OPINION: MBTA Communties Act will overwhelm communities like Ashland with apartments

There’s a 250-unit, five-story 40B apartment complex proposed for the mill buildings site at 10-60 Main St. in downtown Ashland. Everyone needs a place to live that they love and can afford. But the current architectural trend — Soviet bloc-style building design — is troublesome, especially in a small-scale town center. I do however, support well thought and responsible development.

Yet a completely different issue worries me a lot more. It’s the MBTA Communities Act. It requires Ashland and 176 other Massachusetts cities and towns in close proximity to public transportation to allow for the zoning for hundreds of thousands of apartment units.

If Ashland is worried about the impacts of one 40B project on the community, shouldn’t we be more worried about the MBTA Communities Law? This mandate requires that Ashland up-zone, which creates a legal framework to overwhelm Ashland with apartments.

Zoning is to a town what a blueprint is to a building. As a legal premise, zoning is the last lever of control residents have to preserve the town’s history, character and to shape future development. Yes. The landowner has a legal right to build what zoning laws allow. But a\s for development, because you can, does it always mean you should?

I applaud Ashland’s 29-member Comprehensive Plan Committee. It's collecting resident input for a master plan to guide incoming development. But when a MassHousing 40B project can sidestep the Planning Board process and the Comprehensive Plan and the MBTA Communities Law mandates we change zoning, overriding our decisions, what’s the point of resident input? And how useful is the plan?

Whether it's a 250-unit 40B building or 2,000 new apartment units in Ashland, residents have the same concerns about the impacts.

But on the mandate, those concerns are bigger. Much bigger.

Something about this Law feels “off.” Meanwhile, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Association, “Massachusetts is hemorrhaging people. In fact, it’s seeing the highest outmigration numbers in the last 30 years. A net 110,000 people moved out of the Bay State over roughly the first two years of the pandemic.”

Couple the outmigration of people who have left the Bay State with the following Fannie Mae statistics: In 2021, baby boomers owned $13.5 trillion worth of residential real estate. Fannie Mae predicts a “mass exodus” of homeowners as boomers age. What implications do Ashland's generational housing transfer have on the apartment rental market? Variables change. People move. People die. Inventory becomes available.

Yet the mandate continues, towns challenge its legal validity and here we are.

From Ashland’s big picture, the more eyes that look at what’s happening to the whole town, the better. It helps us pool our collective understanding of what we’re seeing, to inform our decisions moving forward.

The MBTA Communities Law will cause unintended consequences to our community that not one person can predict. Unchallenged, this mandate can undermine well plannd and responsible development for Ashland. Only time will tell.

Ashland resident Paula M. Parker is an owner’s adviser preparing businesses to prosper. Contact her at www.paulamparker.net.