were in March and September of 2023. Like I said, we looked at kind of a survey of some other municipalities, condo conversion ordinances, compared and contrasted them, and also got some initial reactions and questions on the board from our planning development sustainability department and our building commissioner. So what we have today, and this is in the agenda packet, is a preliminary kind of version one draft of a condo conversion ordinance, which I wrote. The text did not just come out of my head. This came from several, this was adapted from several of the different condo conversion ordinances that are currently on the books in many of our, in some of our neighboring communities, who we looked at, who we looked to as examples at the September 2023 meeting and discussed and it kind of comes out of our conversation from about a year and a half ago about what of these neighboring communities ordinances make sense and seems like it's interesting and seems like it's something that'd be worth looking into here in Medford and which of these things seem like they're less tailored for a community like ours. So I'm happy to run through that draft tonight, but just quickly since it has been a while since we've looked at this, I just want to quickly recenter us on kind of the principles of this ordinance and the why of doing it at all. Why do a condo conversion ordinance? This is, like I said, it's just one strategy, but it's a way of making sure that the city has more control and has a seat at the table when the conversion of rental units to condominiums happens in a city. And we know that in Medford, that's already been happening quite a lot, especially in Hillside and South Medford. A condo conversion provides a really fantastic profit opportunity for for-profit developers and for house flippers. And we've seen this, but especially if corporations and for-profit flippers that aren't rooted here in Medford, that kind of have no business in Medford except for extracting property from these conversions. If they're going to profit from housing in our community, we should make sure that that transaction gives something back to our community as well, to individual tenants who are displaced. and to the public at large and the ordinance provides a structure for doing that. In addition it's important to keep in mind as we're thinking through the levers in this ordinance that the conversion of rentals into condos has an impact on our chances of local racial and class diversity because not everybody can afford to buy a home. It's very important to have homes for the I think over 45% of Medford that does rent at this time. Anyway, this is a way to make sure that the public gets something back when what is often a mechanism of gentrification takes place. So with this ordinance, it's up to us to, you know, kind of pull the different levers to make this do what we want it to do in my mind and based on the conversations that we've had about this so far in council. The outcomes that we intend to get out of this ordinance are to target for-profit developers, while protecting homeowners and while protecting the retirement incomes of seniors in our community, to increase tenant protections, to increase the city's ability to connect displaced tenants with new comparable affordable housing, to make sure that relocation payments, compensation to displaced tenants aligns with the true cost of moving within our community, and to increase the incentives and the assistance to owners or condo developers to help with finding new housing for their tenants. And so as we go through the ordinance, I think the key questions for us to be considering and, you know, happy to add to this list are how do we make sure that we're targeting for-profit developers and flippers as opposed to owner-occupants? How what does that relate to a certain type or size of building that we should make sure to target or be sure to exempt? And what are the key enforcement related issues that we should make sure to get feedback from city staff on? So with that, if there are no pressing comments or questions from my fellow Councilors at this time, I'd happily run us quickly through the draft of the ordinance and then we can go forward. Proceed? I'll share my screen. All right, I'm going to try to go through this pretty quickly because it is quite long. This draft, including the comments, is on the city council's public portal for if anybody watching would like to follow along or read it in greater detail that I'm going to go into. So like I said, prior to the writing of this draft, the council reviewed several condo conversion ordinances from other communities in Massachusetts. This included Somerville, Boston, New Bedford, Lexington, and Marlborough. Based on my notes from our conversations in 2023, it seemed like our most instructive examples, the things that were closely aligned with the mechanisms that we might want to pursue. And most comparable and useful for us here in Medford would be Somerville's ordinance and Marlborough's ordinance. And there are some sections that are kind of adapted from those other communities as well. Boston tends to be pretty unique. It interacts pretty uniquely with state law in a lot of cases, but still really interesting to look at. So we start, I'm just going to run through this quickly. We start with the statement of purpose, which is kind of what I spoke to in terms of the housing context for this project in general. It's followed by a definitions section. These definitions align with the other ordinance, the other condo conversion ordinances that are held by our neighbors. Then we get to section three, condominium conversion requirements. Actually, let me just switch my navigation here. This is where we get into the meat of the ordinance this is speaking to. Okay, so we've gotten to the point where a condo conversion, a developer or an owner wants that to happen. Now what? So this is, This is where we start to get into that flowchart of what a developer might want to do with their property and what the city is saying must happen to increase fairness for tenants and the community in that case. Provisions for vacant units or owner-occupied units. These are treated a little bit differently. In this case, we don't have a tenant unrelated to the owner that might be displaced by the conversion. occupied units, this sets forth, sorry I'm losing my place here. So largely this is about how much notice is an owner required to give to a tenant when they intend to take a rental unit and convert it into a condominium. This was one major point of comparison among the other ordinances. Most of the other communities that we looked at give protected tenants a five year notice period and an either one or three year notice period for all other tenants. If you are a protected tenant, so for example, if you have a disability, if you are a senior, if you are low income, your notice period is five years. All other tenants, three years of notice. That's how long the owner has to give you a warning when they're about to take that rental off the market because they're going to perform a conversion. Renting units during a conversion, this is, this section is speaking to tenants' rights while they are kind of going through a current lease when an owner is