Incorruptible Mass

Housing and Zoning

• Anna Callahan • Season 6 • Episode 17

Share episode

Please donate to the show!

We continue our series on housing with Joyce Mandell, a community organizer and activist who's focused on this very issue. We discuss what zoning is and why it's so important, the structural barriers that NIMBYs and opposition to zoning reforms erect, and what we can do to help fix big problems in our own local communities.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

To stay informed:

ANNA

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of the seven million residents who live here. Today we are talking about housing. We have an amazing guest with us. We're gonna be talking about how we got to the place we are. We're gonna be talking a little bit about Jane Jacobs and some housing theory. We will talk about why housing is important and the work that we need to do specifically here in Massachusetts. We're gonna be talking about how to sort of talk to and be able to have conversations with people who maybe are NIMBYs and do not want more housing, more density, and basically how can we sort of win in the housing fight to have a more affordable housing and enough housing here in Massachusetts for everyone. And we'll talk about local, we'll talk about state. So it's gonna be a fantastic conversation. We have Joyce Mandell, who is a community organizer, a longtime activist around housing and the founder of Jane Week. But before we talk to Joyce, I will have my two co-hosts, fabulous co-hosts of course, introduce themselves and I will start with Jonathan.


JONATHAN

Hello, I am Jonathan Cohn. He/his, joining from the South End in Boston. I've been active in a number of issue, issue and electoral campaigns for over a decade now.


ANNA

And Jordan.


JORDAN

Jordan B. Powers, he/him, I am a Worcester resident. I'm on the zoning board in Worcester. I'm getting my PhD and a lot of my focus is on housing. And I am really excited that you're back. And for those of you listening in order, last week was a little bit of a disaster here. So excited to have, we're excited for you to be a part of this conversation again and not have me doing it.


JOYCE

Thank you.


ANNA

I always love to be here with you guys. I am Anna Callahan, she/her coming at you from Medford, where I am a city councilor. And we, you know, got voted in many of my fellow city councilors and I got voted in on a, a very housing strong and pro housing mandate. That's what we ran on. And we have been, you know, trying to implement that into our zoning. And so I'll be very interested in this discussion so I can really learn from our lovely expert. And on that note, I would love to introduce or have Joyce Mandell introduce herself if you want to tell us a little bit about who you are, your work in housing, and just let us know what we're talking about before we talk about it.


JOYCE

Great. So I have been a community organizer for over 30 years, started organizing around a nuclear freeze. Now I'm really dating myself and have morphed into other issues that are important. And I, I actually wasn't. The Jane week was not really an organizing project, but it morphed into it because I often have that hat. Yeah, I was just really wanting to honor the 100th birthday of this amazing Jane Jacobs, who maybe we'll talk about later. And then my last sort of organizing stint was working in. Lot of communities all around Massachusetts to pass zoning reform in compliance with the MBTA communities law that passed here in 2021. And I'm happy to talk about that as well. I was working with a pro housing statewide group called Abundant Housing Massachusetts and love that work. And so have a lot to talk about with housing. And the challenge of changing housing policy on the ground?


ANNA

I would love to ask sort of a broad question up front, which is, what do you see as the issue in housing that you want to have the most effect on? So what do you want to talk about today? What do you want people to do? Like, what is your work in housing trying to get to? And it sounds like zoning for more housing, but you tell me in your own words.


JOYCE

So housing is only one thing that I'm interested in. So I like the idea of organizing around great neighborhoods. What does it mean to be in a great neighborhood? In a neighborhood where you can walk to everywhere you want to go to, there's lots of people around. And that's what draws me, drew me to the work of Jane Jacobs. Because she talked about what makes a great place. So it's all about housing, but it's more than that. So when I did a lot of organizing in Worcester before I was organizing specifically around housing, I talk about, you know, what makes a great neighborhood. And so you're bringing together people who are interested in environmental issues, people who are interested in preserving open space. So we have housing that's more dense and we can have more open space in our community. People who are interested in walkability and getting around not just by car, but also by walking, by biking. So I like to think of myself as not just a housing activist or community organizer, but a great neighborhood organizer.


