Rockport Planning Board, Oct. 15, 2026

there we go uh good evening i'm tom mika's vice chair of the planning board and this is october 15th at 6 30. uh our chair jason is unlikely to attend he's out of state so uh

and now we move on to a discussion of draft bylaws governing tiny houses and substandard lots and eohlc sample bylaws how shall we structure this bessie well what i would suggest i'm hoping that

everybody has read them. And I think one way of dealing with it is kind of going through,

just going through the bylaw. And, you know, if people have questions, what I intend to do

is write a series of questions to the state and to the AG's office to get more clarity.

on this. Additionally, Bob made a very nice presentation last night to the Rockport Affordable

Housing Trust and they brought up a whole bunch of issues about the finances of it, the

locations, you know, compliance with certain affordability standards.

So I don't think the state thinks of tiny houses as the panacea for the lack of housing in

in Massachusetts. However, it's one additional tool that they're suggesting can be added to the mix.

I personally have some reservations about tiny houses and the size. And one of the comments

that was made last night is that the target people in Rockport would be municipal workers

and elderly. Now an elderly person is, you know, depending on their capabilities, may not be able to

adapt to living in their present house to a 400 square foot house.

And so making it clear, it's 400 square feet on the first floor, exclusive of the loft, and the state is silent about a basement. um so um i'm not sure that any of us could live in a 400 square foot house but if it includes a

generous loft then it's a little more doable um the other thought was there's a lot of municipal

workers with families and a municipal worker with you know a wife and you know a spouse and a child

or two 400 square feet is not gonna 400 in a loft so say 800 square feet or 700 square feet is may

not swing it so building codes generally tend to limit mezzanine spaces which are like loft spaces

to 25% or 33% of the floor below. Yeah, that was the other thing I have on my list of questions for the state is that you've got to define loft. You can't just throw a term out that's not in the building codes anywhere unless it may be defined in the MGL new appendix AQ

queue for tiny houses i haven't looked there yet but but uh it's it's basements it's what's a loft

and it's can you have a garage an enclosed garage i don't know doesn't really address that is the 400 square feet just habitable living space so well and the other thing the other

question i had about it is you know they're silent on the basement could you make a basement that's non-habitable space where people can put their lawnmower and their you know bicycles and right right yeah whatever well everybody needs that type of space we already don't count basements

unless it's unless it's testing the 7 000 square foot upper limit otherwise basement's not considered

part of it yeah so that's a good point there's some issues to check out so in in their definitions

though they have no definition of loft no that's true that's why mezzanine is the closest that's covered in typical building codes and mezzanine mezzanine has certain rules like it

really can't be more than 50 of the floor but it's looking down onto it so it's allowed to have one exit etc yeah but so probably easy shorthand is to say this is a 600 square foot maybe yeah

In the interest of reviewing this document, we've all reviewed it, as we were asked, I think.

But the subcommittee did not meet. Is that right, Betsy? Right. So let me explain what happened. We did not meet. And we did not meet because we tried to schedule a meeting on Tuesday.

And last Tuesday. and it turns out there's a policy with the select board that you cannot meet during a select board

meeting so i didn't know about that rosa didn't know about that jason didn't know about that so we started to schedule the meeting you know robert and and peter and i and somebody put the brakes on

it real fast. So we are scheduled to have a meeting, an in-person meeting in Town Hall Annex

on next Thursday. So a week from today, it's a posted meeting of the Planning Board

Seasonal Communities Subcommittee. It will meet at 6.30 in the Town Hall Annex in that open meeting room in the front. So I assume then tonight's meeting, we should put together this list of questions. Is that what you're looking for tonight? I think so. Questions and comments that we have on this document. Exactly. Rather than reading every line by line, I would suggest we go person by person to see what they see as their major issues so that you have a little blueprint of questions questions for the October 22 meeting. Right. I don't know, Tom, what do you think? Yeah. Are we going to do both the draft that Betsy did and the model or just?

No, do not do my draft. Because what happened was when they didn't provide a model bylaw,

I did my draft. I see. And my draft was tailored more toward the Rockport bylaws. So I think what we do is we look at the model first and see what we like and what we don't like and what we have questions about the model.

and then what we will do is get answers to the questions and then I will draft a bylaw based on the answers to the questions and that will then get into our bylaw or you know be considered for our bylaw does that make sense? it does Yeah, I think we might as well use the state since the state developed this. We'll have a lot less chance of messing up. The state model also has little boxes with things around them begging to be decided on. Right. Right.