preparing for conversion. And it speaks to essentially protecting tenants from the conditions of their lease changing while they're still in that same current lease. The intent of this is to prevent owners from doing things that would essentially try to force their tenants out early by, say, increasing the rent drastically or increasing demands on the tenant during their current lease so that they could make the conversion earlier. So this prevents that from happening. It also prevents evictions before the notice period, as specified earlier in this section, would be up. Tenant right to purchase was another stipulation that we saw in many other condominium conversion ordinances. This puts forward that when a owner wants to convert a unit that is currently occupied by a tenant, before they put it on the market, they must extend to the tenant like first right of refusal. Before they put it out to the general public, they have to offer it first to the tenant. on equal or comparable terms to that which they would be offering it on the free market. Most of the other examples that we looked at gave that first right of refusal period as 120 days to average tenants and 180 days refusal period in the case of protected tenants. We also have a section in here and this is interesting, something that I think the council should talk about further at some point is if a tenant should pass on this opportunity to purchase the unit once it is converted, that first, that's actually a second right of refusal would then go to the city of Medford or its designee which might include our affordable housing trust to maintain the property as affordable housing in perpetuity. And then it would be up to the city or its designee to waive that right to purchase and then it could go on to the market. I do want to note and make really clear. that this does not obligate any owner to sell the unit for less than it would be offering in good faith to third parties on the market. It's more about the sequence here, giving the tenant the first right to say no thank you, and after that, giving the municipality or its designee the right to say no thank you before it goes on the market. There are exceptions to the first right of refusal. including if they intend to transfer the condo to a close relative instead of offering it on the market. That would be an instance where first right of refusal to the tenant or to the city would be exempted. The intent of the ordinance is not to prevent people from converting units and then selling or giving it to a family member. going down to the next section underneath requirements if a condo conversion is going to take place. The other major piece of, or I would say one of the main pillars of the ordinance, of course, is increasing tenants' rights in the event of a condo conversion of a unit where they're living and also making sure that they are fairly compensated for the disruptions to their life as a result of that conversion. One of the ways that cities can do that is by making sure that tenants are financially compensated when they're displaced by a conversion. And so all of the condo conversion ordinances that we looked at from those other municipalities included some level of relocation payment. This is a way of making the tenant whole because they're being forced to move because of the conversion, whereas they otherwise wouldn't have had to. So in terms of the actual payment, the financial compensation, we looked at a bunch of different numbers from these other communities. The relocation benefit of $10,000 per unit for protected tenants and $6,000 per unit for all other tenants aligns us with the city of Somerville and how they are structuring their relocation payments. They're much higher in Boston. That makes sense. The cost of living is much higher in most parts of Boston. Boston's relocation payments are more like $15,000 for protected tenants and $10,000 for all other tenants. New Bedford and Marlboros are far lower. But again, I think that one of our north stars here is trying to make sure that it does what it's intended to do, and that's to make tenants whole based on the actual cost of moving and finding comparable housing after displacement. There's also an annual adjustment mechanism in here to make sure that we don't codify one relocation payment that in 10 or 20 years is vastly out of step with how much it actually does cost to move and resettle. So this draft includes language that is similar to what's found in other ordinances, that it shall be adjusted annually by an amount equal to the increase in the CPI for the preceding calendar year, just to make sure that this increases with inflation. Another way that this ordinance seeks to assist tenants with that displacement caused by the conversion is with actual housing and relocation assistance by the owner. The owner under this is entitled to assist the tenant with finding housing within the city of Medford that is comparable, that is not far more expensive or radically different that would essentially satisfy the needs that the current unit was satisfying for them. There's an interesting exemption in here essentially for owners who have gone above and beyond in terms of affordability. keeping their rent levels in line with MHA Section 8 payment standards, or limiting rent increases to no more than 5% per year. They are kind of given deference during this housing relocation assistance process, knowing that the rest of the housing market has been escalating far more rapidly than they allowed their unit to escalate, and this takes that into account. Essentially, we want to set homeowners up for, or owners and sellers up for success, not for failure. And this next section is kind of an extension of saying during the notice period when tenants are continuing to live at the unit during that notice period, the rental unit, the rental agreement is extended and it has to be comparable to the rental agreement that was signed prior to the beginning of the notice period. Again, not giving owners the ability to do any sort of bait and switch scheme to try to force tenants out early to speed up the conversion process. Subsection 8 goes over the administration and the regulation of conversions. Permits will be required for conversions and a sitting board within the city of Medford will do that process, administer those permits and make the necessary documentations. One second. I'm going to come back to permitting in a minute. Just to continue with the rest of the tenant rights and protections under this ordinance, it speaks to renovations to units during the notice period, again, protecting tenants from or super noisy or inconveniences due to renovations that the owner may be making to prepare for the conversion. Tenants still have to be able to enjoy a safe, quiet and peaceful home like anybody else. And the tenant does have the right to vacate their unit early before their lease period would expire, the notice period would expire should they choose to once the notice period has been given. So, excuse me. The next section sets up a condominium and cooperative review board in the city of Medford that will be the administrator of this ordinance and oversee the permitting process. And this is, I think, another interesting section for the city council and staff