Observer: What was your motivation for launching the Yes campaign?
Heidi Frail: The motivation for launching the campaign was education around the question, around the issue — the question being the referendum specifically, the issue being the plan in general. It seems like there are some folks who haven’t been following the progress as the process moved through the past three years or more, so helping to bring people up to date. When we were moving this through Town Meeting we found that zoning is just very complicated, and this has ramifications well beyond just building. It impacts the economics of the whole town into the future. So it was just necessary to do a lot of education with our Town Meeting members so that they could make a responsible vote, and certainly that’s needed for the residents as well.
Observer: What are your primary concerns as we approach election day?
Marianne Cooley: I think primary concerns always are about how do you actually reach everybody so that they are able to have an informed opinion when they vote rather than an opinion that’s based on a fear or some uncertainty about something that they don’t understand. That’s always the challenge in everything.
Observer: What are your concerns around what happens if the repeal passes?
Heidi Frail: I think that certainly compliance and the funding that comes with compliance is a major issue, but I’d also note that MBTA Communities is a tool that the town is using to help produce some housing. So worst case scenario is we go back to Town Meeting and we become compliant, but we don’t produce any housing. That would be a real tragedy because I think that there are impacts for Needham well into our future if we miss this opportunity. We won’t provide housing diversity for our seniors, who will then stay in their single-family homes that will lock up our housing inventory. That has ramifications for our school enrollment into the future. I mean, there are some big issues here that won’t be solved by being compliant. Compliance is one thing, solving Needham’s housing crisis is another.
Observer: Knowing that you recognize the state is in a housing crisis, what role do you think Needham should play in solving it?
Kate Weinograd: Well, obviously Needham can’t solve it alone, right? Everybody — every town, every part of Massachusetts, has to do a tiny little bit, and then all of those tiny little bits add up to a whole bit, right? I see our role as we have to be a good community in our state, and a good community for residents of Massachusetts. But also we need to be a good community for people in Needham who are looking for flexible housing options and give people that middle housing that they’re lacking. It’s all interconnected and intertwined, and if we do our small part we can help our town, and hopefully that has a trickle impact on the state as well.
The plan was written based on feedback from folks in Needham, so while we’re complying, the structure of the plan was really based around what would help Needham for the next generation.
Marianne Cooley: We’re seeing some discussion recently about what Needham’s doing relative to what other communities are doing, and that’s never been our focus. Our focus has always been what do we need in Needham to successfully put some housing in places that makes sense to us.
Heidi Frail: This plan was entirely tailored by Needham residents for Needham’s use, you know, to solve Needham’s problems, but also tailored to our geography and our commercial corridor and everything it has in the greater scheme of things. Sure there’d be an impact on the region, but this was all about how we make Needham healthy in the long run.
Observer: Is it reasonable to think that Needham can make a meaningful impact on the cost of housing?
Kate Weinograd: It’s not about necessarily taking the cost of housing on the market today and altering it in some way. It’s about creating some options that are not subsidized, deeply affordable housing or a single-family, million-dollar-plus house. There needs to be something.
I think a lot of these terms are inherently confusing. When you talk about “affordable,” people imagine one thing, but it’s a calculation. So it gets a little bit tricky in terms of what people understand is affordable versus what affordable means in the state law.
Heidi Frail: I think we can make a huge impact on personal finance. Whether we’ll have an impact on macro pricing in the area, no, I don’t think so, not for a while. Eventually yes. This is a supply bill. If everyone increases supply, then eventually supply and demand will equalize, and there will be a price drop, right? However, I do think that a senior who is feeling like they want to move out of their single- family house, personally their finances are going to benefit from the sale of that house, their finances are going to benefit from stopping paying the real estate tax on that house. They’ll purchase a condo or move into a rental, and their personal finances will improve. I know that there’s a lot of talk about how this won’t be affordable to Needham seniors, but someone who has potentially just sold their house and maybe doesn’t want to buy again will have the money that they need to pay rent, if that’s the situation that they choose to find themselves in. So I think there are a lot of other questions about whether or not this is affordable and beneficial.
Marianne Cooley: MBTA Communities was not done for affordable housing, but with Needham’s inclusionary zoning 12.5% is 12.5%, and it is better than 0. But you have to actually build some housing to yield some affordable units.
Observer: What outside experts did you consult to come to your conclusions?
Marianne Cooley: We did not bring in any outside experts, but it’s fair to say what the town brought in.
Heidi Frail: There was a ton of research done into both housing plans. RKG was the consultant that we worked with during the HONE committee’s work. There was one commissioned by [the town] with a third-party vendor. Same thing with the traffic study done by GPI specifically for the HONE report. And then a lot of the numbers that were used for housing cost burden, school enrollments, housing costs as opposed to incomes or versus incomes are available through the state. There are reputable sources with a lot of industry experience.
A lot of the information about resourcing for the ongoing work was done through department heads throughout the town. Police and fire weighed in, sewer and water, the DPW, parks and rec — all of the town departments were consulted about how this would impact their capital costs and operating expenses, and I consider those people to be experts, so that was counted as well.
Also, a lot of these cost estimates weren’t created for this work. Those are the same numbers that we’re basing our five-year capital plan on. Those numbers are all vetted by the Finance Committee, who has confidence in them. They are entirely reliable, and if they’re not, certainly we have bigger problems than not passing the zoning.
Marianne Cooley: I really look at the last 25 years at least in town as being a period where the town has worked very hard to think carefully and logically about its budget and what the forward needs are, and to build in provisions for what’s going to be required for future needs and anticipating what those are. So when people are saying, ‘Well, what’s going to happen, you’ll need more infrastructure.’ The answer is there’s already infrastructure projects in the capital plan. We know we are going to be continuing to work on infrastructure, and this is just part of our ongoing stewardship
Observer: What is the most compelling data that enables you to not have a concern about overcrowding in the schools?
Heidi Frail: Of course we’re concerned about overcrowding in the schools. What we’re not doing is catastrophizing, there’s a difference there. We’re always looking and planning and preparing to make sure that our schools are well set up, well resourced, and that our children are well taken care of. We were incredibly responsible with our planning. The numbers that we used were inflated, the timeline that we used was reduced just to offset any uncertainty that could crop up. We’ve consulted experts. So I would say we’re totally planning based on that concern, just not catastrophizing.
Marianne Cooley: I also want to speak a little bit from my perspective in 20-plus years of future school needs. When the schools hired Dr. [Jerome] McKibben to start working as our demographer, we were all highly skeptical that [he] was correct about what was happening with underlying demographics, and I have to say that time has borne him out. The trends that he has talked about have been trends that have occurred here, so I have a high degree of confidence in at least his thought process and his interrogation of the numbers and his consideration of what the future might look like.
Observer: What do you most want the public to know about what the Yes side stands for and why it’s important?
Kate Weinograd: The Yes campaign is centered around the idea that we can do better for Needham, that we can have long-term vision, that we can not only comply with the MBTA act, but craft zoning and craft policies and craft public policy in a way that reflects the future that we want to see for Needham’s seniors, for Needham’s workforce and for the kids that are even yet to be born into our town. We can have and we can do all of these things if we work together, if we listen to our neighbors, if we craft plans and policies that reflect what is best and what will move Needham forward over the next 50 years. That’s why we think that this plan is a bright future for Needham.
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