[Ed note: My Southborough accepts signed letters to the editor submitted by Southborough residents. Letters may be emailed to mysouthborough@gmail.com.
The following letter is from James Nichols-Worley, Ellen Marya, and Steph Horan.]
To the Editor:
We’re writing in support of Article 8 at Town Meeting this Monday, September 30 at 7:00pm. Article 8’s MBTA Communities Overlay District will not only put us in compliance with state law, but it’s just right for Southborough: Right for our future, our schools, and for our finances. Both the Select Board and the Southborough Housing Opportunity Partnership Committee (SHOPC) have voted to support Article 8.
Importantly:
- Article 8 is a specific Zoning Bylaw to legalize multifamily homes, not a mandate to build. Any new development would still have to go through site plan review and have its own septic system;
- Districts 1A and 1B, on Woodland/Blendon Woods & Southville Road respectively, are zoned for only 77 and 80 homes;
- 454 homes are zoned for District 2, placed over Madison Place, which is already built out;
- 217 homes are zoned for District 3 on St. Martin Drive, on the border of Marlborough;
- The impacts to our schools, traffic, and infrastructure will be minimal and manageable.
For these reasons, we ask you to join us in voting “Yes” on Article 8, which will make it legal to build different kinds of homes and welcome new neighbors to our amazing town, and make it possible to create attainable housing options for all near public transportation.
Diversifying our housing stock benefits our current neighbors and helps our community continue to grow. More multifamily housing gives our senior population options to downsize without leaving the community, and creates opportunities for families to move in. As of 2020, 13% of our population is aged 65 and older, up from 9% in 1990. And projections indicate this share will reach 28% by 2030. If older community members want to stay in Southborough close to their neighbors and support systems, they currently have very few options in town to downsize. In addition, we have very few opportunities for young adults who grew up here or nearby to move back and start their own families. In 1990, 31% of Southborough’s population was between the ages of 20 and 39; in 2020, that was down to 18%.
The type of zoning in Article 8 also continues progress from our downtown district rezoning and helps us meet the goals laid out in our Housing Production Plan, the first goal being to “Provide housing options that attract families and enable older adults to remain in Southborough as their needs change.”
Zoning is a power granted to communities by the state, and laws like MBTA Communities are fully within state power. This is also not an unfunded mandate – the state has invested about $7 million in technical assistance and support to help communities comply with the law, and has already granted Southborough leeway in the placement of the zoning Overlay District areas. And it is not one-size-fits-all – it’s a law that explicitly tailors the size of required zoning districts to community size, level of transit access, and available land, and empowers local boards to determine the best location of those districts based on significant community input.
We do not lose our oversight of the development process. Allowing multifamily development by-right means that communities cannot impose special permit, variance, zoning amendment, or other discretionary zoning requirements for multifamily development within these districts. Communities absolutely maintain our local oversight of zoning as granted to us by the state, and can include site plan review within these districts if they so choose. But as with all uses of site plan review, this can only involve the regulation of a use and impact factors like access and circulation at the site, architectural design, and screening on adjacent properties, and cannot prohibit a use as permitted by right.
The Planning Board can’t conduct studies on projects that don’t exist. If projects are proposed in these zoning districts, the Planning Board can have a proponent complete a traffic study or school impact study, as well as consult with the police and fire departments to understand the public safety impact. Those studies require information on unit mixes, numbers of bedrooms, building heights, and proposed traffic flow patterns that do not exist when projects do not exist. These types of studies are not part of the zoning process, they are part of the development process, and if and when development on any of these sites are proposed, the Planning Board will work with proponents to ensure we as a town have all our questions answered.
Even then, on Southville Road for example, MassDOT data show there were on average 7,000 total cars (3,500 each way) traveling on any given day, and 9,500 on Cordaville Road. Districts 1A and 1B, located within ½ mile of the train station, have a capacity of 77 and 80 homes, respectively. (It is unlikely these parcels will actually be built to capacity, because again, they still must follow all other requirements, including septic system constraints). We will offer an amendment to the bylaw to decrease the parking minimum for these Districts, which would further lower the amount of cars any new development might bring. That might be a 2-4% increase in local traffic, but it is impossible to study buildings that don’t exist, or predict the effects of future infrastructure (especially for bicycles and improvements for the existing sidewalk on Southville Road) that have not yet been built.
