With Question 7’s fate still undecided statewide, voters in the Pioneer Valley have already drawn their lines. Amherst, Northampton and Easthampton backed the measure to allow smaller residential lots, while rural Hampshire County towns rejected it.
Question 7 would override zoning in most municipalities to allow single-family homes on residentially zoned lots of at least 5,000 square feet, as long as the lot has at least 50 feet of frontage and access to public sewer and water.
As of 12:15 p.m. Thursday, with 96% of the expected vote counted, 49.3% of voters statewide supported the measure and 50.7% opposed it, according to the Associated Press.
Raymond La Raja, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the vote on Question 7 did not split Democrats and Republicans so much as renters and homeowners.
La Raja said support likely breaks down along geographic lines. Voters in cities, where housing costs are most visible, may have more reason to vote “yes,” while it’s harder for people in rural towns to see the benefits, he said.
“I think a lot of people in the suburbs who already have homes in these expensive suburbs outside Boston, they don’t want to change the character of their town,” La Raja said.
La Raja’s theory held in Hampshire County, where municipalities with large student populations and more rental housing voted in favor of Question 7’s smaller lot sizes, while less densely populated towns voted against it.
Unofficial election results show that 4,995 Amherst residents voted in favor of the ballot question while 2,811 voted against it. In Northampton, 8,742 voters supported the ballot question while 5,182 voted against it.
The wide support for Question 7 by Amherst voters was noted at Wednesday’s Planning Board meeting by member Jerah Smith. The board is regularly looking for ways to increase the housing stock in town through zoning changes.
Amherst requires minimum lot sizes of 12,000 square feet in some zoning districts, though lots can be smaller in certain projects, such as cluster developments. Smith said Amherst’s support for smaller lot sizes was among the highest in the state and the region.
“So that’s a bylaw change that we could just do locally,” Planning Board Chairman Doug Marshall said.
“For now, food for thought,” Smith responded.
Northampton’s minimums are already lower than Amherst’s, according to Carolyn Misch, the city’s director of planning and sustainability. Some zoning districts allow lots as small as 3,750 square feet with 50 feet of frontage, and others set the minimum at 5,000 square feet. Outside the city’s denser districts, minimum lot sizes can reach 80,000 square feet, or nearly 2 acres.
Although Northampton passed the ballot question by a significant margin, Misch said she hoped the measure would fail at the state level, explaining that she considered the idea to be shortsighted and written in a way that disregards municipalities’ planning processes and other conditions that might make a district less than ideal for dense housing production.
Misch explained that in Northampton, for instance, some housing districts have minimum lot sizes that are larger than 5,000 square feet in order to preserve space for groundwater recharge and drinking water protection.
“What it says is, ‘Thou shalt approve a lot size,’ it doesn’t say the lot is developable,” Misch said. “In Northampton, it’s probably not going to affect a lot of places, but there are some areas of the city where we have water and sewer, and the minimum lot size is larger than 5,000 square feet, but it’s larger than 5,000 square feet on purpose. Those areas include drinking water supply protection areas where we have a much larger minimum lot size to allow groundwater recharge … you have to have a minimum open space in order to allow the recharge into the public drinking water supply.”
Misch said that sometimes, municipalities place lot size restrictions in districts where sprawl might obstruct pedestrian and bicyclist use.
“This sort of flies in the face of good planning. Zoning should follow planning, it shouldn’t be the other way around,” Misch said. “Zoning is an implementation tool of a community’s long-range plan.”
Easthampton voters also supported Question 7, though by a slimmer margin than their Northampton neighbors, as 4,452 residents voted “yes” and 4,021 voters said “no.”
At-large City Councilor Kiam Jamrog-McQuaid, a vocal supporter of the measure, said he has been advocating for smaller lot sizes across the city’s districts, much like the housing-friendly zoning changes planned in Amherst.
Easthampton’s minimum lot sizes range from 5,000 to 40,000 square feet, depending on the district. Jamrog-McQuaid said he wants to roll back rules adopted after the city’s older, denser neighborhoods were built, which made many of those lots nonconforming.
“Some of the things that I’ve been pushing for through our local zoning reform process have been lowering lot size minimums,” Jamrog-McQuaid said. “Some of that has been made non-conforming by newer zoning regulations. I’ve been trying to push back on (that) and see if we can return to the land use that existed before, or at least the regulations that existed before.”
Residents of more rural towns largely voted down Question 7, such as in Goshen, which saw a 193-358 yes-to-no-vote split; Granby, which voted 1,217-1,832 and South Hadley, which voted 3,788-4,001.
In Westhampton, 414 voters supported the ballot question, while 650 voted against it and in Worthington, 258 voted in support of the question and 458 residents rejected it.
Many municipalities in Franklin County, such as Greenfield and Conway, also voted down the ballot initiative. Only 954 votes separate the “yes” and “no” camps for Question 7 across Franklin County and the North Quabbin region — 19,927 votes in favor and 20,881 votes against.
Greenfield housing activist Susan Worgaftik said she was originally against the proposal, out of fear developers would use it to purchase farmland and throw up as many houses as they could fit, but changed her mind once she learned the proposed law included a requirement for sewer and water infrastructure.
She said she thought the question wouldn’t have much of an impact on rural communities and was written more to address the suburbs outside Boston, where more housing is needed but available land does not meet development requirements.
“I live in Greenfield on a lot that’s not much bigger than 5,000 feet, so it’s fine to me,” Worgaftik said. “This really wasn’t written for us out here.”
Worgaftik said she understood other people’s concerns about giving up local zoning control, as well as those who may struggle to visualize what dense neighborhoods with small lots would look like. But with housing needs outpacing production, she said, communities need to rethink how and where housing is built.
“It’s a very difficult question, and it requires a lot of deep thinking,” Worgaftik said. “We’re gradually gonna have to change how we think about density.”
Jeff Lacy is a member of the Conway Planning Board and works for Rural Planning Associates, a land-use and planning consultant. He agreed that zoning changes could support more housing, but voted “no” on Question 7 and hopes that it fails to pass.
“I’m hoping for the final icing on the cake on what was a good night,” Lacy said, referring to Election Day.
Lacy argued that the one-size-fits-all concept doesn’t work for zoning. Towns have a range of character, needs, and infrastructure, and the zoning requirements for each municipality should be left up to it to decide.
Lacy pointed out that the city of Boston would be exempt from the law, and said it’s unfair that Boston gets to vote on regulations that would apply to everyone but Boston.
