Regulations need to be relaxed to allow for new urban-like communities that bring more housing and better public transit, says urban planning expert
“If developers are not restricted by the copy-and-paste format of single-family residential zoning, they can create architecturally diverse, walkable, mixed-use, and dense towns,” says Justin Hollander. Here, a street in Kentlands, an example of a “new town” neighborhood in Maryland. Photo: Shutterstock
As housing prices continue to rise nationwide—not just in major metropolitan areas, but even in rural locations—there’s pressure to create more housing. In Massachusetts, the 2024 Affordable Homes Act calls for 220,000 additional units of affordable housing to be created, but it isn’t clear exactly how that’s going to happen.
While development usually leads to suburban sprawl, Justin Hollander, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, calls for an entirely different solution to the housing crunch—building new self-contained towns, which would be linked by public transit to nearby urban areas.
New towns, as they are sometimes called, are created from scratch. They have varied architecture, an urban feel, parks and public amenities, and a transportation network that prioritizes pedestrians, bikes, and transit, Hollander says.
He’s advocated for them in his writing and late last year convened the New Towns Symposium at Tufts, co-sponsored by the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, to increase public attention. The gathering showed the growing interest in trying new approaches to address the housing crunch not just in Massachusetts, but around the country, he says.
“I think the participants were supportive of the idea of new towns as a strategy for drastically increasing affordable housing to address the problems of urban sprawl, low-density housing, and automobile-oriented development patterns that we have now,” Hollander says.
They’ve Already Built One
An example of a new town is Kentlands, outside of Washington, D.C., which was built in the early 1990s on what was the last large farm in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Instead of the standard suburban subdivision, Kentlands was developed with a small, urban core, varied architecture with single- and multi-family housing, and walkable neighborhoods. It also linked to public transportation networks to nearby urban centers.
“In typical suburban subdivisions, there are meandering streets, where many end in cul-de-sacs—nowhere to walk to—versus what they’ve tried to accomplish in Kentlands, with grids and what they call a neo-traditional urban feel,” says Hollander.
“We are working to change the political language around this and really rethink what zoning is.”
The amount of land needed to develop a new town isn’t too large—a minimum of about 100 acres—and it could easily be scaled up if there was more open space. But projects like Kentlands “are really hard to build” says Hollander. “They take decades to put together and get all the approvals.”
One reason is the type of zoning regulations that exist now. While they make it easy for developers to create single-family housing on single lots, they make it more difficult to create a new town. “We are working to change the political language around this and really rethink what zoning is,” he says.
Regulations That Help Building Projects
Current zoning regulations “help to support individual property owners making individual investments. One farm here, one farm there, without any kind of cohesion or sense of what would it mean to create transit-supportive neighborhoods, or walkable neighborhoods,” Hollander says.
What’s needed, he emphasizes, is legislation at the state level to enable the creation of new towns, since at least half of all states have authority over what zoning local governments can control. What he proposes is called “by-right zoning,” meaning that any housing development that complies with pre-existing criteria is allowed to proceed by right without the current lengthy process of approvals for special zoning permits.
“If developers are not restricted by the copy-and-paste format of single-family residential zoning, they can create architecturally diverse, walkable, mixed-use, and dense towns,” Hollander says. And that would provide more housing for more people.
What’s Holding Back Change
Massachusetts needs an impetus to create new towns, he says. “There’s a natural disinclination for change here, but there are calls for action, which might help.”
Under the current rules and regulations in Massachusetts, building a new town like Kentlands “probably would never happen. And if somehow miraculously a team was able to pull it off, it would take probably in the range of 10 to 20 years,” Hollander says.
But with changes in regulations, the landscape could change drastically, Hollander says. Coming up with a preliminary design, acquiring the property, getting legal permits, and the beginning of construction might be done within six months, and the first residents move within that year. The following stages of building and development might take another three to five years, but that would be far more rapid than what is possible now.
“What’s really good about these types of projects is the increased supply of housing,” he says. And with a mix of multi-family and single-family homes, “it’s really about attracting a diversity of different types of people across different income levels.”
