It was only a few years ago that the residents of Lexington declared their community an unlikely leader in the state’s daunting quest to dig out of its deep housing affordability crisis, passing an ambitious plan to boost multifamily development in key parts of the town.
As it turns out, the historic town’s support for new housing was not quite so straightforward. Voters there last week rejected Question 7, the ballot measure that would have set a state minimum of land needed to build a single-family home in Massachusetts in a bid to boost the production of so-called starter homes.
Like in many other communities outside of Boston’s urban core, Lexington residents were broadly reluctant to let go of local authority over the look and feel of their neighborhoods. A patchwork of municipal restrictions on land use across the state has helped exacerbate the crisis, but the narrow failure of Question 7 last week demonstrates the difficult town-by-town challenge of building the homes Massachusetts needs.
“There were good intentions behind this proposal,” said Lin Jensen, a Lexington Planning Board member. “But places like Lexington are carefully planned by people who know it the best and want the best for it.”
Jensen voted against Question 7, which narrowly failed last week. With 99 percent of the vote tallied statewide Monday, some 50.6 percent of votes were cast against the question.
Nonetheless, there were signs that attitudes in some places may be beginning to soften.
Some towns with a history of fierce resistance to efforts to build more voted for the measure, including Milton and Needham, which both held tightly contested referendums over the MBTA Communities Act, the 2021 law requiring cities and towns served by the T to make room for more multifamily housing. Some 50.7 percent of Milton voters favored the measure, and 50.6 percent of Needham ballots approved it.
Winthrop, which still has yet to pass an MBTA Communities plan amid a local battle over the law, backed the measure by a single vote, according to a preliminary tally.
Question 7 would have established a statewide minimum lot size standard for the first time, allowing single-family home construction on any residentially zoned lot of 5,000 square feet or larger, provided that lot was connected to water and sewer services and included at least 50 feet along a road.
It posed a challenging question for places like Lexington. The affluent town in 2023 became the first place to pass new zoning rules under the MBTA Communities Act, with leaders seeing an opportunity to “lead the way out of the housing crisis,” as a New Yorker article put it at the time.
But while the MBTA Communities zoning targeted new housing development in strategic parts of town — like a stretch of office buildings near 128 — Question 7 asked residents to support development in their neighborhoods.
Lot sizes help influence the look and feel of a neighborhood by dictating density, Jensen said, and she and other Lexington residents worried that establishing a statewide standard would be a pathway for individual neighborhoods to lose their unique charm. Small homes on small lots in neighborhoods with big homes on big lots, in other words.
Ultimately, 52.5 percent of voters in Lexington cast their ballot against Question 7.
A trend that emerged from the vote was that denser communities closer to Boston, which are disproportionately impacted by the pressure of the housing shortage on the region’s housing market, supported the measure. Further-out towns and wealthier suburbs outside of the inner core largely opposed it.
Part of that can be explained by the fact that the housing shortage simply has a more magnified impact in Boston’s inner core than in the suburbs where the rental market is much smaller, some local advocates said. And Question 7 would have been more consequential further out of Boston, where there is more land that would have been made available for single-family home construction under the measure.
Another powerful force that helped shape the vote is that some residents of the towns outside of Boston are simply principally opposed to the idea of state rules that override local land-use decision-making powers.
“It’s not like there was some big backlash to Question 7 in Franklin,” said Cobi Frongillo, a former Franklin town councilor and one of the leaders of the local pro-housing group Building Equitable Neighborhoods (BEN) 4 Franklin. “But there is this overriding skepticism of state mandates over what we do with our land.”
Franklin has been relatively supportive of new housing efforts over the years, Frongillo said. The town workshopped new zoning to allow more development and broadly allowed Accessory Dwelling Units before the 2023 state law that legalized them statewide. But 57 percent of voters there cast their ballot against Question 7.
“I think people here know how bad our housing issue is, and they also care a lot about the neighborhoods they’ve invested in,” Frongillo said. “The merits of a top-down versus bottom-up approach is a real conversation for us as housing advocates to have.”
It is a vexing juxtaposition for state leaders to grapple with. Massachusetts’ deep shortage of homes is due in part to restrictive local land-use rules that have largely prevented the construction of housing over the last few decades, planners and advocates say.
But those rules also created the neighborhoods that many residents today love. Building more means convincing people to accept changes to the places where they live.
The result has been a protracted tug-of-war between towns and the state over the housing shortage.
Governor Maura Healey’s administration said last year that the state would need to build 222,000 new units by 2035 to meet demand and ease price growth, and officials have increasingly tailored their housing policies to chip away at the local rules they see as responsible for the problem.
But it is a delicate balance. While the legal power over zoning ultimately resides with the state, towns have fought back regardless. Most notably, MBTA Communities turned into a protracted legal battle that is only now winding to an end.
Kathleen O’Donnell, a longtime Milton resident and head of the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals, said Question 7 may have been an easier sell in Milton than somewhere like Weston because the town already has many small homes on 5,000-square-foot lots, meaning it would be easy to visualize how the measure would play out in town.
More than that, though, O’Donnell said, since Milton’s referendum over MBTA Communities, the tone of the discussion about housing in town has shifted. Many middle-class residents who bought their first home in Milton have realized how significantly the housing market there has shifted. Most homes in town sell for well over $1 million, and many residents’ children may not have the same opportunity to buy there.
“There is a general sense of how dramatically things have shifted here,” O’Donnell said. “People are realizing how unaffordable it is to move to this community that we were all able to move to as first-time homebuyers. That is long gone now, and people are feeling it.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.