How Many Affordable Units?
With last week's post on affordable housing I was wondering: if we did build out all the Somerville lots zoned for four stories (MR4) to be seven stories of affordable housing, how much housing would that be? I count 254 lots zoned MR4 with a total area of 1.8M sqft. Built out at seven stories and an average of 80% coverage that's 10M sqft of housing. Figure 10% for stairs, elevators, and hallways, and it's really 9M for units. Let's say you build:
bedrooms portion of construction unit size 2br 25% 850 sqft 3br 25% 1000 sqft 4br 25% 1100 sqft 5br 25% 1200 sqft
Then building all of this would give you:
bedrooms number of units 2br 2230 3br 2230 4br 2230 5br 2230
These properties currently comprise just under 1k units, so this is 7.9k new units of affordable housing and 1k units converted to affordable housing. This would bring Somerville from ~35k units to ~43k.