[marssaxman]

> Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing is just stupid.

It's a good thing I am not talking about locales like yours, then; unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem, akin to the ones you see in big cities whose history of inadequate development due to strict zoning regulation has created a persistent housing crunch, nothing I said pertains to you.

> It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain.

You're not making this point of view sound any more appealing by defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.

[toss1]

>>unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem...nothing I said pertains to you.

Well, the current town has no homelessness problem, but there ARE most definitely laws in place (Massachusetts 40B) that specifically seeks to override local zoning and mandate low-income housing in ALL towns.

So, while we agree that what you said should not pertain to me, the people making the actual laws most definitely apply it to me.

I don't know why there is the disconnect, perhaps some misguided "it must apply to everyone everywhere" cop-out to avoid the actual complexity, but the fact is that the rhetoric is very destructive.

>>defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.

The DEFINITION is "quiet, low traffic, wildlife, gardens, etc.".

The COST is defined in money as well as work.

The point is that those things are not free — they cost a lot of work and yes, money in both taxes and improvements and maintenance. More importantly, it is not cost-free to decide to destroy those valuable things. Especially when the result will not help the people you are intending to help.

[marssaxman]

Thank you for explaining your situation. I can see why that would be frustrating!

Here in Washington, the state legislature recently passed a law overriding any local zoning which would forbid multi-family housing, but the law does not apply to cities under 25K population, and its strongest provisions only apply above 75K. Oregon has had a similar law since 2019. This approach seems more reasonable to me.

[toss1]

Yes, those provisions in Oregon and Washington are certainly doing that better.

I had literally to take three weeks off to kill a proposed development literally in my back yard. It is a wetland habitat, so enjoys some protection from good Massachusetts environmental laws, but they can be overridden by 40B. It is also a hilly and inaccessable site, and the developer was proposing to raze the whole site and put in 300+ units of warehouse-type condos. They literally did not even have sufficient access for fire trucks because of the terrain, and would have eliminated the habitat of an endangered turtle (found by required survey/trap-releasing).

We dug hard into the laws and process, and rallied hundreds of neighbors and political influencers in town to literally make the most packed planning board hearing they ever had, but a factor of at least 10.

This ended up killing the project, for now. But the absurdity of blanket zoning overrides literally destroying highly valuable (and costly) environment to literally solve nothing except transferring some of that value to developer's pockets has not left me. I understand it is still sad to replace brownstones with 10' square garden plots out back with high-rises, but I'm fine with that, since there really isn't any wildlife habitat and there is infrastructure to move the new people around the city. I'm not fine with doing it everywhere, particularly where it will destroy habitat and where there is no good people-moving infrastructure.