Middleboro Review 2: Boston's broken land use system blocks the homes we desperately need

Sunday, January 11, 2026

Boston's broken land use system blocks the homes we desperately need

LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER.....

ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON

MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON

Boston's broken land use system blocks the homes we desperately need

January 11, 2026

By John Infranca

Thirty low-income seniors recently lost potential housing, but 10 mature trees will survive.

Those are among the outcomes so far of the neighborhood process and design review for a desperately needed affordable housing project in Jamaica Plain. They are emblematic of Boston’s broken land use process, through which neighbors assert parochial interests to stymie needed housing development or impose additional costs and delays. Even when that development advances the city’s purported goals – goals that city leaders appear unwilling to expend political capital to advance.

Founded in 1860, Rogerson Communities provides assisted living, memory care services, and independent living opportunities to older adults in the Commonwealth. In the summer of 2024, Rogerson began meeting with neighbors near its 3.2-acre site on the Jamaicaway and in August it filed a Letter of Intent with the Boston Planning Department, announcing plans to redevelop a surface parking lot and a vacant single-family home.

The first phase of the initial proposal sought to replace the lot with below-grade parking and construct a new building that would replace existing memory care and day programs and add 71 units of affordable senior housing. The building would be seven stories tall, exceeding the three-story maximum under the zoning code, but still one story less than the eight-story building next door. As initially presented, the project offered outdoor space for community use, used passive housing construction, and collected and reused rainwater for landscaping.

Although there was some support from neighbors, opposition coalesced early last year around the three-legged stool of NIMBYism -- traffic, parking and “neighborhood character” -- as well as height and shadows.

A few insisted they weren’t against affordable housing, just this project. The one near, if not quite in, their backyard. Predictably, the result was a revised and smaller project, reduced first to 67 and then to 41 units of affordable housing. Fewer people housed. Higher per-unit costs. A neighborhood’s physical character preserved at the expense of the additional housing needed to preserve its social fabric.

The reduction in the number of units at the Rogerson-Beaufort project is not an anomaly. It is the order of business in Boston — where excessive public processes, an outdated and outsized zoning code, and the influence of an unrepresentative set of residents combine to choke the supply of housing at every turn.

Thirty units may seem inconsequential, but cumulatively such reductions, which happen over and over when development projects are reviewed, exacerbate our desperate housing shortage. The result is a city that talks about solving its housing crisis but whose actions – collectively and individually – ensure the problem persists.