I 
posted something a while back that drew on Alice Ingerson’s research about the history of zoning in Newton. I just learned that Alice continued and expanded her research and gave a presentation about it for Historic Newton in January.
I’m sorry to have missed her lecture but here’s a link to a PDF of the presentation – it’s chock full of interesting maps, quotes, and facts and historical background.
What’s most interesting is that 100 years later, all of the same issues and concerns about zoning are being debated – everything from supporting economic diversity, maintaining property values, discouraging knockdowns, geographic divides in the city, pace of development, racial/ethnic issues, etc.
The only topic from 1925 that I haven’t heard much discussion of in today’s zoning talk is “airships”.
At the May 1925 public hearing, resident Amand C. Band opposed single-residence district because “only 10% of the residents of Massachusetts lived in single-family houses, [which] required an income of at least five thousand dollars a year. … He also predicted that “within five or ten years, the development of airships would mean that the people of such incomes would commute from places over a hundred miles away and that they would not want to live in Newton anyway”. (Newton Graphic, May 9, 1925)
The one thread that seems to run through all of this zoning history is that with each wave of new zoning regulations in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s it became harder and harder to build new housing in Newton – single family only, bigger minimum lots sizes, bigger set backs, etc. An ironic part of all this, is that a very large fraction of the pre-zoning housing in the city (e.g Nonantum, Upper Falls, Newton Corner, and much of Newtonville and West Newton) could not be built today due to ever more restrictive zoning over the years.
Many thanks to Alice Ingerson and Historic Newton for putting together and making available this timely history
I wonder how it differed from almost any other suburb zoning in the boston metro area at that time?
Are we describing unique to Newton or pretty much any suburb in usa at that time?
@Bugek – Newton actually led the way in introducing the concept of single-family-only housing in its zoning code in the 1920’s. That said, most suburban towns both here and in other metropolitan areas around the country also followed suit with a similar trajectory in their zoning codes over the course of the 20th century.
Massachusett’s 40B housing rules were adopted for exactly that reason – i.e. virtually all of Boston suburban towns in the 20th century had institutionalized a whole host of policies, primarily in their zoning codes, to limit construction of cheaper housing – i.e. none of that is a Newton-only issue.
Something I noticed long ago is that there are certain places that have a special hold for lots of people. They don’t look like other places and it’s their “different-ness” that sets them apart and is the key to their appeal.
In Newton, my neighborhood of Upper Falls has some of that. Provincetown is a great example, so is Newport RI. What all three of those places have in common is that they are 99% in violation of all standard principles of American zoning codes. They only exist because they pre-date the introduction of zoning.
It strikes me that there is some fatal flaw in much of our approach to zoning if all the places we tend to love are completly illegal under today’s general zoning principles.
Jerry,
An express purpose of zoning in Newton was to reduce growth, hence the lot size minimums that make most of Newton “illegal” (more precisely, non-conforming).
I wouldn’t say that growth-limiting, exclusionary zoning is a standard “principle.” Somerville and Cambridge have introduced (and Somerville has passed) zoning that allows a lot more of what you like about Upper Falls.
Zoning reflects values.
Or to view it differently:
People move from the cities to suburbs for some peace and extra space, as demand grew… existing residents wanted to retain the original reasons they move out of the city so they lobbied for zoning changes
Why imply anything nefarious? Are people not entitled to want some space?
@Bugek – Yes, that is all true too. As @fignewtonville says – more than one thing can be true at the same time.
The upshot is the same though – a severe regional housing shortage.
As for the nefarious parts, they are indeed true too.
From Alice’s history (above)… during the first zoning debate in the 20’s, just as the country had passed the Emergency Quota Act to limit immigration from undesirable countries, this ran in the Newton Graphic
So I agree that there are all kinds of perfectly sound and reasonable rationale’s for virtually every zoning rule but I think it’s always a good thing to be aware that there have always been less savory and healthy rationale’s in play as well.
Personally, I think the overwhelming amount of zoning decisions over the years have been made primarily in good faith for reasons like you mention – that said, they still have had lots of unintended (and in some cases intended) consequences.
Mr. Band with his somewhat tenuous abilities as a prognosticator would have be felt right at home on this blog.
