WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — A divided Planning Board on Tuesday voted to draft warrant articles that would ask May's town meeting whether to reduce the dimensional requirements for housing lots in the General Residence district and the Rural Residence district.

 

Proposals to reduce the lot sizes in each of the town's most populated districts have been heavily debated by the board since the summer, and prior to its February meeting, the body received written communication from 18 residents, nearly all calling on the panel to pump the brakes on its zoning bylaw revisions.

 

Most of those letters echoed concerns raised by a member of the town's Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, who last week argued that any major bylaw revisions should wait until at least the publication of that plan in spring 2023.

 

"We are writing to ask you to please consider allowing time to incorporate input from both the public and the Town's unfinished new comprehensive zoning plan before changing the village zoning," wrote Edith Thurber and Kevin O'Rourke in an email representative of the correspondence the board received and posted on the town's website.

 

The need for more study was raised by two board members in other contexts during a nearly three-hour meeting that dealt with four other potential bylaw amendments in addition to the dimensional changes in the GR and RR2 districts.

 

On the dimensional issues themselves, the board members for and against the changes on Tuesday made many of the same arguments that have become familiar throughout the 2021-22 Planning Board cycle.

 

And the votes on the contentious proposals broke along familiar lines.

 

Roger Lawrence was the lone dissenter in a 4-1 vote to advance the proposal on General Residence lot sizes to the drafting stage.

 

Stephanie Boyd joined Lawrence in the minority of a 3-2 vote to advance to drafting a warrant article on reducing lot sizes in Rural Residence 2, the district that includes most of the town's buildable acreage but only about 20 percent of its population, according to occupancy figures cited at Tuesday's meeting.

 

"RR2 is a combination of farming and residences," Boyd said. "I think we saw last year when we were working on legislation related to cannabis that there's some tension between those two uses. What one does affects the other. So adding more people through more [housing] lots out there is going to increase that, so we have to tread carefully.

 

"I don't believe making lots smaller out there is going to fundamentally, or even at all, help with anything any of us would consider affordable housing. And, as we let more people live in rural residence, we're going to put more pressure on town services, whether that's firefighters, roads, water and sewer, ambulance, you name it. And it's more expensive because [the population] is not densely packed."

 

Chair Chris Winters, who drafted the revision proposals for dimensional changes and a host of other aspects of the town's zoning bylaw, once again Tuesday argued that those lot-size changes are incremental.

 

"The principle at work behind these dimensional schedule suggestions is to allow for opportunity," Winters said. "We talk casually and incorrectly about ‘creating housing' as a board and as a town. We create nothing as a board, other than opportunity. We create opportunity or we restrict opportunity.

 

"What we know is the outcome of what we've lived with. And what we are told is the outcome of what we've lived with, which is the result of our existing zoning regulations, is untenable, that it has resulted in a housing crisis, a lack of affordability in Williamstown that keeps the community from enjoying the benefits of diversity in many forms. We're a land use board. We create nothing. We create opportunity. By reducing these dimensions, we create opportunities at the margins, where people can choose to then be the active creators of actual housing."

 

Town meeting in August 2020 overwhelmingly passed an article that calls on town officials to, "reflect on areas including housing and zoning and make changes that actively allow for a town more supportive of a wide array of racial and economic backgrounds."

 

The resolution, known as Article 37, specifically calls on the Planning Board by name, to "critically re-examine and continue to create their policies and practices according to a commitment to accessible living."

 

Boyd on Tuesday reaffirmed her commitment to making Williamstown more affordable but argued that allowing more housing lots in RR2 would not accomplish that goal and instead only would hurt the benefits the town derives from having a rural residential district.

 

"Farmland, forested land, this thing we call 'open space' provides services to us, too," Boyd said. "We need that to take carbon out of the air, to make us feel good, to bring tourism dollars here. It's a tricky balance, and we don't need that one extra house or 10 extra houses out there. The kind of housing we need is going to be resolved by smaller lots, rental units, multi-unit buildings. That's where we should be focusing. And we shouldn't take on that issue in rural Williamstown right now."