ANNA

Amazing. And maybe this is a time to start talking about Jane Week and what her theories were and why you think her work is important.


JOYCE

Great. So not everyone knows who she is, so maybe I'll just say a little bit about who she was. She was someone who lived in New York City and she loved the hustle and bustle of neighborhoods in New York City and was very, very upset about cities just in the 1960s, 70s just being completely abandoned. This was a time of the growth of suburbs and there there was a lot of flight out to newly sort of auto centric suburbs. And she was like, we need to focus on cities. She was also very much against urban renewal, completely going in and decimating communities, which happened all over the country. She wrote a very famous book that for many of us has been kind of like a Bible. In 1961, it's called the Death and Life of Great American Cities. And would happy to give you the little recipe of what she had for what makes a great neighborhood. Do it. Okay. So she said, you know, when you think about, just think about, you know, you said Medford, wherever you are, what makes a great neighborhood? And she said, basically, there are four variables. And the first one is you want to be able to reuse historic buildings. So that's one. Instead of completely decimating starting over or even the suburbs that emerged that were built all at once, you want to have the old with the new. So that's the first one. The second one is mixed uses. A lot of zoning with suburbs as single use zoning. So housing is over here and Businesses are over here, so you have to drive. But mixed uses are the kind of, you know, the businesses and the housing, everything is mixed together. You know, there's mixed use neighborhoods and there's mixed use buildings. The third one is density. You know, more people makes for more liveliness. She talked about the importance of eyes on the street, more people. When you think about it, you feel safer when there's more people around. And the fourth little recipe of her in her cookbook of good neighborhoods is short blocks. You know, you want to be able to turn the corner and see what's around the corner and what's going on. So that's kind of her recipe. When you think about the neighborhoods that she's talking about, most modern day zoning actually outlaws most of what she's talking about.


JONATHAN

It's so interesting in that, I guess this is an on-brand comment from me, in that, when thinking of the point about the eyes on the street, as well as the density ways neighborhoods work, it reminds me of what's always fascinating to me when working on a different campaign is how late can you get away with canvassing in a neighborhood or a city based on the various factors of that, which are always a function of density, of proximity to commerce and street lighting. Make a huge difference on whether or not, near where I live in the South End, if you're in the South End, Back Bay, Fenway, Beacon Hill, areas of the city that are very dense, they are very, like commerce is either mixed in or just a block over, very high lighting both from the residential buildings that are multi units, so they cast a lot of light onto the street, as well as street lights that exist, and that people milling about walking their dogs or going to the commerce that's still open. You feel like knocking doors until 9:00 PM feels like a totally viable thing to do. A place like Cambridge and Somerville have a lot of areas where that's as well. If you go to some suburbs, 7:30, you feel like it's already too late to be outside and that it is weird and unwelcome. And that dynamic fastening, it's very much so a product of those factors.


JOYCE

Yeah, I love that. Sort of the test of what makes a safe neighborhood, what makes a livable neighborhood. Can you canvas? How late can you be out at night? Makes a lot of sense.


