Are we kind of being pricks?

“Are we kind of being pricks?,” asked a resident at Marblehead’s annual Town Meeting this week in a video that went viral (full disclosure: I live here and serve on the Housing Committee). After four votes over three years, the town approved a zoning overlay to comply with the state’s MBTA Communities Act, this time by concentrating the required multifamily capacity on a private golf course, where it’s all but certain no new housing will be built. Marblehead isn’t alone. A Boston Foundation report from earlier this year sorts municipal responses into three categories: towns that exceeded requirements, towns that achieved incremental reform, and towns whose zoning will yield little or no new housing. The law has put nearly 7,000 units into the pipeline across 34 communities and is the most effective state zoning policy Massachusetts has passed in decades. But its flexibility was a deliberate tradeoff: ask too much and the whole thing collapses politically, ask too little and you get compliance plans built around golf courses. The law lets towns put their zoning capacity on land where nothing is likely to get built, which is why it matters when some guy stands up at a microphone and says what’s actually happening.