to review together. It was interesting looking at other ordinances, breakdown of who should sit on this board. My recommendation, based on that research in this draft, is for it to have seven full members and one alternate, which matches with a lot of our comparable communities. Staggered terms of three years each, and that the review board should include two homeowners. Nope, sorry, actually my total number I didn't update. Two homeowners, two tenants, at least one person that would fall into that protected class that might be a homeowner or a tenant, an elderly, disabled, or lower moderate income person. A representative from the CDB, a representative from the Affordable Housing Trust or Medford Housing Authority, and an alternate who may be either a homeowner or a tenant. And I think that actually does add up to seven people. If I can count and talk at the same time. This provides for an appointment process and an annual stipend, which is similar to that of the CDB. And it enumerates the board's duties and powers largely to enforce this ordinance. to create and make available the conversion permit applications to issue them to owners who want to do a conversion and who are compliant with the prerequisites found in this ordinance, to hear complaints from people who are alleging that this ordinance has been violated, to assist in a public awareness program about this ordinance, to establish fees for the issuing of permits, review the documentation of everything associated with this ordinance and condo conversions in Medford and to kind of keep a running list of those numbers, analyze the number of conversions in the city where they're taking place for the edification of the city and the city council. And then finally, the board retains the power to not issue a permit to any owner who has taken any action to circumvent mass general law chapter. 527, which also deals with condo conversions or of this ordinance, including but not limited to unreasonable rent increases, reduction or elimination of services, termination of any tenancy without cause or the imposition of new conditions of the tenancy. Essentially, if a owner of a rental unit is being a really bad landlord, if they're doing shady things to try to vacate tenants in ways that are illegal, the board then has the discretion to not issue a conversion. if a pattern of that behavior is documented. And I just want to, speaking of powers and discretion granted to the board, this is a little bit earlier in section three. But just while we're on that topic, broadly owners in order to retain a conversion permit are required to comply with Chapter, Master and Rule of Chapter 527 of the Acts of 1983. And, sorry for pausing, I'm looking for something specific. Right, my apologies. In subsection seven. The board is permitted to make the conversion permit subject to reasonable conditions for the protection of tenants and the public interest of the city of Medford, including but not limited to these following factors. And this part is really important because this is the section of the ordinance that essentially says what is that kind of What's the word I'm looking for? How is the city allowed to make that decision of whether to issue a conversion permit or not? And different cities handle this differently and handle discretion of this differently. Some other cities that we looked at have a hard cap, like for example, in Marlborough. And per their ordinance, no more than 25% of units in a building per year may be converted from rental to conversion in other cities. Whether conversion permits are approved or not depends on the vacancy rate of units community wide, which I do think is a very interesting way to handle it. To essentially let the housing market and the vacancy rate be a guide on how many units are allowed to be taken out of the rental market. These are things for the city council to consider as we move forward. I did not include those hard caps in this draft. I don't know that that would be my recommendation. But some of the other factors and pieces of context from some of our neighbors I thought were useful. For example, when deciding whether to approve a permit or not, to consider the hardships imposed on the tenants residing in the accommodations proposed to be converted. The aggravation of the shortage of rental housing accommodations in the city. particularly for lower income people. What reasonable arrangements may have been made or will be made to alleviate the hardship on the tenants that might be affected by the conversion, and an intent by the owner to offer a reasonable percentage of the new conversions to sell to the Medford Housing Authority, Affordable Housing Trust, or another entity that will serve a similar function. So a lot of the same principles are at play here, but this leaves a little bit more discretion in the hands of the board to interpret hardship, to interpret the market, and to approve or deny permits based on those important pieces of context. So I will jump down again to, I think we're at section five now. Permitting process, this is the, lays out the steps that an owner with an intent to convert might go through. I'm not going to go through this in great detail. This provides details for if you want a permit to convert, here's how you do it. Here's the steps that you would take. The granting process, which would include, again, some administrative steps and some hearings before the board. And then if a permit were to expire before it is approved, steps that the owner must take to get a new one and restart the process. Effective date, I propose that the ordinance would take effect six months after passage. Give the city time to prepare, create the board, empower the board, and start that administrative process. Standard severability clause, annual reporting. The review board should submit to the city council building department and office of planning development and sustainability an annual report kind of summarizing what we have learned about conversions, their rate, where they're happening in the city because of this ordinance and penalties for violation. This was also adapted from other communities with condo conversion ordinances putting forth or actually this one was pulled directly from mass general law I believe. that any property owner who violates or knowingly permits a violation will be punished with a fine of not less than $1,000. With the final disclaimer that a violation of this ordinance by an owner will not affect or negatively impact its sale to a purchaser who is not involved in the violation and had no knowledge of it. I'm going to pause there. for a second, so I can pull up my other notes document. Are there any initial reactions, questions, or sections that we should go back to? All right, I'll go to Councilor Leming and then Councilor Bears. Oh, wait. I went to you first, go ahead.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, I'll be quick. Yeah. take the comments that you identified as decision points and put them in kind of like a top line such decision points document for to guide us in the future. That would be amazing. Thank you. And then my only other question is who from city staff or boards and commissions do you think we should follow up with to have a meeting with them about this?