Optional stuff. stuff so uh i will say maybe uh tom and and peter and uh betsy can go first because i have like

40 comments on here and i'll take up everybody i probably have many of the same comments that you do yeah so i don't know if if any of the other three of you have well if we're just doing our hot points

because you guys already probably have a bigger list that includes many of our things. My biggest concern is this small lot. And they must be from Hamilton or something because the small, the tiny lots are 10,000

square feet or 25% of the district they're in. So if they're in, and 10,000 square feet is not a

tiny lot it's our typical lot yeah yeah and it does say there that we the town has the

their the option of going as small as they want to go uh and i i was gonna given given the little

peter had done a little uh sketch on what what is what is functionally works for the lot

and a 1650 square foot lot functionally works for a non-septic unit say right um but i say

i would say if we if we maybe start with a 3 000 square foot limit um and possibly entertain like a

5 000 square foot uh optional base um there there may there may be many factors in here where we

could offer carrots to people that want to put income restrictions on their units by allowing

them to do smaller lots or less parking or whatever it might be. So that's one thing I've been noodling around with. So I think the state was originally thinking, okay, maybe there'll be 5 000 square foot lots or 7 000 square foot lots and then it dawned on people that not everybody

has sewer so that's when they bumped it up to the 10 000 thinking that um you know if you had

if you needed to put a septic system in then that was you know a little more acceptable now obviously the state does not understand that Rockport has a lot of granite so

well in 10,000 square foot lots are very typical across the entire state there's nothing particularly

smaller than yeah and the alternative which is 25 of what's allowed in this like if if if you look

at sraa that's 40 000 that's our biggest area requirement and that's 25 of that is 10 000 so

basically they've just stepped in and said 10 000 square foot tiny lots and that's not tiny yeah i mean if you look at downtown there's a number of lots that are you know like 1200 square feet 3000 square feet i mean small small yeah well the diagram i did was just to show

what can how small of a lot can still comply with the front set back the side set back the street frontage and all that right and that was the 1600 but you know i was thinking something more like 3,000 to 5,000 is more acceptable. The other thing about these tiny lots is also with approval not required is where do you find them?

Do you have to just assume they're there by some natural attrition? Or does somebody just say, hey, I got 40,000 square feet. I'll slice off. i'll i'll do my own subdivision on my own little piece of property and make three little tiny houses on the corner well yeah you know i think that's on the on the governor's uh ballot initiative too

if it passes that basically you can create a 5 000 square foot lot chunk off of your existing

uh single family parcel and with only i think 20 linear feet of foot frontage frontage you can

create a lot for a house not this isn't regarding tiny houses but you can create a lot for 5 000

square feet anyway so i share my screen again i i want to point out something i see it says a lot that at the time of recording or endorsement does not meet minimum watt size It doesn't sound like you can create one. It has to be pre-existing. Did I read that wrong?

Well, so I asked two questions of the state. I said, one question was, there's a number of

pre-existing non-conforming lots in most communities, including Rockport. So those

have a certain amount of protection under under 40a um and so does that mean all of those lots if

they can show water and sewer and compliance with you know development laws that they can

build on those and there is a certain amount of grandfathering going on and nobody could answer that question and then i said you mean if there's already a a unit on the property or not no okay yeah no and then i asked another question which was okay what happens if somebody comes in

to the planning board with a an approval not required plan of say they have three acres

and they divvy it up until these, you know, and they have a lot of frontage on a street,

can they divvy it up into 20-foot wide lots? And nobody could answer that question either. So I had the same thought when reading through the states, you know, when they talk about multiple tiny houses or clustering of them. You know, Rockport may very well want to put an upper limit, no matter how much land you have. Right. Otherwise, someone with a huge parcel can say, oh, you know, I'm going to put up 24 tiny homes.

And I guess the question is, does Rockport allow that? If it meets all the criteria or do limit the size? The tiny home cluster. And Bob, correct me if I'm wrong on this. There's a provision that allows the town to adopt a provision in the bylaw that would allow the clustering of like a little cottage village of tiny houses.

And one of the questions I had on that was the issue of, I mean, what kind of density are we talking here?

Correct. And I guess the question is, do we want to limit it? Exactly. And do you want to do that by site plan review or special permit? The state seems to say that it could be by either site plan or special permit. But to me, the density is the key element there.

And I think it's something that we need to address in a bylaw. I think we can try to decide whether a single parcel has a limit or, I mean, the interesting thing that came up was actually something that the Affordable Housing Group was thinking about for the Main Street property at one point, which was, boy, you could, on five or six acres, you could put, you know, a group of artist housing in there.

have 20 units of tiny house artist housing with common studio spaces or common storage spaces or whatever you wanted to do there and that might be an economical way to provide at least attainable housing if not SHI units as well but I think it does allow us to create that the town's option is to allow the creation of undersized lots so we are allowed to do that in that box on the top of the page there so they do allow that we just have to change the writing of j there slightly could we attach some conditionality to it like they could be smaller if they're on a sewer line

i think that conditionality exists anyway because they weren't that wouldn't be approved from a

building permit so for example i had a person come to me and he has a lot of land that's about

six acres some of it is ledgy but he was going to build a home for himself and he decided so he

And I think he installed a six-bedroom septic system where he got approved a six-bedroom septic system.