JORDAN

And I'm thinking also about like one of my favorite cities I've visited isn't quite right because I had a friend who lived there was Barcelona. And in Barcelona, what I loved is that the buildings were big, were sort of like big and tall, but they had courtyards in the middle. So when you went to the back, there was open space. So they were like big blocks. And they were created community within them, right, within it, which was inward facing. And then outward facing, the bottoms almost always had some sort of business or restaurant or food. So outward facing to the street, right, is commerce. It's like a way to walk around. And there's lots of people and out, and they would often, the sidewalks were wide, so you would have people, like the restaurants had the ability to sit sort of into the street a little. And sort of that sort of model of like courtyards and community and outward and lots of people, I think, is like was something I really enjoyed and liked a lot. And like, you know, at certain time of the day, like people literally just went down into the courtyard and just like ate together and hung out and maybe brought food from the restaurant into the courtyard. And like, there was just a lovely different way to think about it as opposed to like, you know, there's just concrete or maybe there's some, like, maybe there's some, there's some trees and some green space over there someplace and you're not really walkable and they're not really together. And like, you know, my, my neighborhood, I love my neighbors and like, we make a point to see each other, but it's not actually easy, right? Like, we have to go out of our way to communicate, to, to commune with each other. The street isn't, our, our residences aren't, they don't self-encourage that, except that our backyards, like, when we're out and we're all in the backyard of our, of our little, like, little three-decker yards, then we can all see each other, so we all talk to each other, right? But otherwise, that's sort of not guaranteed. So thinking about some of those principles and what makes it great, right? It's all those things. It's that I know my neighbors. They're really lovely, but there's a bunch of us. I love all the diversity. I love all the people.


JOYCE

Oh, I'm sorry.


ANNA

No, go ahead, Joyce.


JOYCE

I love what you said because design really has an impact on how you relate to other people. And when you were talking, I was thinking about always like the next place where I live, I would love to have a front porch, you know, that whole idea of being on the front porch. And there's this festival porch fest, you know, where people come in, they they sing on the porch, you know, and I think about how then designs of houses had changed and now mostly people treasured the backyard patio. And what does that mean for community when you're in your private space and what happened to the front porch and the front stoop? So it's interesting to think how just little pieces of design can impact how you connect with other people. Yeah.


ANNA

So I wanna turn us to the housing crisis in Massachusetts and the fact that housing is ridiculously expensive and we have priced some people like completely out of having any housing and combine it with with the zoning and with these theories of a wonderful neighborhood. And if you can talk a little bit about how these two things play out today in housing policy, what you see as issues in local zoning and maybe state policy interacting with that.


JOYCE

Sure. And thank you for bringing up about the housing crisis. You ask anyone, and as a community organizer, I always ask people about their housing story. And you'll always be able to hear something. And we can maybe delve into that more. It makes it more personal when you can bring the stories to it. But as some people may know that Massachusetts needs over 200,000 new homes just to have enough homes for the people who want to live here by the next decade, which makes it very hard when we're not building enough homes. And the impact of that when we don't have enough supply is that we see prices rising. We hear about, you know, people outbidding each other to get apartments and rent an apartment or not being able to find a house, having to move other places, having to move out of the state. So the housing crisis is real. And it makes sense that we've had to address it policy wise, not only on the statewide level, but also in our local towns and communities. Would it be helpful to talk about specific policies that are helping to address this crisis?


ANNA

I think we could touch on some of those. I'm really interested in hearing from you. Maybe we touch on those and then I'd I'd love to hear from you some of your community organizing in different places around, you know, the goals that we have.


JOYCE

Sure. So I was a community organizer for a pro housing statewide organization called Abundant Housing Massachusetts. Anyone who's interested in sort of local and organizing around housing policy and also statewide should think about connecting up with abundant housing. And my role was really to work on organizing advocates in local towns and communities that had to rezone in compliance with the 2021 MBTA communities law. This is one way to address the housing crisis. We need to rezone to allow for those great neighborhoods near transportation. So can you. What?


JORDAN

Can you explain? Rezone.


JOYCE

Okay.


JONATHAN

I was about to say, can you explain what the MBTA communities law was?


JOYCE

But know what? I'm, like, so. I was so involved in it. I sort of made an assumption, so thank you.


JONATHAN

No worries. I I think a lot of people listening do, but it's always like, okay, what is the thing that. What is like, think back to when I was like. Various terms of art that I would hear everybody using when I first started getting involved in things and being like, what does that actually mean?


