A few takeaways from the discussion about the proposed new Zoning Ordinance at last week’s on-line meeting of the City Council’s Zoning and Planning Committee.

The materials the Planning Department created, presumably in response to committee input, seem to reflect only some of the goals of the Zoning Redesign. Planning seems to be focused on the technical and aesthetic goals: reducing non-conformity, simplifying processes, and maintaining consistent scale of buildings in a neighborhood. There seems to be less attention to other goals in the Redesign’s brief: increasing housing opportunity and mitigating global climate change. Given the regional housing crisis and the global climate crisis, creating housing options and encouraging less carbon-intensive and use ought to be the top priorities … by a long shot.

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By my count, at least four councilors – Lisle Baker (ward, Ward 7), Lenny Gentile (at-large, Ward 4), Marc Laredo (at-large, Ward 7), and Chris Markiewicz (ward, Ward 4) – openly questioned the need for a zoning re-write in this single meeting, arguing that many of the problems with the zoning code can be addressed with tweaks to the existing code. I have written here and elsewhere that if the City Council enacts a new zoning code that includes single-family-only districts and the other exclusionary zoning tools that were conceived in racism and have created enduring racial segregation, every councilor who votes yes owns that social injustice. The inverse is also true: every councilor who works to defeat efforts to redo our exclusionary zoning code are freshly responsible for the social injustice that remains embedded within it.

The city is deep into a project to overhaul our zoning ordinance. While ridding it of its racist intent and impact are – sadly – not on the list of objectives, failure to do so is on any councilor who supports single-family-only districts, either because they defeat the overhaul and such districts remain in our existing code or they successfully pass a new ordinance that includes such districts anew. At the end of this council’s term, the zoning code will no longer be one they inherited. They will have enacted a new code or, by defeating redesign, will have freshly validated it. In either case, this council will own the code and its segregating impact.

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One of the Planning Department speakers at least twice used the phrase “preserve neighborhood character” or a variant. It’s 2020. No planning professional should be ignorant of the racist history of the phrase. All Planning staff need to read “The Color of Law.” And, stop using any variation of the phrase. But, what, you might ask, if they want to express the perfectly reasonable notion that there are folks would like to keep their neighborhoods as they are? Maybe the difficulty finding good words to express the notion reflects that the notion itself is maybe not so reasonable.

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Councilor Laredo made the argument that, if the objective of the new zoning code is to get rid of the widespread non-conformity created when the zoning code was first implemented and created a whole bunch of pre-existing but non-conforming homes, neighborhoods with existing very large homes should not have size restrictions that would make those existing homes non-conforming and, therefore, limit the size of teardown-replacement homes. Councilor Laredo noted, quite accurately, that an 8,000 sq. ft. new home (post-teardown) on a half-acre lot might be perfectly consistent with its neighborhood.

By that logic, though, a new 8,000 sq. ft. small apartment building on the same size lot, with 6 homes ranging from 1,000 to 1,500 sq. ft. would also not be out-of-scale and should be allowed post-teardown. But Councilor Laredo is already on record as wanting to preserve single-family-only zoning in the neighborhoods in Newton with big homes. When councilors like Councilor Laredo go out of their way to defend 8,000 sq. ft. single-family homes and go out of their way to restrict neighborhoods with existing 8,000 sq. ft. homes to single-family-only zoning, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that their primary concern is not building size, but preserving Newton’s exclusive concentration of wealth. They are not interested in addressing economic, social, and environmental injustices that Newton’s zoning exacerbate. Really, in our era of climate change, how can we possibly justify a zoning code that encourages 8,000 sq. ft. single-family homes but outlaws 1,000 to 1,500 sq. ft. apartments?

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A Planning Department staffer noted, as a positive development, that the total buildout under the current proposal is smaller than under the previous version. How exactly is that going in the right direction?

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Turns out that City Council meetings on Zoom are effective, enlightening, and entertaining, even if the sentiments expressed are sometimes exasperating.