And then he rethought the whole thing. And this is a person who grew up in Rockport. And he said, you know, I don't need a big house. I could operate in a tiny house because I have another little house elsewhere. and um it it doesn't make sense to me to build this big manse when i have a number of friends

who live in who are trying to live in rockport but they grew up in rockport they can't live in rockport and i'd be more than happy to trade my big house for six tiny houses on the septic system

And there's a well installed as well. Now, a common well is one of my questions, too, is does the Board of Health allow like a community well?

I know in New Hampshire they do. But is a community well allowed under mass general laws? And I haven't had time to check with the thinking about that. You may know this, Betsy, but I think this question came up about this a year or two ago, which surprised me.

I think the state doesn't even allow shared common septic, but I could be wrong. In our subdivision. No, I did look into that. And if it's a condo association or a homeowners association, there's specific language about that.

you can do a common system okay and i do know that because when i worked in in ipswich

there were a number of condos that were built on not on um on sewer and they were allowed to do

either a tertiary plant or a common septic system okay okay well that makes sense so that means

in order to access these units um particularly i mean um rockport has a history of having

little driveways serving you know multiple houses so um anyhow you know i there's a whole list of infrastructure questions right right um

i have kind of a fundamental question about applicability let me back up here something i highlighted so this is about undersized lots and single family residential zoning districts does that mean it doesn't apply in the other districts i think it means any district that has a single family allowed yeah plus uh it said sing where or where single

family is allowed by special permit which i think includes the g and d districts i think it means everywhere so like yeah it's gonna be like downtown district allows residential just as much as it allows commercial yeah so this would probably have to include every district that we have well i actually think is going to be hard to get through town meeting hard to do it's not that

you could actually build anything on the neck because there's no space yeah i think this is going to be a real tough sell i mean there's lots on the neck that are less than a thousand square feet yeah i think bob said there's 500 square feet some of them five or six hundred square feet there's about ten of those lots which have built right up to the property lines and they are tiny okay well you guys read this differently than i did i i thought it was the zone the districts that were solely single family yeah no i i think in well let's see you're on you're on number two

there yeah how i how i somewhere else in the text it talks about that tom and i okay i think it's one of those boxes okay um i think it says anywhere where a single family house can be built okay you

have to allow it that makes sense okay i think you're trying to promote the mbta

one of the community arguments against it was you're encumbering just the denser parts of towns that are denser already why why isn't this kind of thing spread elsewhere yeah this is almost the opposite of it the potential is everywhere but the denser parts of town but those are restricted by the square footage not by the bylaw um but there i think there are a few

odd and end lots uh in downtown and in the the neck there that never got built on because they

couldn't comply with the setbacks or any of the modern requirements but now they might be able to is my guess what about the 20 foot of frontage that sounds really skimpy to me well that that came down as a skimpy as a mandate and i think i think that is based on this that the

the reason they said it's so small is that this is where you could create pork chop lots on an existing uh lot right and you only need a driveway to go back to it or if you have a cul-de-sac of

like eight tiny houses you you will have pie-shaped lots that might only have 20 feet at the front edge

you're gonna have trouble getting the 40-foot ball down the uh yeah and this the setback thing is also pretty skimpy if you've got if we go down to 5 000 it's just a five foot setback right and i

think uh as i've got thinking about the sketches that peter did um i i was thinking we might have a

a side setback thing that was something like the setbacks for the left and right might need to equal 15 feet so that you get up a five on one side and a ten on the other say

so you might be able to drive a car down one side to a back parking space so desired or we don't

know if we're allowed to have accessory garages but um or or that you would that the five foot

thing um minimizes the amount of windows you can have that close to a property line to some degree

so you'd want a fence if you're five feet from the uh yeah well there are you know there's like there's some towns that allow zero lot line setbacks on one side uh basically to say okay it's silly to have two useless side yards let's have one bigger one and we'll put the other So I think one of the issues there, though, is the fire department wants you to have a separation of house, you know, of houses to garage or houses to houses.