JOYCE

Thank you. When you're so immersed in something and you know it, it's just, okay. So the MBTA Communities Law passed under former Governor Baker in 2021, and it was a way to address the housing crisis. By requiring communities on or near the T, there are 177 communities, they should carve out a district that would allow for multifamily housing by right. So now, in many or before, in many communities, you wanted to you wanted to build a new house, you'd have to go through, it wasn't by right, it was by special permit. So this would allow just a small district that would increase the density and not by a lot. It wasn't, you know, like huge apartment buildings, but it was, it's just a small amount of density increase. It really wasn't that much. So that law passed in 2021 and communities needed to come up with their own zoning plans that would be in compliance. And I was my role was to go in communities and work with advocates that were supportive of more housing to pass this zoning. I, was that a, that was, that's wonderful.


JONATHAN

And then let's hear about like, so what are your favorite success stories from that experience?


JOYCE

Wait, wait, wait.


ANNA

Can we, can we say what zoning is though?


JOYCE

I can jump and say a little.


ANNA

Bit of zoning is like, cause I'm, we've been doing zoning for a year and a half now in Medford. And so zoning is basically like, Hey, this area of the city can only have single family houses. This area of the city can have two family houses or single family. This area of the city can have apartments. This area of the city can have commercial.


JOYCE

Right?


ANNA

So it just is a way of saying like where you're allowed, what you're allowed to build in each area of the city. And it's surprisingly restrictive. And I have to say, I'm always surprised that the people who are horrified that you would put any restrictions on their ability to cut down trees or do whatever they want to on their own property are the same people who definitely want the most restrictions on what anyone else can build on their property in terms of zoning. It's fascinating to me. They want absolutely no free market in terms of zoning. They don't want the zoning to change, but they do want to make sure that they can do anything they want on their own property except for build more housing.


JOYCE

Yeah, I think that's a great explanation, Anna, of what zoning is. In a nutshell, what your town, your community allows to be built where. And most of the time it's very restrictive. In fact, some communities, they even require that you can only build a single family house and you need an acre to do it. There are many communities where that kind of zoning is in effect. So a lot of the kinds of communities that we love, Jordan was talking about Barcelona, a lot of times we go to other places to get these really great dense and exciting communities, Jane Jacobs type, type of communities. You can't necessarily do that. Jordan and I are from Worcester. Half the triple deckers, if they, you know, if they're no longer there, you couldn't rebuild them because of zoning, you know, so the kinds of communities that we love to go to, we don't, we don't necessarily, we're not necessarily able to build them now. So that that MBTA communities law was a little bit of a taste to try to change that and make it so that you could have more flexibility in having more housing.


JORDAN

Yeah, just to just to I've said this on the podcast, but Somerville is the only place you can legally build a three-decker in Massachusetts. You can't like zoning is the ways in which you cut property in such a way that you make it so only certain types of things can be built. And you can build one.


JOYCE

Yeah.


ANNA

I would love. Oh, go ahead.


JOYCE

Would it be helpful to tell you some examples of some successes and maybe. Yes. Yes.


ANNA

I was just gonna ask if you want to talk about your organizing and different cities.


JORDAN

Cambridge, too.


JONATHAN

Cambridge as of this year.


JORDAN

Okay. Also allows three.


JOYCE

Yeah.


JORDAN

And it's like. And it's like people think like, oh, they're not allowed to build because it's high, but it's not actually that. It's like. The reason you can and Worcester is because three deckers are often too close to the street. So it's like how far back is it supposed to be? How much space do you need on either side? How much space do you need behind you? Those are questions that sometimes we do need. Like, I'm not saying we don't need any regulations, but we regulate them in such a way. And if you look about the history of those regulations in Massachusetts, they were explicitly created to outlaw three deckers, which were seen as being poor, Irish, Italian. One of my favorite quotes, I quoted in a paper about zoning laws that got changed to stop three deckers, was it's a place where you lose your husband to. Was one of the legislators trying to outlaw them.


