There are many benefits of allowing more home choices near jobs, transit, and local businesses, but the impact on our climate action efforts is one that deserves more attention. By saying “yes” to the places to live our community needs, we can achieve much more than merely contributing our part in addressing the regional housing shortage.
The sustainability benefits of compact, connected communities are backed up by the data. For example, the businesses along the stretch of Route 128 between Lexington and Newton provide over 56,000 well-paying jobs. Unfortunately, less than 1% of those employees actually live nearby due to a lack of available housing. Over 60% are forced to drive from 10 or more miles away (Source: MassDOT’s Beyond Mobility report). Transportation accounts for almost thirty percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and a quarter of all microplastics in the environment are shed by car tires. Getting more people to drive less is a huge win.
More than electrifying our vehicles, adopting stretch energy building codes, or building solar canopies over parking lots, allowing more multi-family housing is the most impactful climate action we can take at the local level. Research by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation shows that every suburban ring you move further away from urban centers increases the average resident’s carbon footprint by 30-40%. If we continue to let the unmet demand for housing in Lexington be pushed to more outlying, exurban areas, we’re passing up the chance to make valuable contributions in fighting the ongoing climate disaster.
Adding more homes of all shapes and sizes to existing neighborhoods helps to prevent sprawling development beyond Lexington. It helps reduce the loss of farmland and sensitive habitats, and the clear-cutting of trees for far-flung, greenfield subdivisions. Apartments, townhouses, triplexes: these are varieties of sustainable and economically beneficial homes that have historically been difficult to build here. Permitting more of these attainable, mixed-income housing types is the most effective way to provide accessible living options for downsizers, and reduce travel distances of local employees, future community members, and maybe — we can hope! — our children and grandchildren.
Why is it important to highlight this right now? Because in 2023, in response to new state law provisions known as MBTA Communities, Lexington updated its zoning to create overlay districts that allow as-of-right development of multi-family housing. Project proposals are now coming in, a few having already made it through the Town’s review process. If every currently submitted project is built, we will see an additional 985 homes added to our town, and there will certainly be more proposals as time goes on. This constitutes a significant change to our community and I’m here to tell you that’s a good thing.
We should be proud and excited about what we’re doing here, and celebrate that our Planning Board saw the MBTA Communities law as an opportunity to make progress towards the priorities expressed in our Lexington NEXT comprehensive plan. Some have questioned why our rezoning went beyond what the law required, but you can ask that about many things we do in Lexington. Leadership by example is what we do here, whether it be implementing the more expensive stretch building code, committing to Zero Waste initiatives, banning plastic water bottles and gas-powered leaf blowers, or providing our children with one of the best educational systems in the state.
Almost everything worth doing to address climate change comes with trade-offs. The decisions we make reflect our willingness to act on our shared values. Our town is resilient enough to navigate the changes and to embrace the opportunities they present.
Jay Luker
Town Meeting Member, Precinct One
Transportation Advisory Committee Member
I fully agree that we need denser housing in the US in general and in Lexington in particular — as exists where I grew up, in Paris, France.
But in France (as in most western countries), schools are funded, like nuclear submarines, etc, by progressive, national income taxes, not by regressive, real estate local taxes as we fund schools in the US.
Since neither our Planning Board nor our Town Meeting will change that quaint, inefficient way of funding schools any time soon, how does Jay Luker think we will balance our budgets in any of the scenarii of MBTA developments listed in tab 1 of https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s_I7RFfVAdjIUpE8YOAFl7M3OA2SwF0j/edit?gid=168010758#gid=168010758?
I hope Jay Luker will let us know here as I am very curious to learn how that can be done.
The state legislature would have to change the system of property taxation. That is not within the control of any local town entity.
All of the municipalities who have studied the matter have found that adding more homes is net fiscally positive, not that we should decide how best to address a housing shortage based on that!
Patrick, I did the math and discovered that with our modest abode our property taxes are only covering about 12% of the cost to educate our three kids. Yikes! I mean I pay excise taxes too, and shop at local businesses, volunteer my time, try to be a good neighbor, stuff like that. But I’m still probably not pulling my full weight.
If we assume your $28k marginal cost per student is correct, I would actually need my property reassessed at $6.3M in order to break even and do my part to “balance our budget”. Maybe we should just stick to building more $6M mansions.
A lot of people believe that new housing could break a city’s budget by bringing in children who need services.This is simply not true. Multifamily housing in general improves municipal budgets because more taxpayers can split the burden of supporting municipal services, especially when they’re not spread out over a huge sprawling suburban landscape.
Here’s an explanation of a study from the journal Regional Science and Urban Economics: https://www.population.fyi/p/united-states-apartments-boost-local
You may also be interested in the fiscal analysis from Strong Towns, which has focused for years on the ways that having more people in a town makes it more sustainable (fiscally and environmentally) to operate town services.
Beautifully said, Jay. I’ve heard you speak in other contexts as well and appreciate your level-headed, reason-based approach to issues.