Zoning Q&A
Residents rightfully and routinely bring to me a number of their concerns, such as the state of the roads, traffic, and the cost of housing. But, for decades, Medford has stagnated in its development, which has led to a low commercial tax base that resulted in one of the lowest per capita city budgets in Massachusetts, as well as skyrocketing housing prices. Prop 2.5 squeezes city budgets by ensuring that they’re eaten by inflation over time, so without periodic overrides of Prop 2.5 or substantial expansion of a commercial tax base, we are hamstrung in our efforts to adequately serve residents. Last year, our success in Medford’s first-ever Prop 2.5 override gave us modest funds to apply an immediate fix on post-COVID fiscal cliffs (as well as much-needed investments in our schools), but we need to start addressing our long-term housing crisis and tax base with the most powerful tool that the city has at its disposal to spur development: zoning laws. That is exactly what the City is doing right now.
Zoning dictates what can be built in the future and where. Development’s happening already, but because our current zoning is an unclear mess, developers usually just go parcel by parcel and routinely seek variances to build what they want to build anyway (usually to change buildings from one nonconforming use to another nonconforming use), without a clear overarching plan for the city. And what is allowed right now is not great: last summer, Medford’s planning office had proposals from developers to build a car wash on Mystic Avenue and residential units with no ground floor commercial storefronts right on Salem Street, neither of which would contribute to a vibrant city with a healthy commercial tax base. We need consistent rules and language in our zoning to guide what makes sense for today and across the city as a whole.
The City of Medford has conducted studies that repeatedly called for zoning changes since at least the mid-2000s, with five in the last ten years that variously suggest improvements to Medford Square, ways to increase housing production, traffic pattern improvements, ways to adapt to the changing climate, as well as a comprehensive plan that had a steering committee of 21 residents and synthesized all of these findings. These studies combined public and expert feedback and ultimately suggested densifying certain areas of the city, allowing incentives to build affordable housing, clarifying our zoning to make it friendlier for commercial development, and mandating environmentally friendly business practices.
Following modest zoning changes in 2022, Medford signed an 18-month contract with Innes Associates in early 2024 to conduct a comprehensive zoning overhaul that implements the zoning-related recommendations of these plans, each of which is publicly available on the City’s zoning webpage. The process and timeline established as part of this contract outlined ten topics to be reviewed between January 2024 and June 2025, each with its own proposed zoning amendment. On each of these topics, the City has held multiple public Council committee meetings, in addition to Q&A sessions, to discuss the details of each, before submitting them to our colleagues on the Community Development Board, who have held their own public hearings to review the proposals and make recommendations. In my personal capacity, I’ve written about different zoning policies multiple times on this blog. In addition to the public engagement that contributed to the plans and analyses at the foundation of this process, engagement of residents throughout the zoning reform process has been substantial, with the residential rezoning proposal alone having received over 150 unique individuals submitting either spoken or written public comment on it.
I’ve been talking to residents for months about this process, so I’m writing up this Q&A to summarize many of the most common questions and answers I’ve heard. Additionally, my colleague wrote up a much more technical Q&A recently on the residential rezoning proposal, which is worth checking out.
Background
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Zoning dictates broadly what can be built in a particular parcel of land in the future, including whether the property is residential or commercial, how high it can be built, the minimum allowable lot size on which something can be built, and so on. It’s an incentive system. It doesn’t change current buildings; if a house burns down, it can be rebuilt as it was regardless of zoning. But it does dictate what a building can be replaced with in the future, thus providing an overall vision for how a city ought to look decades in the future.
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Development’s happening to an extent already, but because our current zoning is an unclear mess, developers usually just go parcel by parcel and routinely seek variances to build what they want to build anyway. Usually, they’re altering a building that’s already nonconforming under our current zoning and seeking another variance that is also nonconforming. So, even as individual building does happen, it doesn’t happen with much of an overall plan in mind. Many buildings in Medford are noncompliant with the current zoning, and so they can’t be built on, altered, or added to legally without such a variance. And what is allowed right now is not great: last summer, Medford’s planning office had proposals from developers to build a car wash on Mystic Avenue and residential units with no ground floor commercial storefronts right on Salem Street, neither of which would contribute to a vibrant city with a healthy commercial tax base. Because of Medford’s current zoning system, in which it is routine to just seek and grant variances, it’s also difficult to attract quality developers.
We need consistent rules and language in our zoning to guide what makes sense for today and across the city as a whole.
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Many residents rightfully bring to City Council a number of issues, including skyrocketing housing prices, increased taxes, too much traffic, the poor state of the roads, and lack of options for seniors who might want to downsize. Medford’s historic inaction and neglect of its own development has only exacerbated these problems.
Our historic lack of development means that, today, we don’t have much funding for a city of our size. The override that was passed last November was necessary to avoid layoffs in the Medford Public School system, but it was ultimately a tradeoff between the needs of young families with kids and fixed-income residents who have trouble paying more property taxes. It was an immediate fix, done with the idea that we would make long-term investments going forward. In order to actually provide services that residents demand, we need to expand our commercial tax base, and rezoning to allow more commercial development is the best lever the city has to influence that.
