Boston College Law’s Initiative on Land, Housing, and Property Rights hosted a panel for local housing experts to discuss the MBTA Communities Act at BC Law School on Wednesday.
“The MBTA Communities Act is the beginning of trying to improve housing affordability in Massachusetts, not the end,” said Jacob Love, an attorney for Lawyers for Civil Rights.
The MBTA Communities Act is a 2021 state law requiring 177 cities and towns to allow more multi-family housing close to public transit stations, but municipalities were largely left with the power to decide implementation.
Many municipalities have seen resistance to the law, and some have sued the state for the right to reject it in their communities. This January, though, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state had the right to force compliance.
Will Rhatigan, the MBTA Communities engagement manager for the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, said the main reasons he’s seen residents oppose the law include fear of overcrowding, fear of traffic congestion, worries about the architectural style of the municipality, and disapproval of perceived state overreach.
“I think often you’ll find at the heart of many people’s resistance to this law is just resistance to any kind of change in their communities,” Rhatigan said.
Rhatigan acknowledged that these concerns make passing zoning reform on the local level difficult, especially for municipalities that are governed by open town meetings and not elected representatives.
“It really seems like the larger the legislative body is, the more difficult it becomes to pass this law,” Rhatigan said.
Instead of navigating the local authority, Esme Caramello, the director of the Housing Affordability Unit in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, suggested that more comprehensive state action might be necessary to navigate Massachusetts’ housing issues.
“This whole thing is an argument for more state intervention,” Caramello said. “We have tried the local control thing when it comes to housing production, and we’ve tried it for like 100 years. It has not worked. It’s led to racial segregation—it’s led to a massive affordability crisis.”
But localities tend to resist top-down changes, especially those related to housing, said Love.
“Municipalities have gotten so used to the long-standing zoning discretion,” Love said.
Love attributed this attitude partly to Home Rule, an amendment to the Massachusetts constitution allowing the state government to delegate power to municipalities. One of these delegated powers is to control zoning.
The state still retains a lot of power over housing policy, though, and can make more sweeping zoning changes than municipalities may want or expect, Love said.
“They just don’t really understand that not only can the state act in zoning, but it already has,” Love said.
The state deemed Newton compliant with the law after the city passed the Village Center Overlay District, a 2023 ordinance permitting more multi-family housing in some of Newton’s village centers that slightly surpassed the state’s upzoning requirements. A more ambitious zoning reform had been planned, but city councilors effectively eliminated it after voters ousted the main proponents of the more extensive reform.
Rhatigan said there is room for more zoning reform in Newton.
“Although it’s very challenging to pass more zoning reforms, I think if we are going to reach any…broad affordability in this state, we have no question that suburban communities like Newton need to continue working on zoning reform to allow more housing,” Rhatigan said.
Heidi Frail, who recently won a reelection bid to Needham’s Select Board, said that supporting zoning reform can be politically risky for elected officials, making housing advocacy more difficult.
“Implementing housing policy is just going to get harder, and this is because a lot of your housing advocates have lost their elected positions, so you no longer have as many,” Frail said. “There aren’t as many people who are willing to do that.”
Frail and other Needham leaders had proposed a zoning ordinance that surpassed MBTA minimums, but it didn’t pass a referendum this January. Today, the town is in interim compliance with the law, having submitted a plan to meet the minimum requirements.
Frail said that since the passage of the MBTA Communities Act, she has tried to educate as many residents and elected officials on the law as possible, which she said resulted in wider support for zoning reform—and for her as a pro-housing politician.
“The same tool that allowed us to pass these plans by town meeting, which was honesty, education, and a personal connection, is the same secret sauce that allowed me to keep my seat with a frankly, astonishingly large margin in my recent reelection,” Frail said.
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