[Kit Collins]: PDS certainly, Director Hunt and I think Planner Evans, I believe, have both been in our meetings on this in the past. They were super helpful. I think they should definitely be looped in. Building Commissioner certainly. And former Commissioner Forty was really helpful a couple years ago when he was still on staff. In addition to that, I think that it would be really helpful to have the CDB chair looped in, as well as a representative from the Affordable Housing Trust. Those would be my top four or five, and I'd be really happy to identify what I think are the main decision points and put them in a memo as suggestions for discussion for the next council.

[Zac Bears]: Great, thank you.

[Kit Collins]: Thanks. Go ahead.

[Matt Leming]: Two things that were on my mind coming through this. The first is I understand that there was either a a bill and I didn't really follow, I didn't really track the status of it over the past two years regarding tenant right of first refusal going through the state house. So my first question is, how does that component of it interact with state law? And the second thing on my mind is, Do you have an idea from your research in other communities how busy the condo review board typically is? Just an order of magnitude, how many applications they receive a year. So if we made a dedicated board for this, would they be the people that are listed out in section four, would they be meeting once a year? Or would this be a once a month kind of a job?

[Kit Collins]: Yeah, that's a good question. Let me, just one second and I'll pull up notes that have a little bit of data on our past conversions. One second. It wasn't in the document I thought it was in. Okay, I think that's a really good question. I can't speak to how busy other, Communities condo review boards are but my impression is that this should be more similar to the CDB model of having a standing meeting every month that it is to a yearly Kind of arrangement and that's not because I think that there will be that's not at all because I think there will be that many permits but rather in the same vein as we want to be able to be Expeditiously working through business permits when they come before the council. We don't want to have sellers or owners waiting too long for their hearing. Former PDS intern put together some research on condo conversions in Medford from 2018 to 2022 and I will give a pretty big caveat that she said at the time, it's hard to find this data because we're not tracking it. So it was a little bit squishy, not as clear as we would like it to be. But the number of conversions per our registry of deeds were around 24 for 2018, 30 the next year, 29 for 2020, 37 in 2021, 33 in 2022. I interpret that as being really not a deluge. for the review board and also like not a huge amount for the city in general, at least at that time. Though, of course, I think that there may be a lot of conversions that were perhaps recorded differently or maybe not, perhaps not showing up in the data at all. But I picture this as more of a CDB level workload or at least the CDB of two years ago level workload.

[Matt Leming]: Did you have any, do you know anything about the state law portion of it?