Additionally, this country is going through a housing crisis, caused largely by growing demand and static housing supply, and Medford is not exempt from that. 58% of Medford’s housing stock was built before 1939 and only 5% since 2000. While there have been particular developments (i.e. Station Landing), the fact is that Medford’s barely added to its limited supply of housing at a time when it’s desperately needed.
All of these problems are interrelated. For instance, residents often bring up traffic problems; when you have zoning that does not allow density near a train station, you create an environment in which it is difficult to get around without a car, which increases traffic.
The Current Rezoning Process
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Changes to zoning are dictated by state law. At minimum, Council must introduce a zoning measure, then refer it to the Community Development Board (which is appointed solely by the mayor in Medford due to a home rule petition from 1974, though under state law they are confirmed by the Council), which holds a public hearing, refers it back to City Council with their recommendations, City Council holds another public hearing, and, finally, votes on it. If two-thirds of Council vote in favor, the zoning is ordained. In practice, Council and the CDB have each held multiple public hearings on each stage of the zoning process.
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Studies on this issue have been done ad nauseum, even as the issues I’ve described above have worsened in a shifting global economy. But, while it’s easy to conduct a study and show a vision for the future, it’s difficult to act on that study, and thus many of them have simply been shelved. This rezoning process is really the long-delayed execution phase. While the idea of revitalizing the city has been discussed for even longer, these are a few of the major studies that have been conducted in recent years:
Medford Square and the Mystic River: Reconnection, revitalization, and redevelopment (2006)
The Medford Square Priority Roadways Improvement Study (2018)
Additionally, there were studies performed during phases of the zoning reforms done during the 2020-2022 Council term, though the records for these are mainly in obscure Council/Community Development Board meeting minutes. And the consultants we’re currently working with have done their own studies during the process, but, again, these tend to be buried in meeting minutes of the Council and Community Development Board.
And all of these are just the studies commissioned by Medford itself. There are others that have been and continue to be conducted by other bodies on roads in Medford, such as MassDot’s Wellington Circle Study (2025) and Somerville’s study on the Broadway corridor (2024).
This current zoning overhaul is really being done with the studies from 2022 and onward in mind. In particular, it’s an execution of the Medford Comprehensive Plan, which had a steering committee of 21 residents and took huge amounts of resident feedback. At the beginning of this term, in early 2024, Medford City Council, the Office of Planning, Development, and Sustainability, and Innes Associates, a consulting firm, began to actually execute on these years and years of plans to start the rezoning process.
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At the start of this term, Council initiated the process of completely rezoning the city. Practically, a comprehensive zoning overhaul requires that it be chunked up into parts that make sense and can be analyzed in themselves. This took a significant amount of planning during the start of the term to even find out how to do this. It’s being divided both geographically and by general policies that affect the whole city. There are ten distinct parts of the zoning overhaul, as follows:
Mystic Avenue - Ordained
Salem Street - Ordained
Green Score - Ordained - A set of requirements and incentives for developers to meet environmental standards.
Residential Zoning - Covers all purely residential areas not covered by the other proposals. Affects the largest area overall.
Accessory Dwelling Units - Dictates what additions residential property owners can make to their homes, which is particularly important because state laws around ADUs recently updated.
Tufts University Institutional Zone - A unique zone that affects Tufts
Other Corridors - Includes Boston Ave, Main Street, Broadway, parts of High Street, and Harvard Street.
Medford Square
West Medford Square
Parking/Transportation Demand Management - A set of ordinances to dictate parking policy and incentives to handle the impacts of traffic.
(Note that I’m only linking to the ordained proposals, since the others are still working documents, but the current drafts of all of them can be found on the city’s webpage.)
Each of these proposals is discussed multiple times in Council committees, referred to the CDB, and we wait for them to hold their own public hearings and offer recommendations. Once they refer it back, Council can then deliberate further and vote on it.
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First, the studies mentioned above took a substantial amount of resident feedback into account in developing those recommendations, and this process is the execution phase of parts of those studies. So even before Council started to work on the current rezoning process in early 2024, a substantial amount of public feedback was taken into account.
For the rezoning itself, there are basic legal requirements for communication to residents about these changes, which the city has been doing, though we’ve used the resources available to us to exceed those minimum requirements. Localized changes or site plan reviews require a mailer be sent to residents abutting the area being rezoned. This isn’t a requirement for general policies that affect nearly all of the city, but it is for localized changes. So, with the above list, Mystic Ave and Salem Street residents were notified via mail, but the whole city didn’t get a mailer to be notified of the Green Score, since that is a general policy that affects the whole city. In some cases, residents received robocalls about these proposals. Additionally, all of the CDB meetings and the City Council committee meetings related to zoning are public, and residents can and have spoken at them.
Outside of the legal requirements, the city also maintains a zoning webpage that received praise from the Massachusetts Municipal Association for its clarity, as well as an interactive online viewer. Additionally, the city conducted six public Q&A sessions on different proposals, though only four of them were recorded and posted online. I wrote last month about some of the public feedback for the residential rezoning proposal, and I’ve since been personally maintaining a spreadsheet of my own that tracks unique residents who have written to me or who have spoken at public meetings, noting their opinions on the rezoning effort. Between 180 and 200 so far have reached out.
