Category: Chapter 40B

Anti-black or anti-green? Part 2, what did we win?

25 August, 2009 (09:55) | Chapter 40B, Desegregation, False Claims Act, Inclusionary zoning, Local issues, Westchester County, Workforce housing, Zoning | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1].
 
Yesterday we delved into Westchester County’s recent settlement, as reported in the New York Times, of a desegregation lawsuit.  Via a clever legal end run, it was brought against the county by the Anti-Discrimination Center, using the False Claims Act:
 
The case was litigated by Mr. Gurian and the center’s lawyer, John [...]

Anti-black or anti-green? Part 1, we won … didn’t we?

24 August, 2009 (12:36) | Chapter 40B, Desegregation, False Claims Act, Inclusionary zoning, Local issues, Westchester County, Workforce housing, Zoning | No comments

Forty years after Operation Breakthrough, the question remains: is exclusionary zoning (de jure or de facto in high land prices) racist, or merely elitist?

Racial discrimination, or economic?
Westchester County house values

Only one is illegal, and in the case of Westchester County, as reported in the New York Times, it took a curious private-citizen [...]

Paradise future? Part 2, operations

12 January, 2009 (10:16) | Chapter 40B, Co-housing, Concepts in housing, Housing, Innovations, Local issues, Massachusetts, Tenure, Zoning and land use | 6 comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s exploration of the interesting experiment of co-housing, based on a sympathetic Boston Globe account, had reached the point of a completed development, using as an anti-snob crowbar the powerful lever of Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B law to produce a development that the founders swear up down and sideways ‘will’ be green.  [...]

Paradise future? Part 1, development

9 January, 2009 (10:22) | Chapter 40B, Co-housing, Housing, Innovations, Local issues, Massachusetts, Tenure, Zoning and land use | 1 comment

The older I get, the less faith I place in future-tense verbs.
 
Character is what you are in the dark
 
Thus it was with a fair dose of jaundice that I read a sympathetic Boston Globe account of a new approach to affordable housing, co-housing:
 

Co-housing?  Bah, humbug!
 
The idea started small. Kathy Journeay and a few close friends [...]

Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B pachinko machine: Part 2, … in spite of local opposition

12 December, 2008 (11:27) | Chapter 40B, Local issues, Massachusetts, Regulation, US News, Zoning and land use | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 

God help us if they get to build it in our town: a 40B property in Sterling, MA
 
Yesterday’s post dug into the high-fiber statistics carefully compiled by MIT DUSP professor (and AHI affiliate) Lynn Fisher and presented in her recently issued Harvard Kennedy School report, Reviewing Chapter 40B: What Gets Proposed, [...]