Yeah. I think that setback is either 10 or 15 feet. I need to double check with the fire department. Is that for the spread of a fire issue? Yeah. Yeah. i think i think you're allowed to go down to five but again i think when you're at five feet from the line don't quote me on this it's something like you can only have say 10 window area on

that facade for example it might be 25 actually but it's some number in the building code and i'm

on the front edge here's another table that has 15. how did we get to 15 instead of 20.

oh this is an example and they're saying yeah this is just an example okay because you can see the massive size of the which is pretty typical for a lot of towns the

one acre the half acre and the three acre lot there looks so we don't have to do 15 we could stick with 20. Yeah, we can do. And I would suggest we think about, I would say like the front lot line is always whatever is a sort of a typical thing in our community is probably fine. But I would say if

you're in the general or downtown district, you should follow up more of a street wall regulation, which says you can have the face of your building in line with all of the other faces on average

within 50 feet of either side of your property, which is a typical zoning thing so that a tiny house doesn't look like I'm missing tooth on the facade. I think that's all I had. Okay, great. I guess I had one question about the mobile units. Is the state requiring that we allow them or can Rockport exclude them? We can exclude them. Yeah. So that's another question. My idea was that we had to allow it, but I don't understand why we would need to allow it.

Well, there is a little box that also says that you can appeal for changes, adaptations of this, you know,

blueprint. And, you know, I'd advocate that the mobile piece doesn't really fit with the community. Well, it's hard to argue that it's permanent housing when it's mobile. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, back to being able to convince people at town meeting, I think that would really go over like a lead balloon. Why people want mobile tiny houses no they don't yeah if you look on 20 of them in next door yeah if you look on

down in the tiny house section um it says optional movable tiny houses municipalities

may additionally allow or further regulate movable tiny houses currently noble homes aren't uh listed as a permitted use in town at all so that would be a big change we could stay consistent yeah the only thing that's sad about this is that there's some really nice prefab

tiny houses on wheels that cost about a third of what a site-built house would cost and uh

they're they're pretty nice but it's like it's hard to figure out how to regulate them Well, as they're regulated, there's a prefab small house. Yeah. Yeah. There's everybody's

making ADUs and stuff much, much nicer. And basically at a level that, that essentially

meets building codes, you know, from the ground up, except for the foundation issue. So it's interesting but uh a building on a chassis is much cheaper yeah i mean i in my little bit of research

that i've done like but but i will say like conversely like my daughter bought a modular

panelized modular house that came in panels for 87 000 it's a two bedroom 2 200 square foot house

for 87 000 now it didn't include they did their own flooring and their own tiling and stuff like that but uh it was pretty complete and they just had to build the foundation that it sat on but there's there's 87 000 trailer uh trailer tiny houses that are pretty pretty chic but they're

They're still on wheels. And then the whole issue is, do you allow movable houses,

but only on purchased land, which would be much different than allowing on rented land?

Does the movable house count as a parking space? Yeah, right. If you can drive it to the... If it has a small engine, I guess. yeah i don't know but i i do agree that probably it would be easier to get this

all through the zeitgeist of the town without the movable tiny houses included

it's likely well we don't have to do this all at once we can do what we think is correct required and passable and if you want to come back later and they'll try to do more yeah let's not let's not lay that on the first time our original motive to jump into seasonal communities was to protect the 10-month lease minimum right and adus this is this is getting

awfully involved for something that looks just like a small adu and with the amounts of paperwork

and monitoring and reporting involved there could be yeah it seems like I it

took me a while to just digest all of this and try to figure out what was required and what was optional too and they it's a little bit fuzzy in several areas I think on that score too but the two the two main parts are that you've got to have that 10-month occupation and uh okay my mind just went blank what was the second one

it's consistent within uh here i mean not consistent there's a six month one i think somewhere in a 10 month somewhere else i think they cleaned that up i think it's now 10 month period end of end of story uh hold on one

second memory the memory and then that look that so the issue is that they have

to fill out a form every every year that is an affidavit that says they are obeying the the year-round housing occupancy restriction how that's

enforced is it is another question but that's in there and then and if it's a

rental unit then obviously the uh landlord has to get that from the tenants um they define short-term

rental as 31 days and it does yeah so that was you know that was the other thing um from my reading

of this a tiny house on a tiny lot must never have short-term rentals but a tiny house on a regular

lot. They don't seem to restrict from having, say, at least two months of short-term rentals,

which in a way, I was throwing the round in my head. I mean, that could be a very nice advantage

for tiny houses if they could get some additional income for renting. Well, if you have a regular lot, you don't need to build a tiny house. You can build a 401 square foot house or 2 000 square foot house yeah yeah so so it's it's it seems to uh

unless betsy you've found something i i couldn't see anything where it required that and it doesn't require the units to be um attainable in another word income restricted and what i read from that

is you can you can make them that all tiny houses have to be attainable so they all have to be under a certain ami for the occupant's income whether it's a renter or a buyer and you can

the town can have the option of having that go for 30 years to 99 years but they have to state a term however they they say here you have you cannot exceed 250 of ami that's

