As we look to 2024, we want to first call out some of 2023’s highlights:
- Your advocacy was vital to Town Meeting’s passing zoning changes that will enable approximately 900 new apartments near transit and make sure Brookline meaningfully complies with the MBTA-CA.
- In May, we elected 26 new pro-housing candidates to Town Meeting, and re-elected all 26 of our endorsed incumbents. Our campaign outreach resulted in an electorate that was more demographically and economically diverse, AND more representative of our town.
- We hosted authors of 3 excellent books who taught us about how anti-housing neighbors successfully restrict new housing resulting in higher housing costs with Katherine Levine Einstein & Maxwell Palmer, the importance of taking action to undo historical segregation with Richard and Leah Rothstein, and the impact grassroots organizing can have on shaping our city with Karilyn Crockett.
We’re looking to carry this momentum forward in 2024!
We want to keep building our pro-housing community; continue educating our friends, neighbors, and elected officials about the importance of building new homes, and the impediments to doing so; identify and advocate for policy changes to welcome new neighbors to Brookline; and more!
One of the most important steps we can take to implement pro-housing reforms is to elect pro-housing candidates to Town Meeting every May. In order to make this happen, we need great candidates, and we think YOU should be that candidate! We’re going to be hosting a couple of info sessions in the coming weeks on running for Town Meeting. If you think you might be interested, or are curious to learn more, sign up here so you’ll be first to get all the details. And if a one-on-one conversation is more your speed, we’re happy to connect that way as well!
It’s a slow week for Brookline board and commissions meetings, so we want to take this opportunity to highlight some of our favorite articles and research from 2023!
- Boston Indicators and researcher Amy Dain issued a phenomenal report titled Exclusionary by Design: An Investigation of Zoning’s Use as a Tool of Race, Class, and Family Exclusion in Boston’s Suburbs, 1920 to Today which delved into 100 years of planning documents and state reports and found widespread use of zoning as a tool of social exclusion against residents of color, especially Black residents; lower-income and working-class residents; families with school-aged children; religious minorities; immigrants; and, in some cases, any newcomers/outsiders at all. Read the report here.
- If you haven’t caught up with the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s excellent series on housing in metro Boston, now’s the time to do so. Of course the piece on Brookline was excellent (read it here), but we also want to highlight the piece on accessory dwelling units.
- A trio of scholars at NYU, Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, & Katherine O’Regan, released a paper reviewing housing cost research and data titled Supply Skepticism Revisited, which found “significant new evidence shows that new construction in a variety of settings decreases, or slows increases in, rents, not only for the city as a whole, but generally also for apartments located close to the new construction.” Read the research paper here, or check out Commonwealth Beacon’s article on the research “Yes, building more housing does lower rents, study says.”
- Planner and housing advocate Nolan Gray wrote an excellent piece for Strong Towns titled “The 6 Zoning Reforms Every Municipality Should Adopt.” Gray advocates for a series of reforms that Brookline / Town Meeting has the power to adopt – eliminate parking minimums, adopting a robust accessory dwelling unit by-law, reduce or eliminate minimum lot mandates, and make more housing types buildable by-right.
- Governor Healy released a wide-ranging housing bond bill in October in which she proposed spending $1.6 billion to improve public housing, creating a new tax on higher-end home sales to fund affordable housing, and making it far easier for property owners to build so-called accessory dwelling units. Check out this excellent summary discussion from GBH News with host Adam Reilly, GBH News State House reporter Katie Lannan, Jesse Kanson-Benanav of Abundant Housing Massachusetts and Brookline’s own Dr. Charles Homer of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.
- The Urban Institute issued a report in June titled Bringing Zoning into Focus: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Zoning’s Relationships to Housing Affordability, Income Distributions, and Segregation in Connecticut by Yonah Freemark, Lydia Lo, Sara C. Bronin. Many of the lessons in this report, and primarily the relationship between zoning policy and residents’ geographic distribution, resonate in Brookline and the Boston area. A key takeaway: “Policymakers considering how to improve access to opportunity while reducing income or racial segregation should evaluate the potential for altering local zoning codes to allow greater diversity of housing construction and tenure types in more places.” Read the report here.
- Here’s a great piece from Jerusalem Demsas, one of our favorite writers on housing production and affordability, in The Atlantic: “Housing Breaks People’s Brains: Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes.”
Thanks so much to everyone who has helped make Brookline for Everyone’s 2023 such a successful one. And here’s to a fantastic 2024!