JOYCE

So.


JORDAN

That perception of who are the people, but the ways that they outlawed that they didn't say no three deckers because they can't do that. They said, you need to set back a certain FAR. You need to have certain types of things. Those things limit your ability to build something like a three-decker on purpose. Sorry to cut that off.


JOYCE

No, no, this is great.


JORDAN

Tell us about some success.


JOYCE

Yay. Let me give you an example. So I worked in communities all over from Norwood to Newburyport to actually, no, I didn't do Newburyport. Ipswich was my community. Gloucester. So I. I've been all over the state working, and each Community is different. I would love to give you the example of Southborough. Southborough is a town in central Mass. They have town meeting, which is its own animal. It's really interesting. And, um, I was able to bring together a group of about five people, and they. They did this all on their own. They, they, we went out to the transfer station, which is also known as the dump, because that's where everyone in Southborough goes. And we tabled at the transfer station. We text banked people. We reminded them of town meeting. We set up a frequently asked questions. We educated people, or I should say, they educated people. They, um. Linked up and, and went to the Democrats and went to different groups, you know, the different teacher groups and environmental groups, and they got support from that. I remember that we text banked maybe two or three days before town meeting, and I think they have never, I I don't want to say never. It was a huge turnout. It was so controversial. And I, I don't want to get this wrong, but I think we won by maybe five votes. It was, it was incredible. It was less than 10 votes. And I remember, you know, we were giving out flyers in, in the line, going to town meeting and showing what density looks like because sometimes people think, oh, my God, this is going to be huge apartment buildings that are going to be erected right here in the town. It doesn't fit a character. So we were able to show them examples of the kind of density that was already in Southborough. And this group did it. So exciting. So exciting. And I really think if they had.


ANNA

Not.


JOYCE

Organized together and done the work that they had done. I don't think it would have passed in town. So that, that was one good example. They're, they're funny.


JONATHAN

In a case like that, where you win by, like, that close, it really does show to the people involved how, like, everything that they did, did to make that happen did matter.


JOYCE

Yeah. And I should also say another, the, the other, another community that I was was my community was Milton. So I don't know if you remember what happened with Milton, but Milton was the only one of the first communities that are right on the tee that they ended up passing it at town meeting. We organized a lot and then they collected signatures to put it on a ballot question and it didn't pass. And there was that lawsuit with the Attorney General. That was kind of an ongoing Saga. What I love about Community organizing, though, and especially around this issue, is it really brings people together and it makes them crystallize of why this is important to them personally and also to their town, which is good.


ANNA

And I, I would love for you to talk a little bit. We, you mentioned this before we started recording. I would love for you to talk a little bit about, you know, what is often called NIMBYism, right? So people who do not want these zoning changes, let's put it that way, right? And just hear your, I mean, this is what you deal with on the ground, right? This is when you're community organizing, this is the people who are against zoning changes and against density. And I would love to hear from you what your experience is about how to win those discussions and win people over. And allay some people's fears.


JOYCE

So my approach with people who are really, really opposed is I don't tend to deal with it, and I encourage people not to address it head on. The people that you're really going to want to target to figure out how to reach out to are those who are in the middle who don't know what what this is about. There's going to be people who oppose no matter what. The main issues, there are several main issues that I've heard over and over again in all the communities, in many of the communities, some stronger than others. You always hear things like traffic and parking. It's going to impact traffic and parking. You hear often, this is going to bring more kids in the schools. We're not going to be able to afford afford to, you know, educate more kids in the schools. Those are two classic ones. You hear a lot about this is going to change the neighborhood character. And, and for that, it's sort of like, for me, I think it's like a code word for we don't want poor people here. We don't. It's sort of racist, classist, everything. We don't want kind of like what Jordan was talking about, you know, with triple deckers. We don't want this in our town. It'll change the character. That's another one that you often hear. And the fourth one that you often hear is the state shouldn't tell us what to do. This is our town. It's local control, which really drove me crazy because the state has allowed the towns to work collectively to figure out how to make this zoning work for them. There's a lot more local control. I can compare it with ADUs passing statewide. In some ways, that's so much easier. ADUs are accessory dwelling units. And it passed, I believe, last year that statewide where that people are allowed to build these accessory apartments, accessory dwelling units. Homes. Let's put, let's say homes. But that's a Statewide mandate. So it doesn't matter. You know, I think of all the effort and the funds to organize locally, and then people are saying, there's no local control. You know what? There's too. Maybe. I don't know if there's too much local control. I. You know what? I can say whatever I want.