well 250 of ami is like 500 000 income or something at least more probably yeah so um

when we were talking with the affordable housing group of course they thought that was a crazy starting point but um so that's where i think over 60 versus 80 percent yeah yeah we were just arguing over whether it would be 60 or 80 or uh but then the other big question is just whether we would require all of them to be uh attainable units which attainable involves some paperwork

and so forth and so on and possibly some enforcement I guess but having it be a true SHI unit that is recognized by the state to get us closer to our goal of 10% is a whole nother matter so in other words the units the occupants would be

restrained by their income but the rent and the purchase price would not be under the control of an agreement. So if you buy the unit and then you sell it, you could sell it at

a much higher price than you bought it for, but the person you sell it to is going to be under the same income restriction as you, right? So, but it essentially, I think they're trying to say without a whole lot of management and paperwork, these units still could be affordable and maybe

third or quarter of the price of a regular home maybe.

So that's another thing to grapple with. Does anybody else have any other items? Try to quickly go through mine. This is a place we could deal with parking again. So, yeah, starting out, Betsy, I think we could use your, the intent and purpose section

that you developed, which was much more verbose and stout than what they had.

I sort of feel like we should put all these definitions probably, which is, I think what we've done with all the rest of the bylaws is put them all at the beginning. and not in this section itself. Bob, does the housing trust, would they pick up everything in here? Or is the word trust here used so differently that it has to be a different entity?

Oh. Designated monitoring entity. it yeah well that you know that designated monitoring entity might be a third party that

the trust hires out it depends on how many of these units start happening i think but it could be our same trust yeah and it is so complicated that i i don't even think it would be something that i don't think that's thought about the complication of the monitoring yeah yeah um but on the face of it i think doing a yearly affidavit just like adus are going to have

to do a yearly affidavit or short-term rentals i i'm sorry short-term rentals will have to do the yearly affidavit i don't think it's going to be that onerous um so bob i went to the uh info

session when they first introduced this and they were talking about the body that needed to be created i believe they said it could be the same as the affordable housing trust same membership except they have to be two separate bodies and meet separately oh yeah even if it's the same people is that what we're talking about here uh yeah i think so but uh again we probably we could do it it's i don't think we're going to suddenly get like a hundred of these things coming down office but there's a lot of there's a lot of work in dealing with all that

stuff is the way I see it because you have to just accepting just even just

accepting unit applications you know you could get like Granite Street Crossing

did they got 500 applications for 20 23 units so they start sifting through those and i think they

i think even they take them in the order that they're received at town hall and stamped or whatever but i could see a lot of a lot of interest if you said suddenly you have eight artist units available or you have eight tiny houses available you might get a whole lot of requests the let's see I'm working a little bit on understanding whether we

can have regulations added in here I think we can for certified artists essential public employees that type of thing and I reached out to the Rockport

Art Association to see if they have any interest in helping manage that process like for example the Somerville Arts Council which is also a nonprofit organization they they manage the applications and the selection of individuals for I think they have 15 artists units in their community they do

do that but somebody's got to manage that process too. And I guess the same

thing would hold true for essential public employees. So both of those have to comply with the fair housing laws and I don't know what that entails but apparently it's doable and just don't know exactly whether we'd be hiring a third party to did some of that work

smooth things along here we've talked about mobile tiny houses on letter H on

definitions short-term rental number page numbers yeah I don't have page numbers on this thing

it's it's it's in the part two definitions letter H I just noticed one little thing that might be

useful to be added knowing about airbnbs quite a bit um sometimes there are airbnbs that rent a

whole room and have eight people sleeping in sleeping bags on that floor so i just added a language that at least one room or dwelling unit is is rented to an occupant i think this is

Page 10, Peter. Yeah. I just said at least one room or sleeping area is rented to an occupant. Those were popping up all over the place. In South End, I know. You could get a college kind of room for a night for 50 bucks in the South End. People were buying condos and doing them and stuffing them full of people. south end of boston yeah all right yeah something there is a south end of rockport yeah sorry sorry this is for my city life um under

item uh well for the at the end of the definitions i think we had already talked a little bit about about this, we may have to add the definitions for certified artists, central public employee, loft or mezzanine or whatever we end up with there and a tiny house cluster on our version.

I can scan this and make a PDF for this for three folks later. But I'll do this for our first work. Should we include it with the minutes? yeah is that a way to do it yeah we could add it to the minutes I guess yep under three applicability tiny houses is in there I thought we we should add a B

there which would be tiny house cottage cluster development we're going to call that as well. Um, this is minor stuff. Um, we already talked about the term limit and, uh,

I think, I think it goes without saying that the affordable housing group would rather not have a 30 year term limit, but use the maximum 99 year term limit. And, have that be renewable upon sale of the property so it would act like a land

trust basically where you start a 99 year restriction every time that property

changes hands. Let's see.

