Suburban Boston Zoning Is Unfair to Families

Many parents of school-age children are looking right now to rent an apartment or buy a condo in a multifamily building in Boston’s suburbs. No municipal official would tell them, “Sorry, kids are not welcome in our buildings.” It would sound absurd and horrible — and be against the law. The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits housing discrimination based on “familial status.”

Of course, families with children are welcome to live in multifamilies, and they do — where they can find suitable housing. But there’s just not enough of it available.

For decades, it has been either the official or unofficial policy of most of Boston’s suburbs to prohibit or discourage development of condos and apartments for families with children, because of school costs and other concerns. The policy is not announced; it is buried in hundreds of local zoning laws. The thousands of zoning decisions that follow add up to a glaring systemic injustice overdue for redress.

This is why the new MBTA Communities zoning law requires Massachusetts municipalities served by the transit system to reform their zoning to allow multifamily housing “suitable for families with children.” The region has perhaps not seen local zoning reform taking place at this scale since The Boston Globe concluded in 1960 that “suburban Boston is zoned to the eyeballs.”

Evidence of the exclusionary policy against families is seen, first of all, in age-restricted zoning. More than half of the 100 Boston suburbs I surveyed for a 2019 report had adopted such zoning, which allows for development of multifamily housing intended for residents 55 years or older. Many communities even offer incentives for developers to place age restrictions on projects, such as permission to build more units. From 2015 to 2017 alone, almost a quarter of Boston’s suburbs granted permits for age-restricted housing developments.

Local zoning sometimes also places restrictions on the number of bedrooms allowed in new developments. More than a quarter of the 100 suburbs I studied had provisions to restrict the number in at least some kinds of multifamily developments. The restrictions generally favor studios and one- and two-bedrooms, which families with multiple children are less likely to choose.

Importantly, age and bedroom restrictions do not need to be explicitly written into the zoning books to be in force. In almost every community, approval processes for multifamily housing are discretionary, political, and risky, so would-be builders have to be strategic. Developers know they are more likely to gain zoning approval from a town if they propose age-restricted projects or