While the City Council and Planning Office have been putting a lot of effort into outreach, it costs money to put out robocalls and citywide mailers, which reach a wider number of residents. More recently, the Mayor has used these systems to communicate more widely to residents about the rezoning proposal.
So, the more recent explosion in interest is really due to a few factors related to the residential rezoning proposal. First, the Mayor sent out a robocall and robotext to all residents just preceding the June 18th Community Development Board meeting (in which they discussed the residential proposal; it was attended by around 300 people, both virtually and in person), which was shortly followed by a letter on June 17th from the Mayor to the Chair of the Community Development Board asking her to delay voting on the proposal until the Fall. This was followed by a notification about the proposal that came with residents’ tax bills.
Common Resident Concerns
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The common view I hear is that more people leads to more cars leads to worsening traffic leads to worsening roads. The reality is that more housing around commuter stops leads to less reliance on cars leads to fewer cars, while more people leads to higher tax revenue leads to more resources to repair our roads. A major goal of this rezoning is to lessen reliance on cars. This doesn’t mean to have a city where nobody has a car, it means to make a city where it is even possible to live without one. That’s why most of the residential rezoning proposal contains increased density around T stops, like the West Medford Commuter Rail, as well as major bus routes. Additionally, higher demand in these areas would incentivize the MBTA to make bus and train services more reliable.
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Rezoning helps with the housing crisis in two ways. First, it contains incentives to build affordable housing (as defined by the state); in UR2 subdistricts, a fourth story may be built if incentive requirements are met, as well as the mixed-use districts. Second, while some new buildings may be pricier, more housing, on the whole, makes it more affordable. 48% of Medford’s housing stock was built before 1939, with 5.7% built between 2000 and 2010 and 5.6% between 2010 and 2020. Since new building both in Medford and statewide has been slow, Medford is analogous to car dealership that’s selling 1997 Toyota Corollas for $70,000 apiece, because that’s what happens when supply is static while demand skyrockets. So, increasing the supply, even if the newer supply is expensive, would overall help the housing market.
(Note that the most credible source of data on building age is the MAPC, but their data sources seems to be only current as of 2013.)
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As said above, the new zoning is based on the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and, from an environmental perspective, is much more protective of green space than existing zoning. It establishes a new 20% open space minimum in proposed NR districts and 15% open space minimum in proposed UR districts (see page 12; currently there is no open space minimum for single family construction), a new limit on impermeable surfaces, and a Green Score program for all larger developments. This, in concert with new stormwater regulations, will make it impossible for the fully paved over backyards and massive impermeable surfaces we currently see far too often in Medford.
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As stated in the residential rezoning webpage, this zoning’s Historic Conversion allows for the conversion of an existing structure that is a minimum of 70 years old and originally designed as one unit to be renovated to contain multiple units, with no change to the building’s exterior. The goal of this mechanism is to allow for more small and diverse housing options, provide another mechanism for incrementally increasing density across the City, and ensure that development can occur while preserving and maintaining cultural heritage and historical character.
Additionally, Medford has two current historic districts and a third (the South Street district) that was voted on by City Council this past term. These contain more stringent protections for historic buildings.
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This question was addressed directly by the School Committee Vice-Chair in a recent email she sent out; I would also recommend looking at the Medford School Committee’s May 20th meeting in which they discussed this issue, as well as the Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s report, which states that the correlation between new housing and increased school enrollment is vastly overstated. Essentially the conventional wisdom that new housing development leads to increased public school enrollment doesn’t really hold water, particularly since public school enrollment has been decreasing for decades due to a number of factors like demographic changes and declining birth rates.
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Medford and many other municipalities in the Commonwealth are working to update older water and sewer systems, and development under any new zoning is going to happen very incrementally, far slower than the rate of repairs to our current sewer systems. Furthermore, the city reviews utility plans and capacity as part of the permitting and site plan review processes. Thus, developers support utility upgrades in order to get the permits for big projects in the first palce. Currently, the Department of Public Works is undertaking a lead pipe replacement program, while City Council is undertaking an effort to update our outdated linkage fees, which are fees that developers pay to Medford for, among other things, water and sewer updates.
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I would recommend reading about the residential rezoning proposal on the city’s official webpage as well as my colleague’s Q&A that gets into technical specifics. In general, it is an effort to make Medford’s distribution of housing make sense given where our biggest roadways and transportation hubs are currently located.
Many parts of Medford are single-family-exclusive and the rezoning will allow “gentle density” near major roadways and transit hubs, which is a balanced way to ease the housing crisis. Now, does that mean that developers will immediately buy up a street full of well-kept single family home and convert all of them into three-story multi-units, plus an ADU? No. (Though I’ve seen this sentiment repeatedly used as a fear-mongering tactic — it is campaign season, after all.) It will take decades to see a substantial effect from this. It’s better to see rezoning as a long-term and much-needed panacea to the housing crisis rather than something that will fundamentally alter the character of any given neighborhood.
If you’d like clarification or have more questions, feel free to reach out.