Did you guys discuss whether this should be two warrants or one combo?

uh we could approve tiny houses and not approve tiny lots or oh um

i'm pretty sure correct me if i'm wrong betsy we have to write zoning on both tiny lots and tiny houses i think and i mean both and that's two separate times until the spring i think it's june

of 2028 to adopt yeah we have to adopt both of them i'm just questioning whether they're two separate yeah yeah they're two separate it's two separate things and it doesn't a tiny or

an undersized lot uh maybe we shouldn't use the word tiny lots because it's confusing uh yeah tiny the tiny lot thing is interesting because i i don't understand exactly how it's super different from the Healy ballot question on there. She's trying to just get 5,000 square foot

lots except for the fact that it's obviously allows any size house you can build on it, you know, as long as it's legal with the codes. Let's see,

Let's see. That restricting short term rentals thing was just interesting to me because I don't really know if this could be abused or not, but it would greatly improve the value of

the house and the property if you can say get an extra $20,000 of income over June.

June and July or something, um, and abandon your, your little house. Um, and you get, and you go to Florida on that, uh, it's your vacation from the rental, but, um, it increases the property value, but it increases the income of the occupant or the developer. Uh, the developer's not going to allow the occupant to sublet. their own unit I don't think for that purpose anyway so that that was a

question we can mull over it as we talked about it with the housing trust

it was interesting as we worked through the demographics of like who would use this thing to me it seemed to be clearly single people single divorced people

single seniors young couples or older couples I think could still make a

studio unit or something especially with the loft out of this and if it was

income restricted to a lower level it could be that workers in the restaurants and shops around

here might be able to to afford something like this so the trust sort of felt like i think

generally especially diane sort of felt that it doesn't really address our most important demographic which is families and seniors particularly well but certainly doesn't address families at all but that that wasn't the intent of this it was to just make more housing units for less money so um and i tried to stress that this is this is kind of a mandate as the

you have to take the good with the bad. This allows us to cap ADU short term rentals completely,

which which we have done now. And the bad part is you might be allowing more housing units, which might make it more difficult to reach the 10% limit on the SHI safe harbor. So

These make 900 square foot ADUs seem palatial. It does. It does. And somewhere in there, I think Betsy, you saw that too. It mentioned tiny houses being able to be up to 800 square feet. And I don't know if that was the idea of the loft that they initially started out with or what.

So then those two things start to compete with each other and get confused. fused but obviously the tiny house is not an accessory to a primary dwelling it is the unit so his small primary dwelling yeah they suggested for parking the maximum parking be one one space

space and I don't know how people feel about that. There was another suggestion that it

could be one space unless it's within half a mile of a rail station and then you wouldn't need any spaces but I don't know if that is practical, especially if you have couples living in this. Well, if you have a 400 square foot house with a 400 square foot footprint and you're

still around a 5,000 square foot lot, there's room for a second car. Yeah, you could build a 600 square foot garage. These are the questions I have. And then suddenly the tiny house is not particularly uh cheap any longer well the most absurd is that you have a 400 square foot tiny house as the

primary residence and you're allowed to build a 900 square foot adu as of right

yeah and rent the adu and rent the adu nothing says no well i would assume a homeowner would would do the financial analysis of this to

figure out what's best for them maximum amount of income that way exactly well one of the interesting things diane brought up was the issue of um she really wanted to see most of the units on the um shi because otherwise if they're not

then the town of rockport loses and has to play catch up on you know providing the desired 10

affordable units so that's kind of one problem and then she brought up the issue of you know

if you have a divorced person with two kids and one's a boy and one's a girl, they have to, so now you're looking at a three bedroom unit or, you know, a two bedroom unit if the girls pair up. So, you know, there were all these permutations and combinations that were like, okay, didn't think of that one before. Yeah. So technically. But I do think it would be a toughie if most of the units did not get put on on the SHI because then the town is going to have to, you know, basically create more units on the SHI because there's a bigger percentage of units not on the SHI.

And if there's a cluster development, um, the weird thing is like, um, if there's a cluster development, you say of eight, you could, you could require 10% or one unit or something to be required to be on the SHA. So we don't lose ground, or you could say 20% so that for all the single ones that are built, we don't lose ground, something like that. But I, But I think, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. If you have one unit, you can't make up ground there. Well, it's a shame, too, because ADUs are already not recognizing SHI.

Right, right. For every five mini micro houses and five 80Us, we lose the percentage point on our SHI.

