Zoning updates
The Mayor and City Council recently put out a joint press release that laid out a roadmap for how the citywide rezoning project would continue. I think this is a positive result after months of uncertainty and contention surrounding it.
What’s in the agreement?
The text of the press release is fairly self-explanatory. The long and short of it is that, in return for the Council reverting the Park and Salem node from MX-2 (up to six stories) to MX-1 (up to four stories, with no medical offices allowed), Council would be able to continue with rezoning for the next few years.
Importantly, despite the title of the press release, it’s not really a “restart” in the sense that we’re starting from scratch — our “starting points” are largely draft documents that currently exist, either in Council papers or the Community Development Board, with the only explicit withdrawal being the May 2025 residential rezoning proposal from the CDB. The true restart is in a renewal of consultants’ contracts and, later, an RFP. The major pivots from what was happening before is that Salem and Park would go from MX-2 to MX-1, we would get a communications consultant, Council would outright withdraw the CDB’s May 2025 residential rezoning map and start from Council’s March 2025 map, and residential rezoning would come last.
In terms of ordering, we’re getting through a few of the more pertinent and less-controversial items, on which a lot of work has already been done, before June (Medford Square and Boston Ave/Tufts). Moving forward, I’d like this process to be a lot more boring than it has been thus far.
Background
The events that led to this are quite confusing and scattered around different sources, so I’ll use this space to offer my own one-sided narrative.
Medford is very underfunded, and we need new development in order to bolster our tax base. Zoning is key to this because zoning dictates what can be built in the future. Medford has known this for a while — we have a history of undertaking studies, often in the form of 10-year-visions, that offer a roadmap for what we should do. But city hall has historically ignored those same studies, because execution is more difficult than a vision. The most recent of these was the Medford Comprehensive Plan, which was approved by the Mayor and City Council in early 2023. The Comprehensive Plan is a great document — a detailed, 10-year vision that took years and many meetings to put together, offering many specific recommendations of — among other things — how to change our zoning. This past term, this City Council undertook the task of actually implementing the Comprehensive Plan when we hired consultants on an 18-month contract to overhaul our zoning. (Notably, the contract covered the rezoning itself, but not communications.)
City Council divided this big project into ten parts, each covering either discinct geographical areas or policies. The first of these parts was Mystic Avenue, which was passed uncontroversially, and the second was a green score, which mandated environmentally friendly building practices citywide. The third was Salem Street, which is where things got a bit shaky. The Community Development Board — which legally must recommend changes to any rezoning proposals before Council can change it — recommended 12 changes to Council’s proposal, including one to revert Park and Salem from MX-2 to MX-1 (this would have made it so that it can only go up to four stories and not six and disallowed medical offices there). In response to public comment received that night, I motioned to reject that change and accept the rest, which Council voted on 6-0. This was in March.
Following this, the fourth proposal to come down the pipeline was residential rezoning. This is, by land area, most of the city. Council approved a residential rezoning map (slide 19), which reflected the proposed future land use from the Comprehensive Plan (page 31, or slide 16). Following contemporary feedback to upzone parts of West Medford near the commuter rail — which came from both pro-housing progressives and some of the same residents who had opposed the Salem Street rezoning — the CDB released a new map in May 2025, which proposed allowing 4-6 unit apartments (City Council’s March 2025 version proposed 2-3 family homes in those areas). This draft resulted in a word-of-mouth campaign from those neighborhoods that evolved into a number of “Slow Down Residential Rezoning” lawn signs that covered areas of West Medford and Lawrence Estates (they also linked to this PDF). A few of those residents emailed and met with the Mayor and discouraged her from allowing it to move forward, and the Mayor sent out a robocall to residents informing them of the June 18th Community Development Board meeting in which it would be discussed; this drew an unprecedented 200-300 audience members on Zoom and filled up nearly all physical chairs in the room. The Mayor also sent a letter directly to the CDB chair at the time requesting that they delay residential rezoning until the Fall, and the meeting ended with them voting to delay it until December 17th. This was later followed by an insert in residents’ quarterly tax bills, which emphasized the density of the rezoning proposals.
Around this time, the actual City Council and School Committee elections took place, which saw progressive incumbents and newcomers run against a slate of candidates that campaigned on stopping this rezoning intiative entirely. A few of their individual mailers used the term “radical rezoning”, and some new lawn signs said “Stop Rezoning — Vote Independent”. The 18-month contract with the zoning consultants also came to an end, and in September, the Mayor publicly stated that she would not fund an extension of their contract unless Council reverted Salem and Park from MX-2 to MX-1.
As far as zoning goes, not much really happened between early September and November 3rd. On November 4th, the anti-rezoning Council candidates all lost, except for one incumbent. Council began to discuss the Mayor’s proposal in earnest after the election, and we spent two meetings both railing against the idea of a public quid-pro-quo and trying to nail down a committment of what, specifically, would be funded and what the Mayor would agree to if we were to switch Salem and Park from MX-2 to MX-1. The original contract did not include any funding for a communications consultant, which had clearly been a problem in the past, and the Mayor informally agreed to this. The consensus at the November 18th meeting was that Council would like to see a press release.
After the Council’s Planning and Permitting Chair gave the Mayor some specific bullet points of what she would like to see, I reworked her document into a draft press release and emailed it to the Mayor; coincidentally, the Mayor’s team drafted their own, which they sent to Council around the same time. We collaborated on a list of bullet points, which were discussed and voted on jointly at the December 2nd City Council meeting and released the next day.
Thoughts on the process
In the rezoning story, there are a lot of nuances that only frequent Council watchers would be aware of (like the myriad of arguments surrounding Salem Street and the relationship between rezoning and the proposed Transom real estate development in Medford Square), but the above is the best, shortened description I could offer of the last two years. In my view, the fact that Council could finally reach an agreement with the Mayor is a result of the election clarifying overall public sentiment and Councilors having time to focus on governing and not just campaigning.
I think the working product we got is just fine, but it’s no secret that I dislike the process that led up to this. I think it’s a result of underresourcing of the project, clashes of personalities, and the fact that much of it took place during an election. Moving forward, I think these challenges can be overcome (or at least mitigated): more resources will be dedicated to the project; clash-ey personalities can still work together; and the election is over. I would like rezoning to be a lot more boring moving forward, and I think the resultant agreement will hugely benefit Medford in the years to come.
