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!”