Andrew Mikula

In much of the country, the easiest way to transform a housing development that is, on paper, not allowed to one that is, in practice, allowed is by changing the zoning.

In places like suburban Dallas and Phoenix, where hundreds of acres of ranchland are converted to housing at a time, the zoning that facilitates that redevelopment is often a carefully negotiated overlay called a “planned unit development” or “PUD.” In some parts of the country, PUDs accounted for nearly half of new housing built in the 2010s.

But in Massachusetts (and most of New England), rezoning is uniquely difficult, and large, master-planned communities are rare.

Current Approach Highly Risky

In part, that’s because zoning changes require a town meeting vote in most communities.

The fact that any adult resident (or the hundreds of voting town meeting members in representative town meeting systems) can show up and vote on land use changes makes votes highly unpredictable and policy difficult to coordinate with executive and administrative bodies. Because town meeting typically occurs no more than twice a year, there’s little opportunity to build consensus within the town meeting body and provide timely, actionable feedback to a project applicant.

In the eyes of zoning reform advocates, there are also built-in hurdles to forming relationships and sufficiently educating town meeting members about a project or even zoning in general. There are too many of them, there’s too much turnover, and in some communities, a lot of them don’t even show up to vote.

That means changing the underlying zoning is almost never the path of least resistance for a homebuilder in Massachusetts trying to get a project approved in the suburbs. Instead, many communities have developed an overreliance on special permits and variances, which create substantial risk and uncertainty around building new homes.

Select, Planning Boards Could Do Better

Of course, aligning Massachusetts rezoning practices with the rest of the country might have a conceptually simple solution: move more zoning decisions to a municipality’s primary elected body.

In most communities with a town meeting form of government, this would be a select board. While the select board is considered an executive body, not a lawmaking one like town meeting, exercising zoning authority via executive bodies has a precedent in other states, including Connecticut.

Planning boards could also serve as rezoning authorities in Massachusetts towns. After all, when used to facilitate the construction of individual developments (like PUDs), rezonings are best treated as quasi-judicial decisions of a kind that citizen-led boards already make in other contexts, including the issuance of special permits. Proposed zoning changes that are initiated by the town, not a developer, could still be subject to approval at town meeting.

To be clear, giving select boards or planning boards authority to approve zoning changes would require a change to state law. Currently, Chapter 40A, Massachusetts’ Zoning Act, deems that “no zoning ordinance or by-law or amendment thereto shall be adopted or changed except by a vote of the town council, or of the city council, or of a town meeting.”

More Predictable, More Democratic

Plenty of select boards and planning boards across the state are wary of, if not outright hostile to, new development. But there are at least two good reasons why these non-legislative bodies might make better (and more) rezoning decisions.

First, unlike most town meetings, non-legislative bodies are typically elected at large, and thus may be less likely to be captured by hyperlocal interests that tend to dominate opposition to housing production. There is substantial academic evidence that, when municipalities move from electing officials at large to doing so by ward, it suppresses housing development. The inverse (i.e., more at-large seats translating to more housing) may also be true.

Second, select and planning boards typically meet at least twice a month, allowing for deliberation over rezoning proposals, consensus building among elected officials, and interface between the affected property owner(s) and the voting body well before a final decision is made. That’s not just a recipe for more predictability in vote outcomes, but also development that better suits the community’s other political priorities besides housing production.

There would inevitably be some pushback to limiting town meeting’s role in rezoning. After all, town meeting is a bastion of direct democracy with a 300-year history.

But I’d argue that, as long as variation in housing markets is best explained at the metropolitan level and state preemption is inherently controversial, we need an out-of-the-box approach to aligning local governance structures with broader housing needs. The least Massachusetts can do is to allocate more authority within the municipality to officials who are already accountable to everyone in the community and who meet often enough to act on those commitments.

Andrew Mikula is a senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute in Boston.