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231 M Community Preservation Residents, Municipalities, and the State Collaborating for Smarter Growth Priscilla Geigis, Linda Silka, and Elisabeth M. Hamin assachusetts is widely known for its rich history, and also for its beautiful vernacular architecture and traditional town greens. Massachusetts is home to a population of 6 million people who share 5 million acres, with approximately two-thirds of that population inhabiting the eastern third of the state. But Massachusetts, like other states, is changing. Between 1950 and 1990, Massachusetts experienced a population increase of only 28 percent, yet land development increased by more than 188 percent. West of Boston, growth followed major highways, perpetuating patterns of sprawl development. In the state’s less-developed western region, rural sprawl increased as homes on large lots proliferated on what had been prime farmland, increasing residents’ driving times and reducing the congeniality and liveliness of small town centers. Like other metropolitan and urban centers and urban regions across the country, the Boston metropolitan area has now come to include suburban communities as far as 35 miles away from the city center. At the same time many Massachusetts urban centers, including those outside the Boston area such as Springfield and Holyoke, lost residents to the surrounding suburbs. For example, the City of Worcester lost 15 percent of its population between 1950 and 1990, while the surrounding suburbs grew by more than 250 percent. The town centers that once defined the Massachusetts landscape are quickly disappearing as single-use development drains and obscures traditional growth centers. Massachusetts, like many other states, is now looking for opportunities to reverse these development patterns and revitalize the urban centers and traditional downtowns that were once the heart of our communities so that the unique characteristics of those communities can be maintained. Planning and Zoning in Massachusetts Today Ever since the colonists dumped teainto the Boston Harbor to protest taxationwithout representation ,Massachusetts residents have boasted a strong independence in political decision-making. 17 232 Keeping the Best This independence is reflected in Massachusetts’ 351 separate and distinct cities and towns each governed by a city council or by a town meeting in which residents collectively make community decisions by a majority vote. The politics of local control is legislatively organized in Massachusetts and many other states as home rule, in which local communities can do pretty much what they want as long as it is not in conflict with existing state regulations (although the amount of actual municipal freedom created varies a great deal from state to state, based largely on how state land-use case law has developed). All land within the Commonwealth is contained in incorporated municipalities, whether towns or cities. Regional planning in the Commonwealth is currently limited to regional planning agencies that are largely consultancies, offering fee-for-service planning to smaller communities that cannot afford full-time planners and also collecting regional data and providing advice and some coordination for federal transportation investments. County government was abolished in 1997, further decentralizing local land-use decisions. These decisions are left to local leaders, and most often these leaders are citizen volunteers. In Massachusetts, we have not passed a significant revision of land-use regulations at the state level since the Model Land Use codes were implemented back in the 1950s. The result of this, along with the incremental development of state case law, is many planning situations that planners consider less than ideal (to say the least). The lack of regional coordination among town plans is one of these, as is the lack of requirement for towns to even have a comprehensive plan. Similar issues include the fact that the state Supreme Court found that any zoning which requires lots bigger than about two acres was illegal (thus making real agricultural zoning virtually impossible), and that once granted, development permits are “grandfathered” pretty much indefinitely, in spite of any new municipal zoning or planning (meaning that creating real change through new plans and zoning is significantly hampered by old permits). Perhaps strangest of all, if a building lot has sufficient frontage on a road, a home can be built without municipal approval; this is called the “approval not required” or ANR regulation, and means that for many homes built in the state, the municipality has no say beyond building codes and set-back requirements. Thus, professional and citizen-planners struggle along in our state under less than ideal codes—but in this, Massachusetts is similar to many states in the nation. The good...

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