Boston Housing Chief Sheila Dillon On Fixing The IDP Process And Clearing The Backlog

The official responsible for overseeing affordable housing in Boston says the city has made substantial progress in filling units, an issue that some developers say hasn't been resolved quickly enough.

Sheila Dillon, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing, told Bisnow in an interview that the department has been caught up on its backlog of vacant affordable units since October after making a series of changes last year. But she said the city still needs to review the steps residents must navigate to apply for affordable units, an area experts have identified as a primary pain point in the process.

One of the changes Dillon highlighted came in August, when MOH created a new boilerplate marketing plan that developers can use to fill their units, allowing the department to sign off on those plans “much more quickly.”

She said MOH accelerating this part of the process led to a pileup on the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s plate. Between October and January, the agency hired four new staffers to review these applications, according to an MOH spokesperson.

“We've made great progress in marketing these very important units more quickly,” Dillon said. “I'm excited that the mayor has authorized additional staff to oversee and work through the volume. I'm really looking forward to the units being consolidated and really looking for ways that we can be more efficient and more responsive in the very near future.”

The MOH is responsible for developing affordable housing and managing the city’s real estate. The department also oversees the lottery and marketing plans developers and consultants file to the city for their projects that include affordable housing. 

Consulting firms like SEB Housing and Maloney Properties help developers file these marketing plans and screen tenants applying for affordable units. Maloney, which Dillon said handles around 75% of all applications that are filed to the MOH, didn't respond to Bisnow's request for comment.

The city has been working to address delays in its affordable housing process for years, and developers told Bisnow last month that it still often takes more than a year after completing a project to fill the income-restricted Inclusionary Development Policy units in their buildings. This not only leaves people who need affordable housing waiting while units sit empty, but developers said these empty units make it more difficult for them to sell or refinance their buildings.

Housing experts expressed concerns that these issues could be exacerbated if the city increases the percentage of IDP units required in new developments from 13% to 20%, as Mayor Michelle Wu proposed in December.

While Dillon said the agency has improved the process for developers to market their affordable units, one of the main problems that tenants and housing consultants identified as holding up the process remains unresolved: the amount of documentation and number of steps required for prospective tenants to receive approval and move into a building.

Dillon said there is still work to be done on that front.

“I do want to look at the documentation that we're requiring from renters and potential homeowners to see if we can streamline that process and even automate whenever possible,” Dillon said.

The city ran into similar problems in 2018 when the Department of Neighborhood Development, which Dillon headed, took over the city’s affordable housing program and planned to add multiple staffers to help approve the hundreds of backlogged applications, the Boston Globe reported at the time.

Unlike in 2018, Dillon said the department is all caught up and said it plans to stay that way.

“To the best of my knowledge, we're caught up and we're responding quickly on anything that we need from developers,” Dillon said.

This year, the BPDA has received 124 applications for IDP rentals and condos in the city. At the same time last year, the agency had received 155 applications.

In January, Wu announced plans to dismantle the BPDA. Beyond creating a new City Planning and Design Department as well as the Planning Advisory Council, the mayor said she would shift compliance and enforcement efforts held by the BPDA to the Mayor’s Office of Housing, a move Dillon said would help streamline the process further.

“It's really going to come down to when the employees come here and we're one system, to be very clear with developers and internally about what the expectations are, what the time frame should be, and then managing against those,” she said.

On Wednesday, the Boston City Council voted in favor of the restructuring, bringing the city one step closer to dissolving the agency. The plan still needs approvals from the state legislature and governor. 

With these new responsibilities, the BPDA would also transfer its employees over to the department so they work under one roof. Dillon said she hopes those changes will be enough to curb the demand but is willing to look into additional resources.

“We are motivated to get the units that are being brought on occupied as quickly as possible,” Dillon said. “If that requires additional staff, we will hire additional staff. If that requires us to review our processes and requirements, we will do that as well.”

Dillon said some of the delays have been caused by developers and marketing consultants that may have mistakes in their applications or changes in projects that have pushed back the process of filling affordable units.

“We are where we need to be here unless developers are not being responsive or we've got some inconsistencies with what we thought we were marketing and what we thought that we were getting as affordable units, but there's been a change either on the developers and/or a use change,” Dillon said. “That does delay things.”

The BPDA shared data with Bisnow last month that showed 314 affordable units, roughly 8% of the inventory it monitors, were listed as unoccupied. Many of these units were classified as lottery pending, meaning the building’s lottery process hadn’t been completed yet.

Dillon said that some of the apartment buildings that are still pending a lottery may have been built in phases, meaning some of the units might not have a certificate of occupancy yet, or they are buildings that had residents vacate affordable units that they are now working to backfill.

For example, Harrison Albany Block in the South End is classified as lottery pending in the BPDA’s data, but a spokesperson said the project is a multiphase development, and while all units are counted as lottery pending, they haven’t all received their certificates of occupancy yet. 

For other units, it might be hard to determine whether they are occupied since the agency relies on landlords and developers to update it when units receive certificates of occupancy and when tenants move in. Dillon encouraged the real estate industry to engage with city officials to help solve the problems that they see in the city’s housing process.

“Developers and the city of Boston have the same goal,” she said. “We want affordable units occupied as quickly as we can do that responsibly. We share the same goal, and I think we’re going to have to continue to work together to design a process and a system that works for both of us.”