Today’s Boston Globe has an op-ed from the CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board (GBREB) on how to make housing more affordable in Massachusetts. Excuse me while I choke on my Cherrios.

This the same real estate lobby that opposed virtually every new initiative designed to increase the amount of affordable housing over the last forty years. Real estate interests opposed Boston’s efforts to initiate a linkage fee for affordable housing in 1983 under Mayor Flynn and testified earlier this year against Mayor Wu’s proposal to increase linkage. They funded the campaign to repeal rent control in 1994. They fought Mayor Menino’s efforts to implement the city’s first inclusionary development policy in 2000. They opposed efforts to win approval of the Community Preservation Act in Boston in 2001 and earlier fought off attempts to fund CPA with a statewide or local-option transfer tax. GBREB threatened a campaign to defeat the CPA in Boston again in 2016 but backed down when they saw the broad political and grassroots coalition that had formed to pass it. As recently as 2019, they were lobbying at the State House against increases in the state match for CPA.

So, what is going on here? The piece makes some good points endorsing Governor Healey-backed proposals to ease restrictions on accessory dwelling units, building affordable housing on state-owned land and encouraging CPA communities to spend more than the 10% minimum threshold on housing.

What is not mentioned in the op-ed is the real headline. Re-establishment of local-option rent control as proposed by Boston and Somerville is not mentioned. Nor is passage of another Healey priority – giving communities the right to assess a tax on high-end real estate sales in order to raise more funds for affordable housing. GBREB is trying to look like they are on offense in the affordable housing battle but they are just, once again, playing defense and protecting the narrow interests of a select few in the real estate industry. GBREB is playing its version of the NIMBY card. NIMBLY. Not In My Bottom Line Yardstick.

The problem with solving our affordable housing crisis isn’t endorsing the easy items, like building on state-owned land. We have to do the tough stuff too. And that requires everyone, communities like Milton and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, to get beyond just saying no.

Milton resident Brian O’Halloran uttered those words just four days before Christmas, apparently unironically. No room at the inn here in our town, I guess.

“It’s impossible for us to understand how adding half of those 2,461 units, how that’s going to be accomplished,” stated O’Halloran in a Dec 21 interview with WBZ-TV News. O’Halloran was speaking in a town that has grown by 4 percent since 1970, surrounded by a region that has grown by over 20 percent during the same time period. Either the 68 year old software engineer is being disingenuous or he is suffering from a complete lack of imagination of how growth can and does happen in the eleventh largest metropolitan region in the US.

The NIMBYs have roared back. Confronted with losing the vote (by a two-thirds majority) to adopt compliant MBTA Communities Act zoning at town meeting on December 11th, they invoked a little-used section of the town charter and collected signatures of five percent of Milton voters in seven days to force a town-wide referendum in late January or early February. It was an impressive show of organization and passion to obtain the requisite number of signatures in the busy holiday season.

We have, of course, responded as well. Our Yes for Milton ballot question campaign committee filed with the town clerk on December 20th, one day before the WBZ interview. We are developing our plan to make our case to Milton voters over the next month. A 30 page zoning amendment that has been debated for over 18 months will now be decided by campaign slogans on each side. Yes for Milton or Just Say No. Stay tuned.

When you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll ask for a glass of milk.

When you outnumber NIMBYs at a town meeting, they ask to delay, dissemble and distract.

“We are not a rapid-transit community,” they cried. “We need more time,” said the Planning Board member who has done nothing in 18 months to move toward compliance.

“How would you like living across the street from a five story apartment building,” said the man who looks across at a huge unsightly salt pile currently. “I was elected to represent Milton residents,” said the public official who assumed that everyone in town would agree he should act to make it harder for people to become his neighbor.

And my favorite one of all. “There’s not enough affordable housing in this zoning article,” exclaimed several town residents who have been on the wrong side of affordable housing efforts in Milton for twenty years.

Last night, Milton joined Brookline, Newton, Arlington, Lexington and others in passing a compliant zoning article in advance of the MBTA Communities Act deadline. It was the first town-wide rezoning effort in Milton since 1938 when towns around the country started to enact zoning ordinances to keep the “other” out.

As Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law chronicled, segregation in America is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels, often with zoning bylaws leading the way.

Zoning is a choice. We have allowed homeowners, often disproportionately white and older as documented in groundbreaking research by Boston University professors Katherine Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer, to determine who they have as neighbors. It is seen as normal that homeowners can keep tenants and lower income prospective homebuyers out. Why have we allowed that for so long?

We have lived in Milton for 29 years. A really good 29 years. Our careers flourished here. Our kids grew up here. And we met our neighbors. And began organizing. And met more neighbors who wondered why we couldn’t have amenities like increased housing choices, more small businesses, more neighbors and more walk-to neighborhoods. This campaign for multi-family zoning wasn’t possible when we first moved to town. But it is now because NIMBYs have exposed themselves in front of town meeting, planning board forums, and Facebook group chats.

They have no answers. Just no. During the campaign, a flyer from the NIMBY group, Milton Neighbors for Responsible Zoning, was mailed to town meeting members. At the bottom it said,

We’re not saying NO,
We’re not saying NEVER,
We’re just saying NOT NOW!

Putting aside the bold type and all caps style, they are saying no with their action, or rather, inaction. The four person majority on the planning board spent 18 months “studying” the issue and got no closer to drafting a compliant zoning article than they were at the start. They had no intention of complying. They did what Milton had become famous for in statewide housing circles. They appealed for special treatment. They delayed in the hope that the political reality would change. That worked for a long time.

This time there was no developer who threw up their hands at the delay tactics and moved on to another site in another town. There was no generous donor who could scoop up property and “protect” Milton. Political winds had shifted and Milton was expected to act as a responsible member of the greater Boston community.

NIMBYs will always try again. A local NIMBY activist was quoted in the Boston Globe promising a town-wide repeal effort. We will meet them at every turn and appeal to our neighbors to move Milton forward.

Most Milton residents, indeed most residents anywhere, do not want to break the law. A campaign that asks them to do so has an uphill battle. There is not a modern-day Rosa Parks leading this civil disobedience effort. No moral high ground. Just a bunch of aging white homeowners willing to lie about the law and its impacts.

And an organized group of neighbors willing to stand up and be counted. Affordable Inclusive Milton stood tall with neighbors from every precinct: Republican lawyers, young renters looking to buy in Milton, parents who worry that their kids will never be able to afford to move back, social justice advocates, environmentalists, older residents that remember when Milton’s housing stock wasn’t so expensive. It was a large and diverse coalition that countered the NIMBYs. Milton for everyone. It’s such a better slogan than “not now!”