The pdf is outstanding and should be required reading. Clearly was economic superiority driven with population control as well. Racism….not so much. To label this racist as we understand the term now is unfair. Now, if you want to talk about keeping out poor people, that’s another story.
it posted to fast. “more like ethnist than racist”
FYI, the Pioneer Institute is suggesting that even after vaccination is widespread, many people who can work remotely will choose to move away from Boston, to places where their housing dollars go farther (link below). So Mr. Band might actually have had a point, except that instead of “airships” the critical technology will be high-speed WiFi.
https://pioneerinstitute.org/pioneer-research/barriers-to-exit-lowered-in-high-cost-states-as-pandemic-related-technologies-changed-outlook/
Irrational fears of disease and epidemics may also have played a role in some of the zoning decisions. The exodus of upper middle class and professional people from Boston to Newton from the 1870’s to the early 20th century was made possible in large measure by constant improvements in commuter rail service between the two cities. But another driving force was the widespread belief that Newton was simply a far healthier place to live and bring up a family. A single family home with a large lot epitomized both upward mobility and a kind of health insurance policy. Much of the settled population of this area was scared to death of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that landed here during this extended period. Wave after wave were crammed 20 or more into grossly substandard, flood prone and rat infested dwellings where disease ran rampant. Crime and assimilation concerns were there, but the overriding fear was that these new immigrants were “naturally dirty” and spread disease because of who they were and not because of where they were forced to live. I heard a lot of nonsense related to this when I was a kid growing up in the Highlands. For some reason there was particular concern by some on the fringe about diseases that were supposedly seeping into Newton from Italian owned fruit and vegetable wagons around Quincy Market. We knew too many Italian kids and their families in Upper Falls (with large vegetable gardens) to take any of this seriously.
Every time the Pioneer institute is mentioned, it should be with the qualifier, “a right-wing anti-tax and pro-privatization think tank”. If the Globe would get over their feeling that they need to both-sides otherwise uncontroversial issues and stop mentioning them a dozen times a week, our regional discourse would be much better off.
In any case, that PDF is fascinating, so thank you for that (as well as the rest of your work on the issue), I very much appreciate it. Most of my favorite parts of Newton are the most non-conforming (Newtonville, Nonantum… the north side in general), and it’s not shocking that my views on both zoning and the regional housing shortage in general follow in line with that. I learned something today, and that is always good!
There was also some fierce opposition to the MBTA extending service along what’s now the D Line when the old commuter rail service went under. There was some concern about a Boston based operation controlling Newton’s transit needs, but even more about the kind of people that would now be able to freely come here and “roam around”.
@Jerry Reilly. I an earlier comment on this post, you noted the certain appeal of villages like Upper Falls in large measure because the homes, factories and office buildings were constructed before zoning laws were in effect. I’ve walked from my home in the Highlands to Upper Falls a good 30 times since the pandemic began and can attest to the special appeal of that architecture, but also the people that live there. Upper Falls and Nonantum are the two friendliest villages in Newton.
That said, I’ve also done even more walking in Newton Highlands, particularly on the streets bordering the village center that we proposed as a local historic district (LHD) a few years back. Rodney Barker and I mulled over the possibility of an LHD in this area at least two years before we actually proposed its consideration. We did so after we discovered that this was the very area we took visitors to when showing our city off because of the diverse forms of irreplaceable residential architecture, an almost perfectly preserved village center and the ambience that was there when I was a kid.
I personally think that there are ways to preserve the essence of what’s in our two villages while allowing a lot more people of all means to live here, but it will require added vision, tolerance, patience, sensitivity and humility that too often gets lost in the perceived need to build big and build quick. We also need designs and policies that will encourage the growth of stronger communities within each village as an antidote to growing societal loneliness and isolation. I can attest that chunks of Europe, including Ireland, have been wrestling with this dilemma for more than a decade.
I’ve spent time biking through parts of New England, from Maine to the Cape to Vermont to Newton, and a familiar pattern emerges. You are essentially going from village to village, and as you get closer to the villages you feel the landscape itself change. Houses grow closer together, closer to the road, turning to white clapboard and, if you’re closer to a mill town or a city, red brick buildings start popping up. It’s like taking a step back in time, it feels human in scope.
In places like Vermont the space between towns is filled by forest or farmland. Closer to the coast (Boston, Portland, Providence) that space is filled by homes built since 1950. Those spaces feel distant and out of scale with the smaller villages. They’re really designed for cars, so houses are back from the main road… and that road is wider than when you get closer to a village.
Newton follows that same pattern, with older villages and houses, filled with spaces in between that have homes on 1/4 or 1/8 acre lots… all built since the time of the automobile. It’s not that we need to preserve all of Newton, it’s that we need to understand how to build for people and not for cars.