Boston pitches libraries, affordable housing as perfect match

In three Boston neighborhoods, home could soon be where the stacks are. 

The city is set to join a handful of other places that combine public libraries with affordable housing, a popular pairing that addresses increasingly pricey housing markets and limited land for new development.

“Certainly no one would argue that housing is one of the biggest challenges in the city and one way to help with that is bringing more affordable housing into the mixture,” Boston Public Library president David Leonard said during a Boston Public Radio segment this week. “So it’s taking a piece of property, and what is great for us is we will get a new library out of the process.”

Boston started floating the idea of combining housing and libraries about six years ago with a partnership between the Housing Innovation Lab, which is a city program that proposes creative solutions to the housing crisis, and the Boston Public Library system under the Walsh administration. “It’s just a natural fit for housing and families to live above them,” said Joe Backer, senior development officer with the mayor’s Office of Housing in the neighborhood housing development division.

The earliest site considered was in Fields Corner, in Dorchester, but the narrow corner library location was “too tight” to both upgrade the library and make sure that the housing mix above it was affordable, Leonard said on GBH. A proposed Egleston Square library with attached housing hit a blockade with the adjacent Jamaica Plain and Roxbury communities, who Leonard says preferred to focus on outdoor programming for the new library to keep as much green space as possible.

But the city and library system hit the right marks with new and renovated libraries planned for Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner, the West End, and Chinatown. The city awarded the Upham’s Corner project to a developer on April 13, released a request for proposals for the West End project earlier this month, and is planning for a new library in Chinatown, which hasn’t had its own branch since the former building was bulldozed in the 1950s to make room for the Central Artery.

Some combination of city-funded affordable housing is being pitched for each site, stacking housing above the library.

“I think we’re seeing an emergence over the last 10 years in the library profession about valuing the role of our civic spaces more,” Leonard said. “And so this is just one more way where we are adjacent to different types of civic infrastructure, whether it’s a community center, or a radio station, or now housing.”

Chicago started exploring co-locating housing and libraries around the same time Boston did. A citywide design competition connected three of Chicago’s top architects to three planned library sites across the city, which opened throughout 2019 and paired state-of-the-art library facilities with a mix of affordable housing.

“It’s been great. It’s putting a little community right there where the library is, and having it in the larger community has been very successful,” said Patrick Molloy, director of government and public affairs for the Chicago Public Library. The combination of a new library, the right connected use, and strong civic architecture has been key to the program’s success, he said, and the library system plans to incorporate mixed uses into as many future projects as possible.

They are starting to see more traffic as the nationwide pandemic emergency wanes, he said. “I don’t think we have any doubt that it is something that definitely works,” Molloy said. “You just have to find the best mixes” of either housing, childcare, or maybe even retail to include in the library sites.

In Boston, with a famously tight landscape and brutal housing costs, the projects are about using the land strategically to pair public amenities in the form of a shiny new library with affordable housing in places like Beacon Hill.

“If you look at sort of geographic distribution of affordable housing in the city, I don’t think it will surprise anyone to learn that you have disproportionately less in the part of the city where this library sits,” Backer said of the West End branch at the foot of Beacon Hill. “So it’s a really valuable opportunity to bring any amount of affordable housing into that neighborhood.”

The three projects on the books aside, Bostonians should keep an eye on Codman Square in Dorchester, which just completed a programming study and is in line for renovation. Library and housing leaders are already looking at a possible housing link for the site.