A housing crisis, a state law, and Winthrop’s fight to stay the same

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To protect the neighborhood, residents want the town to build a berm. But a $1.2 million grant Winthrop needs to get started is being held up by the state because town leaders have failed to rezone for new housing as required under Massachusetts law.

“Our neighborhood is literally underwater,” said Kinlin, who is running in this week’s election for Winthrop Town Council. “And we can’t get the town to do anything about it.”

The law is the MBTA Communities Act, which requires communities served by the T to allow more multifamily housing or risk losing access to key state funds.

It is the biggest effort to boost housing construction in the state in decades, but has inflamed passions in many towns across Eastern Massachusetts — perhaps nowhere as much as in Winthrop. The heated debate has ended friendships, triggered lawsuits, and sparked conspiracy theories.

It will come to a head Tuesday in town elections that boil down to one key question: Does a candidate for the Town Council support complying with the law or vow to fight it?

And while the fight is about this nearly four-century-old community’s capacity to fit more buildings and people on a little peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor, it also evokes deep questions about identity and change amid the broader economic and demographic shifts reshaping Greater Boston.

This historically working-class city has become wealthier as home prices have risen, driven by its proximity to Boston and the seaside, as well as the arrival of younger residents. Building yet more housing, some longtime residents argue, would be to hasten Winthrop’s shift from the cozy community they grew up in.

And the berm project — and potentially Kinlin’s neighborhood as well — is collateral damage. The state has said it did not issue Winthrop the grant for the project because it is not in compliance with MBTA Communities.

The current president of the Town Council, Jim Letterie, a former deli owner and a leading opponent of Winthrop’s MBTA Communities plan, admits that the loss of state funding is “an unfortunate situation.” But he said it is a necessary sacrifice for the town to uphold its values. He perhaps says it best with the slogan for his reelection campaign: “Keep Winthrop Winthrop.”

“People come to Winthrop because they love Winthrop,” Letterie said. “And if people are coming here because they love Winthrop, why would we change it?”

Now going on two years, the fight revolves around something of a red herring.

The law requires Winthrop to create zoning for at least 882 new apartments or condos; that would be about a 10 percent addition to the town’s housing stock, no small thing in what is already one of the most densely populated communities in Massachusetts. And when a consultant showed up at a Town Council meeting in January 2024 with maps indicating where all these new buildings could go, eyebrows were raised. The consultant went further, too, and said that if Winthrop wanted to do more, it could zone for as many as 2,000 units.

“It was a disaster,” said Councilor Joseph Aiello. “Everyone’s hair was on fire, including myself. None of us were expecting to hear about 2,000 new units. And then at the next meeting, the pitchforks came out.”

It mattered little that, in reality, few of the units would likely end up getting built. As other Massachusetts communities have learned, there is a way to write the new zoning to effectively end-run the state mandate while still satisfying the law’s requirements on paper. (Some opponents contend that new homes would be built anyway, perhaps by cramming more units in existing buildings, though those kinds of projects are complicated and rare.)

Yet, the mere idea of zoning for that much housing sparked fear about worsening traffic and overcrowded schools and raised the prospect of a full-blown revolt. There were lawn signs and T-shirts declaring “No on 3A,” a reference to the state statute for the MBTA Communities law, and protests on the bridge to East Boston that carries most traffic in and out of town.

A “No on 3A” Facebook group, now more than 1,000 members, became ground zero for the opposition, full of fiery rhetoric and graphics of wrecking balls demolishing single-family homes and the “Soviet-style” apartment blocks that would surely replace them.

In April 2024, the group hosted opponents of the law from other communities in Winthrop, where Diana Viens, a leader of the local opposition who moved to town a little more than a decade ago, compared the housing mandate to urban renewal and warned of a state takeover of the zoning districts. That sort of distrust, toward the state and government in general, became a central feature of the opposition movement.

“If we allow this to happen, it’s a slippery slope, they’re going to take away your right to govern your own town,” Brian Perrin, a local attorney and former police officer, told the council a few weeks after the plan was introduced. “What they’re trying to do is wrong.”

Settled in 1630, Winthrop is one of the oldest communities in the United States, a fishing village in the original Massachusetts Bay Colony that incorporated as a town in 1852. It is also one of the most densely populated in the state, with 18,700 residents sandwiched into just 1.6 square miles of land.

After centuries of growth, Winthrop stopped building new housing almost entirely in the mid-20th century, permitting just a handful of new homes for long stretches of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s while the town’s population shrank.

All the while, a regionwide housing shortage intensified to the point where it is now estimated the state needs to build 222,000 new homes over the next decade to catch up.

The state’s answer to that problem: MBTA Communities. The law aims to spread the burden of new housing among 177 communities in Eastern Massachusetts, many of which are suburban towns that have built little in decades and are much less dense than Winthrop. And while the vast majority have now implemented plans that comply with the law, in some areas, opposition has been fierce. Milton residents voted to overturn a zoning plan approved by their Town Meeting in early 2024, prompting a lawsuit from Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

In Winthrop, the result has been paralysis.

Opponents so wanted to stop Winthrop from moving forward with the law, and trusted the elected council so little, that they tried, unsuccessfully, to require any plan to be voted on by the entire town.

Eventually, the Planning Board did draft an MBTA Communities scheme aimed at generating as few new homes as possible, and a few weeks later, in November 2024, the council met to vote on it.

By that point, the fight over the law had become toxic. Viens had taken to referring to the opponents of the housing law as “the good people of Winthrop.” At one point, she referred to MBTA Communities and those who supported it as an “infestation.” Opponents and supporters took turns accusing each other of working against the town’s best interests.

The meeting was tense, and the divide in the community over the plan was visible in the crowd. As councilors shared their opinions, one side of the room would cheer and clap in support. When one councilor expressed support for the rezoning, opponents booed.

The final vote was 4-4 with one abstention. The plan was rejected.

In the immediate aftermath, opponents undertook several efforts to recall the councilors who had voted in favor of the plan, but again failed.

Now, the focus is on Tuesday’s election, where dueling slates of candidates support and oppose compliance. And a divide has emerged between Winthrop natives and relative newcomers.

Councilor Patrick Costigan, one of the staunchest opponents of the law, said that while he welcomes new arrivals, longtime residents are better suited to serve in elected office.

“They don’t know all the people,” said Costigan. “They don’t remember the blinking yellow light that is now a major intersection. And now they want to turn us into the big city.”

Kinlin, whose street floods when the water gets too high and is running for a council seat in order to protect his neighborhood, has heard similar comments many times.

“Again, [he] didn’t grow up here,” wrote one commenter on a public Winthrop Facebook page, referring to Kinlin.

Indeed, Kinlin grew up in Woburn and moved to Winthrop in 2013. But that his tenure here is even being discussed, he said, is telling. He rejects the notion that he doesn’t know Winthrop. His parents grew up in town, he said, and he spent considerable time here as a kid. He also loves the place, and doesn’t necessarily support waves of new construction that would fundamentally change it. He supports the Planning Board’s proposal, which he believes would put the town in compliance while not requiring much new development, if any at all.

But on a recent rainy afternoon when water filled Morton Street, the prospect of compromise felt, frankly, impossible.

“People have a sense that things are changing for the worse and they can’t really articulate why,” Kinlin said. “There are more new people coming to town, so our small little community must be turning into Boston. And they would rather let my neighborhood flood than accept that anything about Winthrop should be different than it was 30 years ago.”

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Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.