Letter: Let’s be honest about opposing denser development

[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 Michael Nute.]

To The Editor:

I read the letter of September 27 from the residents of Darleen and Southville roads with interest but also some ambivalence. I wish we could be a bit more honest with ourselves about why we are opposed to denser development in Southborough. Must we tell ourselves that we are deeply concerned that families in these proposed developments will have higher asthma risk or have to cross a busy street, so therefore they should not be built? If that concern is genuine, I propose that we do something about a roadway abutting my property with far worse diesel emissions and even-higher-speed vehicles, one that my poor daughter walks to kindergarten beside, surely choking on exhaust the entire way and terrified of being flattened like Wile E. Coyote.

We’re all Southborough-ans here. This is a safe space. The truth is that development like that imposes some venal and mostly minor costs on us but the benefits accrue to someone else, so it’s a simple calculus. Nearly all of us are acutely financially exposed to the downside risk in the price of our homes created by new development. It risks reducing the median income of the town or, more frightfully, the performance statistics of our school district, and it risks creating additional local supply that may depress selling prices. And the traffic—who wants to wait an extra light cycle on 85 so some developer can make a buck and some out-of-towner can settle near the commuter rail?

It’s true that Massachusetts has a painful shortage of housing particularly in the context of its booming biotech economy, and it’s true that in the long run this kind of NIMBY-ism will create problems for the state similar to what the Bay Area is facing today. (Eventually, you do need people within a reasonable radius to work as daycare providers and nurses and first responders.) But those problems are in the future, and they will not be solved by Southborough alone opening its doors. The whole state would have to do the same, and as Howard Rose noted in his earlier letter, 16 towns have taken up the same opposition to this law. Nobody else is doing it, so why should we?

The unfortunate truth is that we are NIMBYs and we have been for some time. Witness the decline in issuance of single-family residential building permits in town for the past 30 years (see page 22 of this report). That feeds on itself. Again, we are not the only town that has done this, and that restriction in housing stock has led to the staggering rise in home prices especially in recent years which we are all now unfortunately incentivized to protect. That is even now a major reason for the decline in school enrollment which is the basis for the current plans to rebuild Neary elementary, which will then further entrench this incentive if it moves forward.

Finally, let’s also at least acknowledge the effort of the Planning Board with this proposal. They have done what they could to appear to be amenable to the state’s efforts to increase housing stock while quietly dragging their feet, even getting the state to relax 80% of the requirement related to distance from the station and pushing the limit of compliance with previous iterations of the map. They have faithfully represented our interest here by buying time, and by voting this proposal down we are just playing along further.

So I will be following suit and voting no on Monday, but I will do so with sadness and a quiet apology to my children for this small contribution to the housing shortage, perpetuating it into the future. What I will not do is couch this position in disingenuous concern for asthma risk, lack of sidewalks, biodiversity or additional car trips, not even the ones coming down Parkerville road to terrorize my daughter from a whole new direction.

Sincerely,

Michael Nute
49 Wildwood Drive