Lin Jensen grew up in Beijing, China, with very little.
She studied science and psychology at Peking University and later attended Columbia Business School in New York. When she moved to the United States, she loved the convenience of single-use items such as water bottles and the seemingly never-ending amount of plastic bags.
When her job in finance at Honeywell brought her to Germany, she learned from her colleagues that single-use is bad for the environment. She started using reusable bags when grocery shopping, which took some getting used to, but eventually got her hooked on a modest lifestyle.
“There was no going back. Once I learned, I enjoyed it so much. I felt so good and I started to advocate,” Jensen told the Observer in an interview about her campaign for Planning Board. “Being wasteful was never in me, even though in a short period of time I thought it was okay and I didn’t realize the impact.”
Decades later, Jensen has not wavered from that sustainable lifestyle. After moving to Lexington with her family in 2005, she helped implement town policies on waste reduction, including the policy disallowing the sale of single-use plastic bottles on town property. She also co-founded Lexington Public Schools’ Green Team at Hastings in 2012.
“It’s about being a steward of the world and how to take care of our surroundings. Even as a child, you can do something,” Jensen said. “They don’t have a lot of say, but they do have actions they can take every day by reducing plastic usage in their lunchroom.”
The then-superintendent told Jensen she’d have to make a policy change to ensure the green practices she implemented stay beyond her time.
“I really learned about, not just as an organizer, but also how to change a system,” she said.
Jensen still works as a lunch monitor at the high school, helping students sort their trash.
In addition to her sustainability efforts, Jensen was the PTO president for Hastings Elementary School and her family hosted a METCO student.
In 2016, Jensen became interested in Planning Board happenings and started regularly attending meetings. She agrees with bringing more multifamily housing to town, but as a former financial analyst for a large corporation, she feels the financial analysis and future planning the Board does is not sufficient.
“It was very frustrating for me,” she said, reflecting on the town’s response to the MBTA Communities Act. “To put all 250 acres in that was not very wise for our town. It was very short-term thinking.”
Jensen, who has also served on Town Meeting since 2018, voted “no” on the town’s original compliance plan. She voted “yes” on scaling it back during Town Meeting’s annual session last spring.
Asked why she’s running for the Planning Board, Jensen said because she wants to use her business skills and experience changing town bylaws to manage the amount of multifamily housing Lexington brings on, monitor zoning goals, and keep Lexington on its sustainability track. This is her third time running — she last-minute campaigned to be a write-in in 2023, formally ran in 2024, and took last year off to support Tina McBride’s candidacy.
Sustainability and housing are linked in many different ways, Jensen explained. She worries the town is allowing too many livable houses to be torn down, which is both bad for the environment and the housing crisis.
“The bigger you build, the more material you use, the more energy you have to heat, and the more things people inevitably accumulate inside,” she argued. ”I don’t know if there’s any place in the world where people live, per capita, with more space than in the United States, so I think we can learn to live very efficiently with the smaller space and stuff.”
Tearing down the smaller, older houses in town to put up new houses or condo complexes could worsen the region’s housing problem, Jensen argued. Some of the incoming condos will cost over $1 million, which is not affordable for most people.
“No matter how expensive you build, there are always people who can afford it, but our concern is we want different economic classes in our town,” she said. “That will enrich our life and it’s truly important. The ‘missing middle’ is what we are getting at.”
Fifteen percent of each MBTA Communities Act-compliant development coming to town will be affordable.
Improving how the Planning Board and town conduct future planning is another one of Jensen’s goals if elected. She’s concerned the Planning Board and town aren’t fully considering that more projects could come online and how that could affect the town’s schools, traffic, and services.
There are currently 14 projects approved and being considered by the Planning Board, totaling 1,530 units, and there is room for more under the town’s bylaw. Jensen worries town leaders are waiting for developments to be occupied to see how they affect the town. “That’s not planning,” she said.
“This is really a once-in-a-lifetime [chance] to get it right,” she stressed. “You cannot wait until it’s being built to be like, ‘oops, I should have done this’ or ‘I should have more affordable housing’ or ‘I should have had some more setbacks so the people who live there can have common open space.’ All these things, we should consider early on, and that’s why it’s called planning.”
She believes her experience in the corporate world could help the Board better manage zoning goals.
“No decision can be made without forecasting, and after your forecast, it’s not just done, you have to compare…before you forecast with actuals to see where you are missing or where you’re doing better,” she explained. “That process and feedback is critical in private businesses, but also for a government process.”
Jensen also thinks the Planning Board should create more requirements for developers to meet. She’d like to see larger developments have bigger setbacks, more open space outside, and more common space so developments are smaller and units feel more like homes.
“These are people’s homes, they should enjoy it, have a place for a playground, a place to sit under a tree while waiting for friends and chatting with the neighbors,” she argued. “There are times that you don’t feel at home, like in hotels, and you just want to crash and you don’t know your neighbors and there’s no place to meet anyone. There’s no community. Then there’s a time for ones that are more human-scale where you can meet your neighbors, there’s a place you can congregate.”
Implementing those guardrails will also help the town maintain its trees, which is another goal of hers if elected. The trees provide shade, keep Lexington from having intense heat islands, and purify the air people breathe. The more developments Lexington takes on, the fewer trees the community will benefit from, Jensen argued.
Because she has already successfully altered town bylaws, Jensen thinks she has the experience to change them again to help manage incoming housing.
“I’ve been on Town Meeting for a while and I know how the process works and who to talk to,” she said.
Jensen also wants to increase transparency so residents are fully aware of what kinds of housing could come to town.
“The Planning Board works very hard and there are a lot of meetings, but for me, just having meetings is not enough,” she said. “You have to have the data available for people to see and the data has to be factual.”
If elected, Jensen plans to manage the Planning Board’s ability to meet town goals and regularly inform residents of how they’re doing. That could boost trust in the town and help keep the Board on track, she argued.
“I can help to improve data analysis and be transparent with the results of what we are planning to do, how much density we are expecting, at what speed, how we plan town services so everybody is on the same page,” she explained. “We don’t have to be perfect with our forecast, but we should have a regular interval of reviewing what we have done right compared to what we expected.”
LexObserver asked every candidate running for local office, ‘who is a politician or leader, local or not, who you look up to?’ Jensen said José Mujica, the former president of Uruguay.
Before becoming the nation’s leader, Mujica was a farmer. Once he became president, he refused to live in the official residence and continued to drive his old car because he didn’t want to waste resources. “We can all learn from his modesty,” Jensen said.
“I found his policies are often long-view, not short term. He’s very progressive on a lot of things socially, but also environmentally,” she said. “People [in Uruguay] value the long-term well-being of their country…They think their land is important, their community is important. As long as they have their creature comfort, they don’t need to have the top-of-the-line of everything.”
“That’s just the personal value that I really value a lot — he’s the least wasteful, I think, president, probably in the whole world,” Jensen said. “He doesn’t just make policies, but he walks the talk.”
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