In Boston, home may be where the books are.
Across three neighborhoods – the West End, Uphams Corner, and Chinatown – the city is moving forward with a plan to build new public libraries topped with affordable housing. The idea is rooted in necessity: record-high rents, limited land, and aging civic buildings have pushed Boston to rethink how public assets can serve more than one purpose at once.
“Libraries are often the most treasured neighborhood asset,” says Joe Backer, senior development officer with the Mayor’s Office of Housing. In recent years, he says, “there’s been a real push to rethink how city-owned land and buildings can be tools for meeting housing needs.” Combining the two, he adds, “is a no-brainer. It’s how cities have always grown.”
Why We Wrote This
For many people, it sounds like a dream: Living above a library. A number of major U.S. cities are experimenting with such mixed-use buildings as a way to add affordable housing – and cultivate community.
The philosophy reflects a broader revival of mixed-use development. Once common, it faded as zoning rules carved cities into separate residential, commercial, and civic zones. Now, as land grows scarce and communities demand more walkable neighborhoods, cities are again stacking housing over libraries, clustering transit near apartments, and even placing homes above post offices.
Advocates say the benefits go beyond efficiency. Mixed-use buildings can increase density, support sustainability goals, and strengthen neighborhood identity. “Combining housing and civic hubs like libraries is a real win-win, and it is a return to that historic development pattern,” says Katharine Burgess, a vice president at Smart Growth America. Libraries, she adds, “improve a sense of well-being and connectedness and belonging.”
Boston Public Library President David Leonard sees the trend as part of a broader shift within the profession. “We’re seeing an emergence over the last 10 years … about valuing the role of our civic spaces more,” he said on Boston Public Radio in 2023. Libraries, he noted, increasingly sit “adjacent to different types of civic infrastructure whether it’s a community center, a radio station, or now housing.”
“The library becomes an extension of home”
In the past 25 years, more than 1,800 apartments in the United States have been built in structures that combine new housing and new libraries, according to the Urban Institute. Many of those apartments have been affordable.
Boston began exploring the idea of combining housing and libraries in 2018 through a partnership between the city’s Housing Innovation Lab and the Boston Public Library. The initiative identified city-owned parcels that could support both civic space and new homes.
Around the same time, Chicago was developing three library sites that opened in 2019. Each site combined 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,” Chicago Public Library director of government and public affairs Patrick Molloy told the CommonWealth Beacon. “You just have to find the best mixes” – whether that’s housing, childcare, or even retail.
In Boston, three libraries were ultimately selected through a public request for proposals.
“We noticed there was a lot of new rental housing being proposed in the immediate vicinity, but very few opportunities for homeownership,” says Taylor Bearden, a partner at Civico Development, the firm leading the Uphams Corner library redevelopment. “That imbalance really stood out.”
Plans call for 33 affordable units – both rental and ownership – built above the historic 1904 library. The homes will include a mix of layouts, including three bedrooms, two bedrooms, and studios, for households earning between 80% and 100% of area median income.
To preserve walkability and the neighborhood’s character, the new apartments will rise above and behind the library’s historic facade. The goal, Mr. Bearden says, is to maintain the building as a civic landmark that remains “contextual and true to the character of the neighborhood.”
Mixed-use developments, he adds, offer a rare opportunity to create a genuine “third space” – one that doesn’t require a transaction or paid membership. “A public library is one of the few truly free sanctuaries left,” he says. “Imagine how, for residents, the library becomes an extension of home.”
Chinatown gets a new library
Nowhere is that shift more profound than in Chinatown, where residents have been waiting nearly seven decades for a permanent library.
It has been a long time coming for residents like Cynthia Yee, who grew up on Hudson Street, where the new Chinatown branch will be. At the groundbreaking this fall, Ms. Yee called the moment “a step towards spatial justice.”
Chinatown once had a library on Tyler Street, which closed in 1956 during freeway construction that tore through the neighborhood, erasing homes and civic landmarks. Ms. Yee remembers walking there as a child in the 1950s. “The playground equipment was worn, the books were well-used, but the space was always alive with neighbors,” she recalls. It was “warm and cozy – like school.”
After the closure, the neighborhood relied on mobile book clinics and temporary storefront libraries.
That changed in 2013. Some 1,000 Chinatown residents launched a letter-writing campaign to petition then-Mayor Marty Walsh who pledged to bring back the library. The new Hudson Street branch, expected to be completed in 2027, will include 110 affordable apartments.
Is urban planning returning to its roots?
Across the country, cities are rethinking rules that limit density. Experts say it no longer makes sense to reserve large swaths of land for single-family homes. Now, with rents soaring and shortages deepening in recent years, states and municipalities are loosening zoning restrictions and allowing more multifamily housing.
Massachusetts and California are offering incentives to build near transit and public amenities – part of “a rethinking of public assets as platforms for equity,” says Solomon Greene, executive director of Land and Communities at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Boston’s early tests matured into policy this year. In October, the City Council unanimously passed an ordinance requiring that vacant city-owned buildings be evaluated for affordable housing before any other reuse proposal – an effort officials describe as “leading with public purpose.”
Mixed-use development is, in many ways, a return to how cities originally grew.
“The problem is, in many places, mixed-use developments are still illegal,” says Mr. Greene. Early zoning laws were designed to shield residents from industrial pollution and noise, but they also blocked innovations that combine civic and residential uses.
Those laws can still create hurdles. In Boston, all three library-housing projects required special state legislation to bypass the competitive bidding process and partner directly with community organizations.
To Ms. Yee, the Chinatown resident, the project represents long-overdue recognition that equality begins with space. The symbolism runs deep: Housing and books, family and learning, all sharing the same footprint in a neighborhood once fractured by urban renewal.
“It’s about more than convenience,” she says. “It’s about being seen.”
