The eunuch populism of the 119th Congress may be on the verge of getting, er, cut short, soon to be followed by the grifter populism of the executive branch.
But populism as a political force isn’t going away. From Andrew Jackson’s Trump-like contempt for democratic checks and balances and love of the spoils system to the hate-filled burn-it-down nihilism of today’s far left and right, it’s the political itch Americans just can’t stop scratching, even when it exacerbates the eczema.
Massachusetts is no exception. And while some of us flatter ourselves as avatars of populism, our self-serving conflation of it with NIMBYism on housing says otherwise.
No one seriously disputes that the extreme scarcity of affordable housing is helping drive human and financial capital out of state, and while we know what’s causing it, recourse is limited. We can’t do anything about the weather and the rise of remote work as an option for people escaping our five-month winters. Major tax cuts would have to go awfully deep to make us competitive with the states people are fleeing to, and only rich ideologues would love the resulting collapse of government-funded services.
So the only thing we can do is try to build our way out of it. That’s why then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed the MBTA Communities Act, a 2021 law passed with near-unanimous legislative approval that required 177 cities and towns to set up at least one district near T service where multifamily housing could be constructed without a special permit.
For the reactionary defenders of exclusionary local zoning, this long-overdue baby step was on par with the iron boot of imperial Japan decimating the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. “Tell the MBTA their buses can’t stop in Bedford anymore,” wrote one over-caffeinated citizen to his local newspaper.
The arguments follow the usual NIMBY script. New multi-family housing would allegedly swamp local infrastructure, flood the streets with a tsunami of extra cars, and sweet mother of pearl, where will they all park? Besides, zoning is a strictly local prerogative; how dare these jackbooted bureaucrats usurp that historic right (which doesn’t actually exist, but why let facts spoil a good tantrum)?
But all that’s a warm-up for the NIMBYites’ core pitch — despite the latitude communities actually do retain over the details of these heinous new zoning districts, allowing new units would “change the character” of their leafy town by letting in folks who are … you know, different.
Read: not our kind.
Last week the state Supreme Judicial Court tossed aside their last-gasp legal effort to overturn the act. Local zoning authority “does not include the power to exempt the town from an obligation imposed by a valid State Law,” they ruled. And the court torched the boost populist-hero state Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s office gave the NIMBYs when it claimed the act’s costs amounted to an unfunded mandate. The plaintiff’s complaint “does not plausibly allege” pertinent facts to that effect, they ruled.
Most of the impacted communities have found a way to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, without apparent evidence of their descent into slum status. But for the holdouts, there’s still hope in the form of Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue, who vows in his “Blueprint for a Better Future” to “eliminate the enforcement of the MBTA Communities Act and provide legal support to cities and towns that do not accept the terms” as a way of empowering them to “maintain the function and culture of their communities.”
This position may help Minogue in some precincts. The populist instinct still runs deep. But his fate and that of ballot question #7, requiring communities to lower minimum lot sizes for single-family homes — single-family, not those terrifying multi-family hovels — to 5,000 square feet will tell us plenty about just how deeply ingrained this fusion of populism with NIMBYism is.
After all, more than half of the state’s single-family zoned land demands a minimum lot size of 40,000 square feet.
That’s a pretty big backyard to keep people out of.
