Dispatches from Marblehead

By now you’ve probably seen the viral clip of Marblehead resident David Modica asking his fellow townspeople the question heard ‘round the internet. Jerusalem Demsas wrote about it in The Argument, making the case that Marblehead’s decision to zone a golf course for housing (knowing nothing would ever get built) is what happens when local democracy mediates land-use decisions. She’s right.

But I sit on Marblehead’s Housing Committee, and I’ve been watching the aftermath up close. At our May 12 meeting, the mood, in part, was relief: the years-long 3A fight was finally over, compliance was in sight, and the town could stop bleeding resources on it. I get it. The town is in a budget crisis, and the committee chair’s own job has been on the line through all of this. Still, my reaction was that compliance isn’t the right metric for the Housing Committee, housing production is.

What strikes me, though, is that most of the people involved aren’t acting in bad faith, they’re operating within constraints they didn’t design. Voters first accepted (through record-breaking attendance at Town Meeting) and then rejected (through a dormant referendum process) the more meaningful plan. The state signed off on the weaker one. Everyone did their job, and the system still produced the wrong outcome.

We just started a team book club reading Alain Bertaud’s Order Without Design, and our first discussion kept circling this tension. Planners often want to do the right thing but are hemmed in by systems that make good outcomes structurally hard. Marblehead is a small-scale version of that story.