The town of Hadley has contributed to the housing shortage with its prohibition of more than one housing unit on a single lot. The Gazette recently reported that planners in Hadley may tweak their “inclusionary bylaw,” because it hasn’t resulted in any new subsidized housing since it was enacted in 2006. A “tweak” to a bylaw that they already know hasn’t worked isn’t a solution.

One town planner reportedly referred to the bylaw, which puts the onus on builders to pay for subsidized housing in Hadley as a “noble effort.” However, excluding anything but single-family homes from a community’s zoning bylaw is anything but noble. Excluding others by excluding certain types of housing is discrimination. A noble effort would be to increase housing density in town, a noble effort would be to allow a duplex to be built by right, and a noble effort would be to include zoning for an apartment building.

Passing the cost of dealing with the results of such exclusionary zoning created by Hadley to a builder, then calling it an “inclusionary bylaw” is dishonest and patronizing to anyone who can’t afford a home there. And nobody should require a housing subsidy because such restrictive zoning adopted by so few put home prices out of reach for so many.

Zoning bylaws in Massachusetts are decided by voters at an Annual Town Meeting (ATM). Only 4% attended that ATM in 2007, according to the town clerk (143 out of 3,394 registered voters). The same percentage attended in 2022 (161 out of 3,846 registered voters). These meetings are a legacy of the Puritans of the 1600s, and Hadley was among the first Puritan settlements of the region.

Although some years see more ATM attendance than others, typical attendance at these meetings remains critically low for a democracy to function. We don’t even have local legislators publicly calling out for the needed zoning reforms in the communities they represent — a failure in leadership if there ever was one. It also took Beacon Hill years to pass Housing Choice, which, among other things, reduced the threshold to make a zoning change from a 2/3 supermajority to a simple majority. It was a necessary law, because towns weren’t passing the needed reforms. However, it apparently didn’t go far enough. Who knows how long it will before town officials put forth such measures to be voted on, if ever.

Perhaps Massachusetts should follow the reforms of Oregon and California. Oregon passed a law that allowed for duplexes in single-family zones in any community with a population over 10,000 in 2019, and up to a four-unit building in such zones in communities with more than 25,000 people. California passed a law in 2021 making it a right to build up to a four-unit home in single-family zones. Of course, in the case of California, some communities have reportedly attempted to make it harder to build a multi-unit home in response.

Hadley is not the only town in the region that helped create the housing crisis with restrictive zoning. All towns have some form of such zoning, but it is a problem for all of us. In, “Fixer-Upper: How to Repairs America’s Broken Housing Systems,” by Brookings Institute Fellow, Dr. Jenny Shuetz, she wrote, “Restrictive zoning doesn’t just have harmful impacts on housing markets. The cost and availability of housing interact with labor markets, transportation systems, and economic opportunity more broadly.”

It shouldn’t be the responsibility of builders to fund subsidized housing when a small fraction of voters created the environment to necessitate it. It seems to me that housing policy in Massachusetts should not be the purview of a scarcely attended meeting held once a year. Given the scarce attendance of these annual meetings, it seems most people feel the same way about what is now an antiquated and functionally obsolete form of local government.

Michael Seward lives in Shelburne. ]]>