The silver lining in the MBTA Communities’ battles
The MBTA Communities Law was once projected to yield upwards of 300,000 new homes across eastern Massachusetts.
In Sunday’s Globe, reporter Andrew Brinker, suggested the final number could be closer to 20,000 and 40,000 new units, maybe less, over the next two decades.
“A Globe review of dozens of preliminary and already-passed zoning strategies found that towns are deliberately designing plans that cleverly end-run the new state mandate,” Brinker writes.
That includes Wellesley (as I’ve written before), or Dedham, which placed its new housing district over existing and permitted apartment buildings and Legacy Place.
“Others are writing their zoning rules in good faith, but capping building heights and densities in ways that effectively make new development impractical,” Brinker adds.
Discouraging? Big time. But there’s still a significant upside to this law, which remains the biggest zoning reform in state history.
For starters, some communities (just not as many as one wishes) are indeed opening their doors to new housing opportunities beyond the law’s requirement.
Even cities and towns where outcomes are mixed, or worse, are at least having actual substantive debates, perhaps for the first time ever, about where their adult children, seniors, teachers, first responders and other workers are going to live.
And virtually every community is giving rise to new platoons of housing advocates, speaking up, stepping up and hopefully remaining engaged for future battles.
It’s not what we hoped for. But decades of housing obstruction taught us that this was never going to be easy.
