LYNN — Around 30 students from Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge were taken on a tour through the city on Friday by Jeffrey Weeden, the manager of planning and development for the Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development, as part of their semester-long project that would help affordable-housing production in the city.
Weeden said the required percentage of affordable components, costs and amount for proposed projects is currently unknown. Four students will conduct a study from now until May to find the required percentage of affordable housing required in new development projects.
“We don’t know what the numbers look like,” Weeden said. “Is it going to be 10 percent of the units to be affordable? Is it going to be 20-plus units? What level of affordability? We don’t know the numbers and that is what the semester-long project is going to be.”
Brian Cain, a teaching fellow at Harvard Kennedy, said the purpose of the tour was to help students understand the structure and current developments in Lynn. The four students selected will establish relationships with developers and city officials to understand their needs when building new affordable components in the housing.
“The way that I understand it, our team of four will work with the City of Lynn, Lynn Housing and neighborhood developers, and do an analysis for a need for housing and the demands of developers,” Cain said. “We will try to understand the trade-offs between the needs of developers and the regulations for inclusionary zoning.”
After the study is concluded, the students will meet again with city officials and, if they decide to do so, the city may use the plan as a blueprint for future development.
Following the tour, the students were greeted by Mayor Jared Nicholson, former Mayor Thomas M. McGee, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton and state Rep. Peter Capano (D-Lynn) at the Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee Company on Munroe Street.
The four elected officials held a conversation with the students in the lobby of the shop, discussing the need for affordable housing in Lynn and how the city can capitalize on it.
“It sounds cliché to say it, but the rent is too damn high,” Capano said. “You don’t need statistics to tell us that it’s hard for people to get by right now. Whatever we can do to make housing affordable I think will help and benefit the city a lot.”
Nicholson said he hopes the project will be able to provide a path forward for the city to establish more affordable housing. In terms of a goal for the city, the mayor said the housing-production plan put forward a goal of 15 percent of new units being considered affordable.
This is not the first time Harvard Kennedy has worked with the city to perform studies on infrastructure.
In 2019, Harvard Kennedy professor Linda J. Bilmes and researcher Stevie Olsen conducted a study in Lynn about road costs, and found the total cost of the Massachusetts vehicle economy totaled $64 billion per year, which was smaller than public-transportation initiative costs that were considered too expensive by critics.
Cain, who is a student of Bilmes, said there is a working relationship with Moulton, who Bilmes talked to about possible projects that should have been studied.
Despite the ambitious timeline for the study in Lynn, Cain said it would not be available for the public after its completion.
“The city and the congressman’s offices will determine that,” he said. “Even though it will end in May, that doesn’t mean it’s for the public to see just yet.”