DECADES AGO, four towns in central Massachusetts were submerged, and another dozen communities lost part of their land when state officials sought to send drinking water east to Boston.
The state took tens of thousands of acres, moved or destroyed people’s homes, and dug up and reburied thousands of graves. The Quabbin Reservoir’s water started to flow in September 1941.
The story of the Quabbin’s creation came to state Rep. Russell Holmes’s mind as he prepared to discuss the MBTA Communities law for a recent CommonWealth Beacon panel discussion. An edited recording of the live panel, which also included Quincy City Council President Ian Cain and Andrea Harris-Long of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), is this week’s episode of The Codcast.
The MBTA law, which calls for 177 cities and towns to zone for as-of-right multi-family housing, has touched off a debate over local control, as the town of Milton fights state officials over the law.
“This is easy to me” compared to what happened with the Quabbin, said Holmes, who represents several Boston neighborhoods, and has argued the MBTA law should have gone even further.
“I think of the folks who were in the Mass. Legislature more than 100 years ago, who said we’re going to go out and we’re going to create the Quabbin Reservoir and flood four towns, and make sure that we had enough water for the Boston metro area,” he said. “That was a hard decision… They made a decision about what they thought was best for the Commonwealth. And so did we.”
State lawmakers passed the law because Massachusetts has a housing crisis, with rising prices and rents forcing people to leave, Holmes said.
But just as the law has led to Milton tangling with state housing officials – and Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who is set on enforcing it – the topic also led to a back-and-forth on the panel between Holmes and Cain, who said the state is forcing transit-oriented development on cities and towns while the MBTA remains an unreliable service.
“The problem originally is the transit and we’re increasing [housing] stock around transit, and it does not work,” Cain said. He continued: “What does that do to that neighborhood? People are going to come with cars anyway. The T still doesn’t work.”
Cain, who recently enrolled in the Republican Party and is taking steps toward a run against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, said he is not “a full adherent to central planning” and wants to protect the local integrity of municipalities. “People want to maintain those neighborhoods,” he said of parts of Quincy, a Boston suburb which saw a development boom in the decade before the MBTA Communities law. “Those are the only neighborhoods left like it. People want to live in single-family homes.”
Even as the debate over state and local control plays out, a larger force looms. While the flooding of the four Massachusetts towns – Dana, Enfield, Prescott and Greenwich – was man-made, climate change promises to wreak more havoc. A subset of communities along the Massachusetts coast – a number of them qualify as MBTA Communities – face shrinking geographic footprints as sea levels rise in the decades to come.
MAPC’s Harris-Long, whose government research organization works with cities and towns, said coastal communities will have to be a little more creative in how they’re addressing their housing needs.
“Shorelines are shrinking, land is going away, being ceded back to the ocean,” she said. “That just means that we have to be smarter with how we use that land, and that’s where zoning really is intended to help you be smart about how you are growing, being smart about how you’re using the precious resource that you do have. And multi-family, multi-unit developments are more efficient. You get more buildings if you can have a couple of stories rather than having a single family home on an acre lot. That’s not a very efficient use of land.”