by Philippe Thibault

Providing housing is a major concern regionally: for the individual seeking accommodations, for the property owner leasing apartments, for the builder to have adequate housing stock to sell.

Local businesses have interest in housing for a new customer base the homes can provide. Moreover, new residents provide additional staff.

Our municipalities also rely on new homes and residents, for the same reasons as the businesses. New growth means new revenues to supplement the existing tax base.

Businesses manage their growth by planning outlays of money for new equipment and staffing requirements. Anybody would think they were foolish not to. We would think them more foolish to plan their failings, though it does happen through benign neglect, putting off needed upgrades and employee needs until a breaking point, and then waiting until it gets a little worse.

Housing is at the point of benign neglect throughout the northeast and in many portions of the country.

Dracut has its own crisis with affordable housing for seniors and emerging youth abysmally scarce. Much like any other commodity, when inventory is low and the demand is high, the price rises too.

Recently on Facebook I saw a chart comparing the cost of housing rising significantly after 1970. This same chart showed the average individual income rising at a much slower rate.

My first attempt at analysis is to remember that there are three types of lies: there are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics.

What was the point of the author trying to effectuate with this graph? I suspect the increase of average hourly wages.

This, however, will not increase housing stock and thus perpetuate the disparity between the two data points. It reminds me of the monologue in “It’s a Wonderful Life” that George Bailey delivers to Mr. Potter about waiting and saving for a home.

The Bailey Building and Loan had one less obstacle to overcome in providing reasonably priced homes than they have in the present day, Zoning Bylaws.

Zoning Bylaws first started to come into use in Massachusetts during the 1920’s. These new laws regulated construction and uses for the most part. There were some amendments to the legislation in 1921 and 1925.

Dracut had a surge of land development during those periods. The section of the Navy Yard where I reside was known as Hillside Garden, with five thousand square foot lots on forty-foot-wide streets. Many of the buyers who wanted larger yards purchased additional lots. I am a beneficiary of the foresight of the previous owners of my home with three lots. I have one of the larger yards in the neighborhood. It is enough grass for me to cut and maintain.

These regulations were largely left unaltered until 1954, with the enactment of Chapter 40A providing authority to municipalities to establish local zoning bylaws and ordinances. The law also permitted the establishment of planning boards to promulgate zoning bylaws and oversee their implementation.

More rural communities were slower to adopt these provisions, and zoning was still loosely codified.

The Massachusetts State Legislature enacted Comprehensive Permit Law, also known as Chapter 40B. This was done to provide an avenue for affordable housing by simplifying the permitting process of multiple boards into a single committee, the Zoning Board of Appeals.

The aim of the law was to provide variances and waivers to local zoning and conservation regulations if there was a greater need for affordable housing. Affordable is determined by a formula of family size, income level at a central population hub.

Somewhere along the time trail, the attitude shifted in zoning bylaws, from planning what was desirable to the exclusionary NIMBY, Not in My Back Yard.

Dracut has changed to one-acre requirements for housing, but only twenty-two thousand square feet for a business. There are severe requirements and restrictions when a business use abuts a residential use, to the detriment of the business landowner.

With the 1985 Dracut Zoning Bylaw, there were well over one hundred special permit requirements for differing uses of land. There were fewer by right applications and most of those were reserved for municipal (government) uses.

The 2020 Dracut Master Plan recognized the detriment to economic development within the community.

An overarching theme of the Master Plan was the review and rewrite of the Zoning Bylaws. That mission is currently underway. Unfortunately, the major push seems to be making the document gender neutral with little substantive effort to change the generational mindset of the 1980’s.

With the State’s current effort to create housing utilizing the MBTA Communities Law, there is greater reluctance, or should I say obstinance to comply and make zoning districts to provide capacity for housing.

Is this the unstoppable force colliding with an unmovable object?

Local opposition would argue the right to self-govern. Dracut’s local zoning is determined by the citizens wishing to keep “Dracut looking like Dracut”. I am not entirely sure what that means and I am sure those advocates cannot pin it down either.

Is there a specific era that they wish to maintain for the community standard? Without historic or architectural restrictions, how can Dracut maintain any specific appearance?

From the point of view of housing advocates, the challenge is overcoming “NIMBY.”

I find it ironic that those opposed to having housing projects near their neighborhoods deny the NIMBY moniker. People will do intellectual gymnastics to say they are not against housing, but not in their overcrowded neighborhood of one acre lots. I get it that these developments were done under one-acre requirements, but perhaps that is anomalous to zoning. Until the early 1980’s, Dracut had a ten thousand square foot lot requirement.

The zoning pendulum keeps swinging with the need for both market rate and affordable housing being unmet and the gatekeepers of a community’s zoning and growth leery and xenophobic to outside progress. Planning Boards and Zoning Boards of Appeals alike are practically adversarial with developments and the developers today.

This fear has become so pervasive that a new term has entered the lexicon. BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.