 

Likewise, Lawrence and many of the residents who wrote the Planning Board asking for more study before putting the bylaw amendments before town meeting, stressed that they are in favor of affordable housing as well.

 

Lawrence argued that the Planning Board should be looking at more targeted strategies to encourage affordable housing rather than suggesting sweeping changes to the bylaw.

 

"We're also looking at increasing the number of dwelling units on a given lot," Lawrence said during a discussion about the proposal for the General Residence district. "So, for example, if we vote to permit a four-unit building on a given lot, a developer who chooses his property wisely, based on frontage, at any rate, we're talking about going from three dwelling units to 12 dwelling units.

 

"I've been watching building and development all my life. This is a recipe for bulldozing our existing neighborhoods and putting in small apartment buildings. The idea of putting in a small apartment building can play into affordability. But the proposal we're looking at contains no affordability component."

 

Lawrence said land developers would look to maximize their profits, not create housing affordable to a wider range of residents.

 

Winters, throughout the board's deliberations that began in July, contended that the basic principle of micro-economics – increased supply puts downward pressure on prices – will come into play, even if, as he often has stated "at the margins."

 

"If someone wants to maximize their profits by creating 12 units of housing that we don't have, do we object?" Winters asked Lawrence.

 

"Chris, there's no affordability component," Lawrence replied. "This is not about affordability."

 

"How do you know that?" Winters shot back. "You can't possibly know that."

 

Boyd joined Winters in making the case that smaller lot sizes would allow for increased housing stock in General Residence.

 

"Many times we've talked about how Williamstown is essentially built," Boyd said. "There's not much land left for housing. The only way we get more land for housing is to require smaller pieces.

 

"I'm all in favor of reducing lot sizes in the General Residence. I also think it's where people want to live and where we can have smaller, hopefully more affordable homes, whatever that means. On the other hand, when you look at ways we can provide affordable housing, we have only very few tools."

 

Lawrence argued that the town should be looking at other tools, including overlay districts, to achieve its affordable housing goals.

 

Winters agreed and indicated he would be happy to see them explored in the future. But he noted that the board could have been working on an overlay district proposal for the last year if its members had desired, and with the 2022 annual town meeting warrant closing at the end of March, the proposal he has put forward for this year is the only proposal there is.

 

Lawrence said overlay districts are a compromise that could create more affordable housing and protect the things residents like about the town as is.

 

"If we choose those overlay districts skillfully, we can create affordability without making major changes to the fabric of our town," Lawrence said. "I think our voters, our residents want us to create affordability for new residents and folks who live in town on limited incomes. And they want us to do it without turning Williamstown into a fundamentally different place because they love Williamstown exactly the way it is."

 

Winters later argued that the incremental changes he is suggesting to the zoning bylaw have the virtue of applicability throughout the town – reducing dimensional requirements in General Residence and Rural Residence 2 by the same percentage.

 

"The systemic results of our existing zoning have resulted in an outcome that we find worth changing and making tradeoffs, making sacrifices in other priorities," Winters said. "That is the spirit in which this is presented. It also suggests that, as a town, we're in this together, and I think there's a valuable symbolism in the town — all parts of the town, the 20 percent who live in the beautiful countryside and the 80 percent who live in what we call General Residence — coming together to address the problem of housing supply in the hopes that we can have an impact on housing diversity and affordability."

 

His words brought to mind objections that were raised the last time the Planning Board attempted a major "targeted" revision to the zoning bylaw: a 2018 proposal to carve up the General Residence district and allow more dense development in some areas than others.

 

"Why is this good idea of in-fill housing being put into our neighborhood, which is already the densest neighborhood in town?" Linden Street resident Robin Lenz asked the Planning Board in April 2018. "Why not Haley Village or the Knolls? Why aren't you considering Moorland Street for this 'gift'? Why just Mill Street and Linden Street?"