ANNA

They don't mind the adus because that just lets them build a, build a little in-law suite for their parents, but they do the other.


JONATHAN

I feel like there's kind of a misalignment with a lot of like what falls under local control and what doesn't in Massachusetts where that like because as we talked in other episodes, it's very restrictive on stuff really like in relation to like the landlord tenant relationship gets very restrictive in Massachusetts because it's managing a civil relationship. But, and that's something that like there's a, there's no local control and there really should be more ability to manage that. But when it comes to zoning, it can often be I think often far too complicated of policies in far too many places that create a patchwork. As well as with the MBTA Communities Act, what I think is something that I almost wish they would have done is establish the policy of you get an opportunity to rezone it, and if you don't rezone it, the state rezones it for you, but you get to do it first. If you and, like, kind of establishing in that way is that, like, we want you to take the opportunity and do this how you see fit, but this is a goal, and we'll do it if you don't.


JOYCE

You know, Jonathan, it's so interesting you say that because that's what a lot of Advocates on the ground argued in their communities. If we don't do this ourselves, the state's going to come in and gonna mandate it. And, you know, that argument actually, or that sort thinking actually was some persuasive somewhat. Yeah.


ANNA

And I, I would love to hear the other things. Parking, traffic, you know, the community character, like, all of these things, like, how, how do you approach these conversations?


JOYCE

Well, there are, I, I think that, you know, the neighborhood character, you point out the kinds of, the neighborhoods that are already in their community. That have the same kind of density and zoning, or not the zoning, but, you know, I, I think part of it is sort of a fear. And sometimes you can't argue with any of that, and you just argue the merits. And that's what I would say. You know, traffic parking. I, I think the best approach is not to argue here and there on what their arguments are, but what are the benefits to the community? You know, the benefits are to the community are people's stories. Your kids can move back home. You know, there'll be a place to stay. People who want to downsize, maybe there'll be a place to stay that they can be in the community. You know, we are doing our part for climate change if we're building more housing near Transportation. So I I think the focus is less on how can we counteract what their arguments are and turning it around and say, what are the benefits to this? And there are plenty of benefits to it. And also being a community that welcomes people and provides housing for the people who want to live there.


JONATHAN

And I think the one thing that you know that which you really like from being involved in certain like local races, you definitely do here in a number of the suburbs is people realizing that like their children can never move back to that town because of how bad the housing prices have gotten. And that's something that definitely resonates for people who like to view the place as somewhere where like, whether it's their kids or somebody else's kids can move into instead of family and realizing if nothing changes, that's just not happening.


JOYCE

Yeah, and I think that sort of to wrap up this whole point is the importance of stories, you know, when people say, when people in the community say exactly what you're saying, Jonathan, that my kid can't move back here, wants to move back here, or I, there was one Advocate I was working who was a, a renter who ended up buying a, a car, because if she, her rent went higher, she knew she could live in her car. So these are stories that impact people and And yeah, and another person that wants to downsize but can't afford to, there's no options. So my whole thing is the importance of stories and that helps to change. I mean, you can say Massachusetts needs 200,000 new homes, but what does that mean? How does that impact you? How does that impact you? You know, what does it mean for you? And I think that that's the importance of organizing around housing or organizing around anything is really starting with the stories and building community.


