“We have a housing crisis that is a wildfire raging out of control,” said Curly. “We certainly appreciate increased state funding for schools. But unless we treat housing not just as a problem, not just as a crisis, but as an emergency, increased funding for schools will not matter.”
There was polite applause, assurances from a few board members they had heard Curly’s concerns, and a generally uncomfortable air as moderators quickly steered the conversation elsewhere.
It was a brief moment that underscores the tension facing the MMA — the self-described “voice of cities and towns in Massachusetts” — as the group tries to balance the state’s spiraling housing crisis with its own long-held belief that individual towns should have final say over how much housing they build and where.
That balancing act comes as the MMA welcomes its first new leader in three decades, a former town manager in Arlington who supported statewide housing reforms that many of his municipal colleagues did not. He will now be expected to speak for them all on an issue that could well define the state’s future.
Housing policy is one arena where the MMA, one of the most quietly powerful forces on Beacon Hill, has long flexed its muscle, invoking the state’s long tradition of local control to defeat efforts to standardize zoning or otherwise tackle the housing shortage.
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On this issue, its new executive director, Adam Chapdelaine, has a careful line to walk. But he does say, without getting into specifics, that the MMA has to do its part in finding solutions to the state’s housing problems.
“We are in a housing crisis,” he said. “There’s no argument. We’re hearing it from members constantly. And we want to be part of the solution.”
Making the issue even more pressing for the MMA is the fact that cities and towns themselves are feeling the squeeze from high housing costs: their police officers and firefighters can’t afford to live where they work; commercial tax revenues are falling.
Erin Clark/Globe Staff
Change, particularly on an issue like zoning reform, will not be easy. The idea of local control is deeply ingrained in Massachusetts politics, particularly among the local leaders the MMA represents. Any policy that allows the state to dictate local zoning rules from Beacon Hill reliably meets resistance from local officials worried about overdevelopment and one-size-fits-all solutions that they say don’t fit their town.
Since its founding in 1979, the MMA — whose membership includes every community in the state save for Framingham and Lawrence — has consistently fought anything that takes power away from cities and towns. Their sworn enemy is “unfunded mandates” and they tend to say “no” more often than “yes” on policy proposals. As its membership has ballooned in recent decades, so too has its influence on Beacon Hill, honed by close relationships with state legislators who themselves often rose from the ranks of local government. Its sway with lawmakers ranges from municipal funding and tax policy to climate resilience and energy codes.
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The MMA is, by definition, the voice of its collective members. Smaller towns make up the vast majority of the MMA’s membership, and with each member community getting an equal say, the organization more represents the smaller, outlying communities than the larger ones in Boston’s urban core.
“Historically, it’s been an organization that just by its very nature is dominated by smaller towns,” said Andre Leroux, the former leader of the Smart Growth Alliance, an advocacy group that helped conceptualize MBTA Communities. “They’re definitely not villains. The MMA tried to do good work. Housing has been a particularly challenging issue for them.”
It’s nothing Chapdelaine can’t handle, his supporters say. The mild-mannered 44-year-old is a self-described “local government guy,” most often found in a pressed suit and dark-rimmed glasses. He can talk for hours about the turning of gears in town hall, and the importance of a well-oiled municipal machine. Before his stint in Arlington, he was the city administrator in Fall River.
“When municipal government works how it is supposed to,” Chapdelaine said, “you don’t even notice it.”
He’s earned a reputation as someone who knows how to find middle ground on controversial issues. In Arlington, Chapdelaine helped build consensus during a highly charged debate over accessory dwelling units, said Jennifer Raitt, the town’s former community planning and development director. Arlington eventually overwhelmingly approved rules to allow more ADUs.
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Christine Hoyt, a select board member in Adams who serves on the MMA board, said that the housing crisis has become a huge problem for communities, and that the association wanted someone who they knew would take that seriously.
“It is a very real crisis,” said Hoyt. “It’s also a very contentious issue. That’s where you need someone like Adam who knows the issue and knows how to build consensus.”
In some ways, his personal views probably differ from the MMA’s membership at large — something he has to square.
Chapdelaine vocally backed the Baker administration’s push to make it easier for towns to tweak zoning by lowering the local voting threshold for a number of changes to a simple majority, instead of a two-thirds vote. Perhaps more controversially for the MMA, he also supported the MBTA Communities Act, the 2021 law that requires cities and towns served by the T to zone for multifamily housing, which is currently roiling communities throughout Eastern Massachusetts. He called the rules, which have been highly controversial in some towns, an example of good regional housing policy.
Those stances reflect policies touted by housing advocates, as well as the Healey administration, whose approach to solving the housing crisis involves taking some zoning power out of the hands of local governments by compelling communities to make room for multifamily housing, whether they want to or not.
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In the past, the MMA has loudly pushed back against that sort of policy.
The group’s previous executive director, Geoff Beckwith, makes no apologies. He held the position for 31 years before retiring in 2023, and was an adamant defender of local control of zoning. In the 1990s, for example, he criticized the expansion of cell towers as a threat to local zoning power.
“When we advocate for local control, we’re pushing for clear authority to innovate at the local level, because no two communities in Massachusetts are the same,” Beckwith said. ”Some of these zoning mandates simply are not practical for a lot of our towns.”
Under Beckwith’s watch, the group urged Baker to veto MBTA Communities after it passed the Legislature in 2021 (he declined) and defeated efforts to reduce minimum lot sizes on a statewide basis, frustrating some advocates.
State Senator Jamie Eldridge, a Democrat from Acton and one of the Senate’s most prominent advocates for housing reform, recalls how the MMA effectively killed a bill of his that would have required communities to chart out specific plans to increase production of affordable housing.
“I really felt like for a long time that the MMA was just saying no to any zoning or housing production reform that would allow for more diversity in our housing stock,” he said.
The MMA has, subtly, grown more supportive in recent years of housing efforts: It backed Baker’s push to ease the local zoning changes and Healey’s bid to allow towns to tax high-dollar real estate sales. And it hired Chapdelaine.
A more pronounced shift will take time, Chapdelaine said, if it happens at all. Just last week, a number of local officials spoke out at a State House hearing against a proposed measure in Healey’s housing bond bill that would legalize accessory units statewide, saying it would usurp municipal power. But there is cautious hope among advocates the association is tempering its opposition, even just slightly.
“I don’t know if their position is going to change or become more nuanced,” said Marc Draisen, a former legislator and executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. “But Adam works as a consensus builder. If someone can move the MMA forward, it’s him.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.