Vote YES for the HCA on March 23rd.
Last December, Lincoln voted 62% to 38% to comply with the HCA by creating zoning bylaws to promote new housing and retail in the heart of Lincoln.
On March 23rd, we must confirm that choice by voting YES at Town Meeting.
In 2022, the town created the HCA Working Group to develop a plan to make Lincoln compliant with the MBTA Communities Act. After more than a year of work, the Working Group presented several zoning options to the town in a series of public meetings. These options reflected a balance between the state's legal requirements, the long term goals of the town, and feedback from residents throughout Lincoln.
Last fall, a group of residents opposed to these plans developed a zoning option that would meet the letter of the law by minimizing the potential for new housing and retail to be built. After discussion, the Selects included their plan in a binding special Town Meeting vote in December to receive guidance on how to proceed.
At that meeting, the second most attended meeting in recent years, residents voted for more housing and retail in the center of town. The Planning Board took the town's mandate and developed bylaws implementing that vision, holding a series of hearings and public meetings for additional feedback. The Town also sent the proposed bylaws to the state for technical pre-approval.
These bylaws must be passed WITH NO AMENDMENTS in order to meet the town's goals and to maintain compliance with the MBTA Communities Act.
VOTE YES to keep Lincoln compliant with the MBTA Communities Act, preserving access to hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding and showing the MBTA our commitment to our Commuter Rail station.
The MBTA Communities Act prohibits towns that are not in compliance from accessing many grant programs that will be important sources of funding in the future. The list of programs is open ended and may be extended over time.
State agencies including the MBTA have also stated that they will include compliance status when prioritizing projects. Being out of compliance risks being put at the bottom of the list for commuter rail improvements and other state services.
The Attorney General has made it clear that following state law is not optional and that towns that do not pass appropriate zoning changes will face lawsuits and other enforcement action. Besides the significant legal costs for the town, a NO vote would send a strong signal to potential residents around the region that they are not welcome here.
VOTE YES to give residents and the Rural Land Foundation the opportunity to improve the Mall and to build homes in Town Center where they can support local business.
Rezoning the Mall will it possible for the RLF to find a partner to redevelop parts of the Mall. Residential housing is needed to make it economically feasible to rebuild the commercial buildings which are in need of modernization as well as to fulfill the RLF’s long-term goal of improving conservation-friendly housing opportunities in Lincoln.
Zoning changes on Codman Road would allow individual property owners to build multi-family homes on their property. No property owner would ever be forced to sell their property to a developer, and developers would have to negotiate with each property owner independently. New homes would have similar dimensional limits as current single-family homes, but with reduced setbacks and a stricter limit on how much area would be required to left clear (50%). Wetlands protections would remain in place, limiting the developable area for many of the properties.
The Mall and Codman Road are important because they are the only areas in Lincoln where residents regularly walk to the commuter rail station and the businesses at the center of town. New residents living here would bring the most benefits for local businesses with the least impact to the environment and traffic.
Both changes allow property owners to move forward without requiring approval at a town meeting if they follow plans that meet the town's planning guidelines and are approved by the Planning Board. Without these changes, projects of the size feasible in these areas are unlikely because of the risks and costs involved in bringing any proposal to Town Meeting. The town’s veto prevents these smaller projects from ever being started, which is one reason why there has been almost no smaller-scale multi-family housing built in the last 50 years.
VOTE YES to show that we want Lincoln to be a place where our Seniors can stay, our children can return to, and our peers can join us in raising their families.
Lincoln is becoming a place where only the wealthy can live. The lowest priced homes suitable for families are listed for $2million - $3million, requiring mortgage payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Families moving here are no longer as young as they used to be, and couples separating or seniors downsizing are forced to leave town because there are no places where they can afford to stay. A generation ago the fire chief lived on Codman Road near the fire station; today teachers and town staff have almost no chance to be part of our community.
All around Massachusetts, homes and rents are unaffordable because the region has not been able to build enough new housing. One major reason for this is the exclusionary zoning in the Boston suburbs that was put in place during the early and mid 20th century during the great “white flight” from the city. Single family zoning and town vetos over multi-family housing has made it difficult to build larger developments (50+ units) and almost impossible to build smaller developments - the individual duplexes, triplexes, and other buildings that are such an important part of the region’s housing stock.
None of us are responsible for how this came to be; most of us did not live here when these laws were enacted, and even those that did live here were children at the time. And these new bylaws will not solve the problem by themselves; there will be no great wave of devlopment if they pass.
But, doing nothing means that we are willing to watch our community and region suffer because of our own fear of change. It means that we are turning our backs on a situation that benefits some of us at the expense of others, regardless of our intentions.
VOTE YES to show that we can make important decisions through thoughtful, fact-based discussion and the collaboration of residents, volunteers, elected boards, and staff.
The proposed HCA bylaws are a result of more than a year of hard work by the town's Board of Selects, Planning Board, and HCA Working Group together with outside consultants and officials at the state level. This process has gone well beyond where most neighboring towns have gone in getting feedback from residents and is a model for how complicated decisions should be made.
In particular, town staff and volunteers have invested hundreds of hours interacting with the public on all sides of the issue in official hearings and forums, on mailing lists and social media, and in private interactions via email and in person.
Voting YES will send the message that this effort is the way we want Lincoln to make tough decisions.
VOTE YES to show that Lincoln CAN DO more and CAN BE more.
To ensure that the town remains compliant with the MBTA Communities Act, both the rezoning of the Mall and the rezoning of the surrounding neighborhoods must be passed in full and WITH NO AMENDMENTS. Any amendments run the risk of making the plan non-compliant with the state's requirements.