ANNA

Jordan?


JORDAN

I want to say the importance of that also, just like, you know, a lot of the opposition is fear. You know, as a zoning person, the thing I hear the most is I understand we need more zoning, but I'm sorry, I need more housing, but, and then it'll immediately be why we shouldn't have housing. We, we, people always, like, theoretically want more housing. And I think both getting stories about the problem, but also, like, if you think about how we started this conversation, which is Imagine, you know, not everybody wants to live in a city. Some people don't. But if you do live in a city, imagine being able to walk to a place where you can eat with neighbors, people you know, because they're not getting displaced every six months or a year. People who are able to, who, who are able, your kids get to know a little bit better. Maybe they play with because they feel safer because we've oriented it in such a way where they're not worried about cars. Barreling down the street. And you get to walk around and you get to eat great food. And the businesses can stay because they also have some stability because they're not getting priced out from all the rising prices all the time because small businesses are all renters. And so think about those communities where you're walking around, there's, there's, you're still get the feel of the city, the great food, the great spices from all the great places. I love when I'm going into my park and you can play dominoes in about five or six different languages at any one time, you know, those are the does that's a texture of a city that I love. And I'm and like, we should tell those stories as well. Like, like we can remind people to not be so scared. Like, it's gonna be okay. There was a housing thing that went in. And I told somebody afterwards who was worried about it. And I said, five years from now, you won't even remember there was a fight. Like, it's just it will be okay. Like, it's just not going to affect it the way all the fears you have. I'm not saying the person who who gets into this place is gonna, you're gonna love that person. But like, it's gonna be fine. It's just gonna be a person. It's gonna be fine. Like, and we just, so the more that we could tell stories, the more and vision out what it is we're trying to see, which is why I thought Jane Week was so important. It wasn't just about like, because a lot of times we talk about these things, we talk about changing zones or changing housing or more density, words that mean something to us, but not necessarily to regular people. We tell stories and vision out and give people a feeling for what this could feel like. Immediately they're like, oh yeah, well, I want that.


ANNA

And I want to just note that we're coming up on time and if people want to make their final comments, my final comment is, you know, people get scared about zoning and they think that if they're changed from a single family to a two family zone, that instantaneously every house will be a two family. And that isn't how zoning works. So zoning only means that it is allowed. And so what happens is, you know, realistically in city after city, you know, over 10 years, 20 years, like this house, that house, they will be turned into a two family, like one on a block, two, you know, it just, it happens slowly, it happens over time, things, the world changes, you know, and so zoning changes are not instantly changing your city. Zoning simply allows people to do things. It just means it's less restrictive. And that's my word on zoning.


JONATHAN

So, yeah, it reminds me of how there are people who often think that ending single family zoning means like that somehow the city is commandeering your single family house and that is 100% not what ending single family zoning is.


JOYCE

Yeah. I, I love what Jordan said about the importance of getting out into the community. And I think that's what made Jane week, which actually is still going on since 2017. It's a one whole week of walking conversations out in the community, walks and, and talks and, and just being able to see for yourself, you know, what, what works here? What, what do you like about this space? What do you like about this street and being able to experience, you know, just just the life out in the community. Yeah.


ANNA

Wonderful. Well, Joyce Mandell, thank you so much for coming on here. And thanks for all the work you do. I also want to thank our listeners, and we forgot to do our little mid-roll which is, you know, hey, if you can donate a few bucks to, to this podcast, remember that these are not conversations that you hear anywhere else. Um, and our media in Massachusetts is not the greatest, so, um, you can help to make sure that this podcast continues, um, and that our lovely young folks who do all the sort of background work for us. They edit the video, they do our social media, the graphics and all of that stuff. They put all that stuff together and make sure that everything comes together for us and that we get these stories and this expertise into more ears than just yours. So thank you so much to everyone listening and we look forward to talking with you all next week.