So, even if you're building housing to accommodate the need, if they aren't on the SHI, you're getting penalized.

right it's it's like you know yeah some kind of of thought to address that yeah we need a way to

get some on the shi pardon we need to have a method to get some of these things onto the shi yeah yeah and the trust would then have would then pick up that paperwork too yeah yeah yeah the stuff we're trying to get developers to do on the affordable housing act

well i think it wouldn't be it wouldn't be crazy to require say we had a maximum of eight units for

our i'm thinking like eight units at three thousand square feet each on a 24 000 square foot lot it's okay a little more than a half acre uh with yeah it depends on whether this is more

attractive to somebody building a cluster or whether we're going to attract a whole lot of one-offs because yeah yeah well that would be interesting to see how the healy initiative goes because i think that's also that's definitely looking at pork chopping some lots if um and i'm wondering how they're going to do that pork chopping was bad so yeah pork chopping is not exactly a thing that we were taught in architecture school to do

you want eyes on the street you want everybody's house looking onto the street for security and safety and semi-public realm to exist 10 000 square foot lot with 20 feet of frontage is 500

feet long yeah yeah a lot of pork chops back there yeah yeah exactly which is why i'm tempted to get

with the the smaller the smaller size or nothing nothing will ever come of this anyway uh let's see

so i think that was i had some comments on setbacks but i think that's stuff we can just talk about as we develop the lot size and stuff a little bit more see what people think should we go to the undersized lots quickly go ahead

I first thing I came across with they have definitions in here for frontage

and lot which we probably already have possibly in our current zoning to check that to that's to see in the um going to um i'm assuming what we started to do in the past with

these definitions is have them as a separate warrant in one place not start peppering the

whole thing with multiple definition locations yeah because i we haven't done that today i I don't think right and I don't think we want to make it worse the optional new

undersized lots I I think we ought to personal opinions allow that to happen

so there may be some subdivisions out in the woods in the areas that are

developable possibly but I think I think it's going to be a slow slow burn if units happening if they're just all single units on a empty lot let's see

okay under applicant applicability they have some optional things for towns and one of the optional things is in addition to allowing attainable housing units as required by the statute and regulations seasonal communities may also choose to exercise their zoning authority to allow units with year-round occupancy restrictions but have no income restrictions to be built on undersized lots either as of right or via special permit. That's sort of another way of saying the same thing that that clause that has the 250% AMI. Yeah right so I don't understand this except it doesn't seem to be a thing that the

seasonal community would ever want to do so that you have a mansion a tiny house that's gold plated and uh there's no income restrictions whatsoever um but uh anyone want to discuss that

i don't like gold plating you don't like gold plating no yeah Better than gold paint. Okay, I agree, yeah. Gold leaf, I think it's in style right now in this demonstration. Lot requirements. So we could go to, as we discussed at Infinitum, we could go to 3,000 or 5,000 square foot lots or something that makes sense. I'm sort of feeling like if we say 3,000 and somebody has to have a septic or wants a well and a septic and needs the separation for for those two systems as required by law they just have to comply with the law and they'll need a bigger lot but i don't think we we

have to assume that that's the condition same as a typical house

yeah right yeah so um the box that has the exact table of access

example dimensional standards their head is somewhere odd because the examples are residential a 40 000 square foot minimum lot size 20 000 and 120 000 square foot minimum

lots yeah right this has nothing to do with rock part that's for the town of weston or somewhere down a lot of five acres it's true like where's the house I can't see it on that

provide 20 foot of frontage I think that we would want to define what constitutes the roadway paved non-paved pathway and a lane I mean that's one of the issues in

Rockport is all of these substandard access roads. Yeah. To me, it's a very good point. Also, when there are driveways. I think we limit driveways to pretty long driveways, 500 feet, I think. Before you have to turn it into a approved way. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. You know, to deal with that. too much for me to think about right now so you have some questions

um let's see so i'm gonna do a big list i'm gonna ship it out to everybody and if i missed anything

that you want to add you can just add it and send it back yep sounds good but send it only to betsy

we don't want deliberation yeah send comments back to me um so that we won't be perceived as

deliberating good point tom oh yeah right and uh even though we have a square footage thing just

like the adu there's no need for us to go to a far system in town here if anybody wants to be in charge of that effort i think um and then they they show a table x chart here example dimensional standards yeah

that's the one with 120 000 square foot minimum lot size yeah and i thought um

we could have footnotes in that table that talk about seasonal occupancy 10-month minimum yeah no restriction period we've already talked about a lot of things to talk about on

your subcommittee meeting yeah under section highlights in section 4 requirements item B says any dwelling unit including protected use accessory dwelling units I don't know why they added that language in here but constructed on an undersized lot pursuant to this section shall not be used as a seasonal home or short-term rental so that's where I got the express the denial of any short-term rentals which would be to come together on any

