Mark Twain’s observation, “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get,” can be easily adapted to describe land-use planning. Zoning reflects what communities expect; the market ultimately decides what it gets.
In the case of the MBTA Communities Law, the state is requiring 177 communities to loosen local zoning restrictions in hopes of priming the market to create more multi-family housing in Massachusetts.
In a collective effort Needham spent three years working on its compliance plan, which Town Meeting approved Oct. 21. That approval is now subject to a repeal election that will conclude with in-person voting Jan. 14.
Andrew Mikula is a senior housing fellow at Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, a Beacon Hill think tank that often advances free market ideas and generally supports limited government. Mikula led the effort on a Pioneer white paper issued in October on how the MBTA communities are going about complying with the MBTA law.
“Many communities concentrated their zoning districts in areas with existing commercial development or multi-family housing complexes, thus avoiding encroachment on low-density neighborhoods and minimizing the number of net new units able to be created,” Mikuka wrote in the white paper.
This description matches Needham’s “base plan.” But Town Meeting subsequently amended the base plan and replaced it with the “neighborhood plan.” Though it does not encroach on single-family zoned lots — it’s limited to essentially the same existing commercial and multi-family zoned properties — the adopted plan loosened size requirements including building height to add density and increase the number of potential units.
“Others, notably Lexington, went far beyond the unit capacity requirements imposed by the EOHLC,” the report added.
In an interview, Mikula said Lexington’s level of compliance was orders of magnitude higher than any other’s. “It’s maybe slightly above 10 times the capacity they were required to do,” he said.
Other over-compliers include Watertown, whose plan allowed more than 4,000 units — far above its requirement of 1,701. Needham’s neighborhood plan allows for 3,296 units, well above its 1,784-unit quota.
“Not a lot of communities went above and beyond at the end of the day,” Mikula said, an outcome that he said does not bode well for the state reaching the law’s overall goal of increasing zoning capacity by nearly 300,000 units statewide.
The white paper noted that “specific estimates from housing experts suggest that only a small fraction of the zoning capacity created under Section 3A (the MBTA law) will actually be built in the near future.”
The report also notes the stated unit capacities likely greatly exaggerate the number of units that will actually be built. “Credible estimates from local officials and housing experts suggest that only a small fraction of the total housing unit capacity allowed under the law will actually be built in the first few years of full implementation,” it says.
The report also mentions “an analysis by Boston Indicators and the Brookings Institution that found that between 5 and 10 percent of properties are typically redeveloped in the first five years after a major upzoning.”
And it notes that “a rapid pace of change in the housing stock, population, or scale of buildings in a community is far from an inevitable result in a community that is merely meeting (the law’s) minimum requirements.”
Crisis? Yes, a crisis
The state is generally acknowledged as being in the midst of a nationwide housing crisis that the law’s supporters say threatens Massachusetts’ long-term economic viability, a view Mikula shares.
“It’s pretty clear to me that we have a problem,” he said. “We have been bleeding residents to places where you can buy more house for less for a couple of decades, but it’s really gotten worse in the last few years.”
He said the most credible estimates he’s seen for what the state needs to meet demand and stabilize vacancy rates is in the range of 20-25,000 units per year statewide. “And the last time we built 20,000 units of housing in a year in Massachusetts was in 2005.
“We’re not building the type of housing that we need to meet the demographic realities of our time,” Mikula said. “We have a millennial generation that’s coming of age and starting to form their own families, but we don’t have the starter homes. The average single-family home size is getting bigger and bigger, but the average household size is getting smaller and smaller.”
He said many towns have a housing “typology” that does not match their housing needs — “especially in towns like Needham, with seniors who are living in four- or five-bedroom Colonials. They maybe have mobility issues or don’t want to have to maintain a lawn as they get older. But there aren’t really a lot of options for them to downsize in town.”
A common refrain
While every community has its own distinctive issues, Mikula said there are a few issues that opponents of change raise in almost every community regardless of size or other characteristics. The report indicates some of these objections may not be supported by evidence.
“The idea that new housing will automatically overburden emergency services, roads, and other types of infrastructure is a common mantra among detractors,” the report said. “But several academic studies have concluded that local tax revenue from multifamily development usually exceeds the public service obligations that it creates, and the up-front costs of physical infrastructure improvements in Massachusetts are almost always borne by developers.”
As for Needham, the fact that its zoning district has no greenfields and is essentially a 100% redevelopment effort may be a net plus. The report says “new construction in areas with existing development is, on average, more fiscally positive than development in previously undeveloped areas. One 2016 study estimated the cost of infrastructure for infill development at about one-third the cost of infrastructure in greenfield development.”
And school impacts, the report said, are often overstated. “The relationship between new housing development and enrollment growth in public schools is empirically very weak.”
A 2024 MAPC study, which updated data from a 2017 report titled “The Waning Influence of Housing Production On Public School Enrollment,” found “no significant association” between housing production rates and school enrollment change across localities.
Mikula added that the impact of any zoning changes relies heavily on one particular non-zoning requirement being satisfied. “Landowners need to be willing to sell,” he said.
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