We trust the mayor and city council to decide the biggest questions in city government, from the budget to policing to sewers. But when it comes to housing, we pile on extra approvals and public meetings, and those meetings draw a crowd that is older, whiter, and wealthier than the city it's deciding for.
Why does that happen, and what can we do about it?
Where the Meetings Came From
The desire for public input grew out of a lack of it. In the 1950s and 60s, urban highways bulldozed neighborhoods whose residents had no say, and the backlash pushed governments to open up their processes. In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act required environmental review with public comment, and many local rules followed that model. Giving the public a voice and holding officials accountable seemed like an obvious good.
The Time Tax
But every meeting needs attendees, and the people who show up are the ones most motivated to be there. Environmentalists turn out for sewage overflows, dog owners for dog parks, and neighbors for the building going up next door. Layered on top is a bias in who has time. Retirees have the most free evenings, while parents raising kids or working demanding jobs often can't make it. Research on housing meetings in the Boston area shows that attendees tend to be older and whiter than the cities they represent, as well as more likely to be male and more likely to own their homes.
That distorts outcomes, as the city government fulfills the preferences of a narrow slice of the public: preferences for less change, low property taxes, and rising property values. Researcher Katherine Levine Einstein at Boston University has traced this to a structural problem, not just an inconvenience: opposing a nearby project is highly motivating, while supporting housing in general almost never is. As she put it, even the most pro-housing person on Earth has little rational reason to show to every meeting about a project that doesn’t affect them directly. The result is a housing system that serves retirees and existing homeowners at the expense of nearly everyone else.
We've effectively swapped a system where politicians simply decided things on our behalf for one that requires us to spend vast amounts of our own time to be heard. Is that better? In one way, yes: governments now publish far more information about their decisions, so we can judge them for ourselves. But the feedback process underneath that information is still broken.
What We Can Do Better
We don’t want the city to ignore residents, but we do need to let elected officials make faster decisions, and fix how we provide input.
Instead of forcing all construction to submit to extra meetings, additional veto points, and lengthy delays, it should be treated like any other decision, with clear rules and prompt outcomes. And instead of just relying on weeknight meetings, the city can reach out to a representative cross-section of residents and ask for their input directly. That Boston University researcher tested this broader approach for housing plans in Newton and found it to be more representative.
Somerville already tries a similar approach for other projects like bike lanes and street plans. It also worked well during last year's Winter Hill School planning, when the city held focus groups with Winter Hill parents, Brown School parents, Trum Field users, and parents of preschoolers, rather than relying on whoever was free on a Tuesday evening.
Applied to housing, that means the council should decide zoning changes on the merits, drop the extra approval steps that only housing faces, and replace open-mic hearings with outreach that reflects who actually lives here.
We want our city to listen to its residents. That means building systems that actually do, not treating the loudest and most available voices as the whole community.