While you’ve been busy arguing over whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden is the worse tyrant, our local mandarins have been busy pushing a new zoning bylaw that will alter the complexion of the town. If they can get it through the spring Annual Town Meeting, it will be an even bigger boondoggle than the Specialized Energy Code that they rammed through at last fall’s Town Meeting on a Saturday before most people had finished their morning coffee.

The local activist class knows that most people are either too busy or too lazy to attend Town Meeting. So, if they can just convince a hundred or so of their “allies” to bring their knitting to the Galvin Auditorium for a few hours and raise their hands at the appointed time, they can get the town to adopt almost any cockamamie measure.

Our central planners are hoping to drag enough people to the 2024 Annual Town Meeting to approve their scheme to make it even easier than it is now for developers to build new multifamily housing in Wakefield.

Chapter 40A of the Massachusetts General Laws inludes a new state mandate that forces all Massachusetts communities with MBTA service to create at least one zoning district near public transit where multifamily housing is allowed by right.

If you’re wondering what’s behind this, here’s a clue from the commonwealth’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.

“Multi-family housing near transit creates walkable neighborhoods with climate and transportation benefits,” according to the EOHLC, “including better access to work/services, increased utilization of public transit and reduced reliance on single-occupancy vehicles.”

In other words, they’re changing the character of the town to save the planet from climate change.

But the state mandate wasn’t nearly tyrannical enough, so our local central planners set about creating a compliance model with an even larger district and even more multifamily housing than the state is mandating.

For Wakefield, the minimum size required for this new multi-family zoning district would be 114 acres, but the Planning Board is proposing a district of 145.5 acres. The state mandate would require Wakefield to allow up to 1,696 units of multifamily housing in the district. But the Planning Board is backing a plan with a capacity of up to 2,355 housing units – nearly 700 more units than the state mandate requires.

Developers would be able to squeeze four units into a three-story building with a height of up to 35 feet on a minimum lot size of 4,000 square feet without needing a Special Permit or variance.

The Planning Board held three “public forums” last fall, ostensibly to gather citizen feedback on the local plan that had been devised to comply with the state mandate. But as resident after resident spoke against the larger plan and in favor of a minimum compliance model, the planners were unmoved.

It’s bad enough that local officials devised a compliance plan that would bring even more multifamily housing to town than what the state is forcing us to accept. What’s more troubling is that when faced with pleas from residents for a minimum compliance model, the Planning Board’s reaction was essentially, “Let them eat cake.”

Clearly, the purpose of the forums was not to listen to residents and arrive at consensus or compromise. Instead, planners saw the forums as an opportunity to sell the masses on a plan that they had no intention of modifying. After the three forums during which the vast majority of residents spoke against the plan, the Planning Board announced that they were sticking with their original, supersized compliance model.

Members of the Planning Board have tried to downplay public resistance to their local compliance plan, suggesting that people were really objecting to overreach from the state in the form of the mandated district.

But having suffered through all three public forums multiple times, I can tell you that is a mischaracterization. A couple of forum speakers may have raised rhetorical objections to the state mandate. But for most speakers, the problem was the compliance plan devised at the local level, which goes way beyond what the state is requiring the town to do.

Speaking recently to the Town Council, Planning Board chairman Theo Noell suggested that there was a “disconnect” with the public regarding the Planning Board’s belief that adding more multifamily housing around the downtown will benefit local businesses.

“Disconnect” is a euphemistic way of saying, “The public just doesn’t get it.”

Oh, they get it, at least the ones who are paying attention do. And they’re not buying it.

Like the Specialized Energy Code, the MBTA multifamily zoning mandate is technical and complex, which plays to the sponsors’ advantage. Some residents see the calamity that is unfolding and have spoken up. But most people won’t notice until they start seeing triple-deckers popping up all over their neighborhoods.

By then, it will be too late.

The Planning Board has scheduled a public hearing on their plus-sized compliance plan for Tuesday, Feb. 13 at 7:15 p.m. via Zoom. Hopefully, residents won’t be deterred by the board’s obstinacy and will let them know what they really think.
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[This column originally appeared in the February 1, 2024 Wakefield Daily Item.]