IT’S A FAMILIAR refrain in the push and pull over development in Massachusetts: When a project of some kind is proposed, local officials and residents who oppose it often say the development would harm the historic character of their community. Maintaining local control over what gets built and where it gets built is often viewed by communities as the last line of defense in the battle to preserve what’s made them special.
But Garrett Nelson says just the opposite is true. Nelson, the president and head curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, maintains that local control has often been the driving force behind development that has been destructive of the historic character of Massachusetts cities and towns.
Nelson unspooled his provocative argument in a recent essay for CommonWealth, and he joined the Codcast this week to talk about what he says are the myths surrounding local control.
“I’ve always been interested in this kind of way that localism and small-scale neighborhood-scale government gets portrayed in the United States with an automatic golden glow,” he said. “We think of local control almost always as a good thing — more democratic, more participatory. Certainly, when you think about the kind of historic myths of a place like Massachusetts or New England, the image of the town meeting looms large in that myth making. And so we kind of tend to take it as a default that more local participation, more local control will help ameliorate some of our concerns about modern development.”
The truth, Nelson said, is that “when we really take a hard look at this question of have cities and towns in Massachusetts actually done a good job at what we say that they’re doing a good job at — have they done a good job protecting their local landscapes from historic destruction — the answer is pretty clearly no.”
The issue at the center of his argument, in many ways, is the rise of suburban sprawl – the post-World War II build-out of communities that has been dominated by single-family homes on large lots. While that model is the one that has prevailed through local control of development across Greater Boston, Nelson says it has cut sharply against the grain of how those communities lived before then.
Communities in Greater Boston had smaller populations before the mid-1900s, Nelson said, but they nonetheless generally had greater density, with most housing clustered close to town centers.
The rise of the automobile – and roadway expansion to accommodate it — along with a home financing system that Nelson says favored “spatial segregation,” turned what had been largely small rural towns into bedroom communities for commuters to Boston as well as the office parks that sprang up along Route 128.
Communities realized they were “sitting on a gold mine of potentially developable land,” Nelson said, with plenty of incentives to steer growth toward large houses on big lots, which would draw better-off residents.
“They were acting in an economically rational fashion,” Nelson said. “If you are in a town that’s fortunate enough to have a relatively affluent population and relatively few demands on its public services, then you understandably will want to continue the privileges afforded to you by that position.”
He said that development pattern helped promote racial and economic segregation, and did much to undermine the longstanding historic character of those communities.
In his CommonWealth essay, Nelson says a visit to most any small town center in Sweden or Poland, to give two examples, will “almost certainly find a landscape that better preserves the character of centuries past than any town in Massachusetts. And although these countries each have their own unique planning idiosyncrasies, all of them provide far more centralized control to regional and national political units. The United States is an outlier in terms of how much power local authorities have over land-use decisions—and also an outlier in terms of how many historic landscapes have been wiped out.”
Nelson illustrated his point in his CommonWealth essay by showing changes over time in the development pattern in Middleborough, where growth became increasingly dispersed across the 20th century, and lot sizes became progressively larger. Nelson said on the Codcast that he doesn’t mean to “pick on” Middleborough, and that the same pattern is true of most Massachusetts communities.
He used the Middleborough example because the Plymouth County town of 24,000 residents has been among the most outspoken in raising objections to the MBTA Communities Law, passed in 2021, which requires the 175 cities and towns served by the T to create at least one zoning district that allows denser, multi-family housing.
By linking the new zoning requirement to the MBTA service area, the law is acknowledging the interdependence of communities. That’s something that often gets ignored, Nelson said, by communities as they plan only with thoughts of what happens within their borders, not the regional need for more housing at various price levels or other factors critical to the regional economic health.
The MBTA Communities law looks like at least a step in the direction of addressing these issues, Nelson said. But he’s reluctant to say it signals a major turning point.
“I’m a historian. I’m working on a book that’s about 150 years of attempting to solve this geographic problem in the Boston region and elsewhere, and history is littered with attempts to figure this out,” he said. “We don’t necessarily imagine ourselves as being part of these more modern urban and regional geographies. And if we can’t imagine ourselves as part of them, it’s very hard to make political decisions for them.”
MICHAEL JONAS
FROM COMMONWEALTH
Budget set for vote: House and Senate negotiators complete work on the state budget and quick passage is expected. A separate tax package hasn’t surfaced yet, but the budget sets aside $581 million for tax relief this year. The final bill doesn’t include a Lottery move online and the millionaire tax money is split $523 million for education and $477 million for transportation. Read more.
OPINION
Yessed to death: James Aloisi, a board member of TransitMatters, wonders whether the public is being “yessed to death” on the Red-Blue connector and commuter rail electrification. Read more.
Drug dispute: Steve Kowalski, who is struggling with ALS, believes new drugs are helping to extend his life but says the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review is making it difficult for him to access them. Read more.
FROM AROUND THE WEB
BEACON HILL
The chair of the Cannabis Control Commission says the agency is in crisis with the executive director stepping down abruptly. (State House News Service)
State Sen. Liz Miranda and Rep. Christopher Worrell filed legislation that would end sentences of life without parole in the state. Their bill would allow any inmate to go before the parole board after serving 25 years. (Boston Globe) Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project wrote a CommonWealth commentary piece last week calling for the end of life without parole for younger adults.
Foxborough state Sen. Paul Feeney is pushing a bill that would provide state subsidies for developers who build modest-sized “starter” homes for families earning 80 to 120 percent of area median income. (Boston Herald)
Gov. Maura Healey is decamping the Cambridge apartment she has rented to move in with her partner, Joanna Lydgate, at the Arlington home Lydgate owns. (Boston Globe)
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
The Marblehead School Committee is holding discussions about the superintendent’s contract behind closed doors because of a perceived threat against one of the committee members. (Salem News)
HEALTH/HEALTH CARE
Transhealth, a health care organization based in Northampton and serving the trans community, is growing fast, serving more than 2,000 patients and increasing its staff from 13 to 50. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
A Worcester city councilor and her opponent are both calling for action on a lot that has been vacant for decades, with the owners “holding this property hostage.” (Worcester Telegram)
The Christmas Tree Shops, which date back to a first 1950s Yarmouth Port location, have closed all but one of their stores on Cape Cod due to bankruptcy. The final Hyannis shop is set to close on August 12. (Cape Cod Times)
EDUCATION
Academic recovery in the state has stalled, but school districts still have more than $1 billion in federal COVID relief aid they have yet to spend. (Boston Globe)
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT
A new report recommends the often-flooded Tenean Beach in Dorchester be redesigned to protect the nearby Red Line and I-93 from the effects of sea level rise. (Dorchester Reporter)
The weekend’s extreme weather included a tornado in Foxborough, damaging homes and cutting power for about 200 Easton residents. (MassLive)
Natick will implement new regulations in the next few years to meet new federal rules for the amount of PFAS contamination allowed in water. (MetroWest Daily News)
CRIMINAL JUSTICE/COURTS
Staff say the state office providing interpreters in court proceedings is in shambles, with a culture of fear and control dominating the office. (Boston Globe)
The University of Massachusetts will hand over financial records as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought against it by MassLive.
A federal judge rejected an attempt to depose Worcester police and city leaders by lawyers representing a Ghanaian immigrant who alleges police violated his rights during a prostitution “john” sting. (Worcester Telegram)
Southborough police are warning of an uptick in “sexortion” schemes targeting teenagers. (MetroWest Daily News)
MEDIA
The Boston Globe is hiring a media reporter. (Media Nation)
Lindsey Hollenbaugh was promoted to managing editor of the Berkshire Eagle. (Berkshire Eagle)