Complying with this law means zoning for multifamily housing appropriate for families, but it does not mean an influx of kids who will overwhelm our schools. Developments like Madison Place offer a mix of unit sizes, the vast majority of which are not home to families with children. Households living in new homes will also pay property taxes to support our schools. So much of school costs are fixed: looking at average per-pupil spending in no way indicates that is the marginal cost for adding an additional student. Adding new students who will be spread across grade levels and schools does not mean hiring new teachers or bus drivers, or building an additional classroom. The state also contributes significantly to school funding, including about $3.3 million in just Chapter 70 funding alone for FY25.
The effects of new housing on our school population are probably a wash. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council finds that across every kind of community in Massachusetts, there is “no significant association between the change in housing unit development and the change in school enrollment at the district.”
Even then, without any changes to our town, our student-age population and school enrollment is projected to stay stagnant or decline. It is far easier to manage a growing school system (and growing tax base) than a shrinking one. Towns like Marblehead, where the population aged 25-44 shrank 63% in the 2010s, have seen precarious budget deficits and failed town meeting overrides: in Marblehead, this led to the loss of 30 positions in the school system – a preventable harm to both educators and students.
The vast majority of MBTA Communities are complying with the law. As of mid-September, 86 communities have voted on a district and 74 have approved. Of the other 12 , at least 7 (including Hopkinton, which voted down their district by only 8 votes at town meeting) have continued to refine their plan through public engagement and have scheduled or are planning to schedule another vote to reach compliance. Our neighbors in Westborough and Northborough have already approved their plans at their Town Meetings. Only a handful are waiting on the outcome of the Milton court decision – an action which leaves them very little time to become compliant before the end of 2024, which is Southborough’s deadline.
Non-compliance puts Southborough’s One Stop Grant application at risk. The Select Board, in coordination with the Planning Board, is preparing a One Stop grant application focusing on commercial and mixed-use growth along Route 9. Many of us in town understand that Route 9 is a key underutilized resource, and that it’s important to expand our commercial base to help balance the residential tax burden. The State FAQ site for the One Stop grant reads “Any noncompliant MBTA community is ineligible for funding from the Housing Choice Grant Program, the HousingWorks Infrastructure Program, and the MassWorks Infrastructure Program, and all other Community One Stop for Growth programs will take noncompliance with Section 3A into consideration when making grant award recommendations.” Our Economic Development Committee has stressed that progress on Route 9 must come from grant money – which we would be putting at serious risk by choosing to not comply with this law.
We ask that you join us at Town Meeting to vote “Yes” on Article 8. Doing so means following the law, joining our neighboring communities in doing our part to address our statewide housing crisis, maintaining local oversight of future development, making informed decisions based on facts over rumors, and continuing to work together for an inclusive and thriving Southborough.
James Nichols-Worley
94 Main Street
Ellen Marya
Witherbee Lane
Steph Horan
Meeting House Lane
After 39 years, my opinion no longer matters in Southborough (but I’m going to give it anyway 😊). I’ve moved to Westborough! I’m sure the same battle is raging here, too.
Massachusetts has two major economic problems, a housing shortage (reflected in very high prices, including the one I just paid) and poor transportation infrastructure (which makes us all hugely shy of more traffic).
Housing costs are highly proportional to land costs. The only sane ways to lower land costs are to lower minimum lot sizes and to increase housing density. Otherwise, we older people age in place and the economic engine made by younger people moves away. I lived in downtown Southborough for 11 years in a neighborhood that had once been zoned as Residence C (after it was built, to be sure) but that the town had since made illegal to build and only grandfathered for existing neighborhoods. Think about that; many towns, like Southborough, legislated against density in their zoning code!
But *where* should we increase density? Near transit! That minimizes traffic growth, though of course it doesn’t get it to zero.
This zoning change won’t immediately provide 800 new units. Far from it, in fact, especially since Madison Place is in the overlay, as stated above, and it’s already built. 800 immediate new units is an imagined problem. There just aren’t enough builders in Massachusetts to proportionately develop all the transit overlays in the MBTA communities.
Is this about affordability? Not in the technical 40B sense (except that 40B still applies). But any increase in supply constrains price, and that’s one intended effect of this law over the next 20 years. I’d suggest clarity in this debate requires better vocabulary. Best I can come up with on short notice is 40B-affordable and market-affordable; I hope you can do better!
So… has the world turned on its head? How is it that I’m pro-development? People need places to live!
Oh, by the way, I chose to buy a house in downtown Westborough, in a dense neighborhood of singles and multis, where walking to stores and restaurants is often much more convenient than driving. I’m pretty sure this neighborhood would be illegal under current zoning code, although my first impression of the biggest problem is that the Westborough Planning Board has way too much power to say no.