District 9 City Council candidates Jerry McDermott and Mark Ciommo took aim at university housing and parking policies in Allston-Brighton while appealing to voters last night at the Brighton Elks Lodge in the final debate before the Dec. 10 runoff election.
A standing-room-only crowd of nearly 100 Allston and Brighton residents packed the debate room. McDermott and Ciommo, who are the final two candidates remaining in the race after a Nov. 12 primary, are vying for the seat of Brian Honan, who died suddenly in July.
Housing was the debate’s hot issue, raised several times by the debate’s moderators and during the audience question-and-answer portion of the evening. Ciommo and McDermott agreed affordable housing is a major neighborhood problem that needs to be addressed aggressively.
Both candidates said area universities should take more responsibility for housing students on campus, though Ciommo focused on universities as a major cause of the high-cost housing market in the neighborhood. If Boston College, Harvard University and Boston University would create more on-campus housing, Ciommo said, they could free as many as 4,000 housing units and help drive prices down in the district. He said they would help ‘stabilize’ the district’s rent market.
The large student population in the area attracts larger housing investors who drive rents up because students can afford to pay steeper prices for housing, he said. Pressuring universities to move students back on campus would be Ciommo’s first step for creating more affordable housing, he said.
‘The main thing that creates this investor climate is the colleges that use us as a dorm,’ Ciommo said. ‘That is the main reason why investors are attracted to our neighborhood.’
Both candidates said they would pressure Harvard to help the community with affordable housing in return for its continued development of northern Allston.
Ciommo also said he would support Mayor Thomas Menino’s rent caps proposal, which McDermott attacked as a faulty plan. The city council voted down Menino’s rent plan, 6-4, two weeks ago.
Menino’s plan would make the current housing market’s high prices the future base prices, which would not help the city’s low and middle income families better afford housing, McDermott said. Creating more housing units would be the best way to deal with city housing problems, allowing market forces to naturally drive prices down, according to McDermott.
McDermott, however, did agree that the city should create a housing review board, a provision included in the Menino plan. The district’s good landlords would not object to such a board and it would help stop bad landlords from taking advantage of tenants, he said.
‘All good landlords would be very happy with seeing something like [a review board] so we can get rid of those landlords that are gouging,’ McDermott said.
But McDermott and Ciommo agreed that the problem would need several different approaches.
‘We need a housing policy that addresses a complex problem,’ Ciommo said. ‘There isn’t one silver bullet.’
Both candidates also said universities should urge students not to bring cars into the community because they clog already scarce parking places in the district. Students should be using public transportation instead, McDermott said. Ciommo said the city should crack down on cars with out-of-state plates, and McDermott said the city’s transportation department should be expanded to do so more effectively and to crack down on illegal parking in the area in general.
The two candidates agreed the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority should add a commuter rail stop to the Allston-Brighton area, easing the load on T and bus service in the neighborhood.
McDermott and Ciommo also touched on education issues and the city’s budgetary problems. Cutting one-third from the city’s education transportation budget and reinvesting that money to help shrink class sizes would be a good step toward improving education in the city, according to McDermott. Ciommo said the city should focus on improving education in the first through third grades.
Several community members at the meeting said the debate was substantive and addressed many of the most important issues at stake in the race, of which housing is at the top.
Forty-seven-year-old Kevin Carragee, a Brighton resident and co-president of the Hobart Park Neighborhood Association, said local universities’ roles in the community’s housing market are a big issue that both candidates addressed, though he said he agrees most with Ciommo’s plans.
‘Families can no longer afford rents and home prices because rents are set for investor landlords,’ he said.
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