[Kit Collins]: Oh right, sorry. And you were speaking about the state law pertaining to tenant right to purchase?

[Matt Leming]: Yeah. Yeah. The right of first refusal. I'm just vaguely remembering that. I haven't read the Acts of 1983 that you're referencing, so I'm not sure if it's spelled out there. But I do remember that this was one of the points of activism around the time that the Affordable Homes Act was being discussed, was passing the ability of cities to implement tenant right of first refusal. kind of lost track of where that debate was going.

[Kit Collins]: Sure. I think actually what was challenged locally was the city right of first refusal, but I think President Bears, if you might have something on this.

[Zac Bears]: Yes, yeah, the bill at the Statehouse was about tenants regardless of conversion. The Acts of 1983 allows this specifically for condo conversion, so that's the difference. Okay. Yeah. Yep.

[Kit Collins]: I do think it's important to note in Somerville, the city's right of first refusal was actually struck down. That's still in this draft because I knew this draft was going to be amended anyway. And I think that the city should have a first or second right of refusal. But that is something that if it stays in this draft, I'm sure that the city's lawyers will advise us that it's likely to be deemed illegal. Got it. Just one other thing that I will note for this preliminary discussion is another major point of discussion and point of comparison in some other communities ordinances is if certain types of buildings should be exempted. And there are lots of other exemptions in this ordinance for various things, you know, like we talked about. extension of first rate of refusal to tenants is exempted for owners who are planning to sell or convey to family members. In other communities, small buildings are exempted. For example, oh, wait, sorry. Sorry, I have to start that sentence over. In some other communities 2 and 3 unit buildings are actually exempted from the entire ordinance because it is more obviously it goes without saying it's more common for owner occupants to be converting 2 or 3 unit buildings that they might live close to or live inside of. I don't necessarily think that that's an appropriate starting place for Medford. We're seeing a lot of non-local money purchasing duplexes and three-family units. I think that there are lots of other ways that we can tailor the provisions of the ordinance to make it fair for owner-occupants without exempting smaller buildings from the ordinance and its protections for tenants entirely. In addition, and this is something that I'd be happy to put in the memo for the future council to deliberate on, depending on how creative we want to get. Other communities have dealt with this in interesting ways. For example, in Malden, conversions of two and three unit buildings are prevented, except the vacancy rate is in excess of a certain percentage. And that's another way of kind of increasing the complication of the regulations and making it more responsive to what the housing market actually looks like that particular year. But for now, this draft does not exempt any buildings on the sole basis of size or number of units. And I think that that's appropriate for it to stay that way, especially since we've been seeing so many smaller buildings of two or three units being converted and flipped, especially in those neighborhoods that we talked about earlier. Any, go ahead. Great.

[Zac Bears]: I would move that we keep the paper in committee pending the memo from Vice President Collins and invite our Planning Development and Sustainability Director and staff and Building Commissioner to a future meeting in this committee on this draft ordinance.

[Kit Collins]: Great. On the motion by Councilor Bears, seconded by Councilor Leming. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Leming. Yes. President Bears. Yes. Vice President Collins. Yes. Councilor Kelly. Councilor Kelly is absent. Councilor Scarpelli. Councilor Scarpelli is absent.

[Kit Collins]: Great. Thank you. Three in favor, two absent. The motion passes. Are there any final comments, questions or motions from my fellow councilors?

[Zac Bears]: I'm on already. There you go. I just wanted to be recognized by the chair. Thank you. Chair Collins for not only your leadership on this ordinance, but your astute leadership of this committee for the past two years. Your presence at the chair of this committee will be missed by all of us, especially those of us who have to serve on the committee next. So we are so thankful. I'll speak for myself. I'm so thankful for your leadership and everything that you brought to this council and to this committee as its chair this term.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you.

[Matt Leming]: I wish you could stay. I wish you were staying here. It's such a loss having you not lead this committee. I mean, you have accomplished so much in your time on Medford City Council. You have served the city so well, and I know we'll be getting into this in the in the regular meeting, but thank you very much. Thank you so much for your service. It's been a very difficult job, both in the meetings, behind the scenes, and just in your own life, leading us through all that's happened over the past term in this committee. I've learned so much from you, and I'm grateful that I know you. Yeah, thank you, thank you very much and I motion to adjourn.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you very much. All right, on the motion to adjourn. Wait, we can do roll call, right. I mean not roll call, the other one. Yeah, it's been a long time since I chaired this committee. Sorry Rich, like I get one final annoyance from my colleagues. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. Meeting adjourned. Thank you very much. Thank you. No, thank you.