dwelling unit on an undersized lot tiny house or or regular house cannot have

short-term rentals this is a good reason not to use the term tiny lots you're right yeah why is it just associated with tiny houses yeah so that makes sense i just wish they

had decided to say that into the under the tiny house section or or not but i did not say it

it's explicitly um because it increases the purpose of the tiny lot uh ordinance yeah

encumbers any use it could certainly allow modest houses and that looking at your sketch and all the other things we've looked at certainly uh the tiny house is going to swim on a 3 000 or 5 000 square foot lot with tons of extra space but a regular house might be just very comfy and look

like it's any rockport house on the neck or anywhere in the downtown area there's a lot

if you follow the frontage the setback the side yard backyard the two and a half stories and the percentage of open space you can still build a 37 3 700 square foot house on a 5 000 square foot lot

yeah yeah that's a reasonable reasonable size house yeah and if if land costs are really what

make massachusetts houses expensive um if the land is small maybe things will happen yeah yeah

this thing shrunk the house so much more than the land yeah and under section five monitoring uh

that is a big question and i think that's where we may be getting this ad hoc uh affordable housing

group back together again um we could discuss that with that group but uh you know who monitors just the town the DPW the assessor's office in terms of the year-round housing

occupancy restrictions so because when it starts off it probably won't be too

much work but if it catches on like 80 use it might become a significant piece of piece of work to handle. That was all I had. And it's not eight o'clock yet, so.

The other thing about monitoring is if you look at the other document they sent, the 760,

there must be three pages on the year-round housing trust fund of picky little everything. They thought that through better than the regular four pages. yeah yeah did anybody look at the uh appendix building code appendix for tiny houses

it was referenced in the in the model the um the building code appendix aq yeah yeah i haven't looked at that yet i could probably pull it up here but i haven't there's a minimum size for a loft but it's really small minimum or maximum minimum oh that's weird 35

square feet floor area it's sort of like just above the kitchen okay so they do have that defined in

there you can roll out of bed with that one also they have some energy requirements here i don't know if they're more or less strict than the stretch code there's air leak test there's a percent of uh um what do they call renewable energy

okay i'll take a look at that okay great barrington's tiny homes are integrated in the adu section it yeah i was curious about that because i thought that might be uh

fairly confusing because people would understand that like a tiny house can be completely

separate on a separate lot whereas an adu must have a principal dwelling associated with it so i don't mean i wouldn't find that you can't have an au with a separate owner yeah right and uh i am curious about these uh tiny house clusters as we got into a little bit with

the affordable housing group i said it'll be interesting to see if you offered an eight house or a developer offered an eight house cluster would a nuclear family buy three units

like right beside each other um and sort of uh share space like that um anyway some interesting

things could develop there but i sense we're at the end of this agenda item yes makes my head hurt

you need to take a break this is betsy and my second night of this thing so we're getting more practice here at least you're

being honest peter just one word of advice let's call them undersized lots the official term yes

tiny lots is gonna catch us yeah in a confusion i wish there was a better name for it uh undersized

sounds just like i'm very ambitious under under ambitious yes it should be maybe uh

sustainably sized lots or something um don't buck the bureaucracy they call it undersized

village village lots okay moving on any member items no uh join us uh october 22nd uh or well you know you can't join us october 22nd tell your

friends and neighbors to join us october 22nd if they wish can we can we be in the room and

not talk or is that we have to stay away uh i don't that's you what do you think i don't think

you can i think you well maybe you can if you you do not discuss anything with the group so my

understanding of this subcommittee is that it's a working group and i've always taken the stance

that a working group whoever wants to show up and offer their two cents you know it is fine by me

And I think as long as there's not a deliberation and a vote, I think the more the merrier in many respects.

Now, this may be the laws may have changed. You know, something may be amiss, but it's a posted public meeting. and it strikes me that if you know people from the housing trust show up or people from the

cultural council show up you know this all it's a it's a group effort so i may get slapped for this

but i i think i think that fits the woman who gave us the saturday or that morning law

Yeah, thanks, Tom. Because we could have just assigned this to one person, it turns out, and then one person could collect information on a one-by-one basis from people. But as soon as we join, we're only in violation if we join and don't do a public hearing. But once we've done the public hearing, my understanding was we've invited the public. now whether tom counts as the public or not is but it's not technically a public hearing it's a working session a public meeting yeah it's not a decision use of a term public hearing yeah it's a meeting yeah you may be right peter i think unless i hear otherwise i'm going to stay away just to be safe

we'll bring we'll bring back lots of material to chew on this would be a nostalgia trip to

have any planning board stuff going on in the annex we used to meet there before zoom that's right uh I don't have any other items other than that I think there's no one here that remembers that tom oh jason was there oh jason yeah that's right