Executive Summary
Marblehead's fifty years of strict single family zoning, while only a short period in the town's history, has had a negative impact on its capacity to support long-term family networks
Young adults find it difficult to secure suitable housing in town, pushing them away from the place they grew up and their parents
It also forces seniors to confront a choice: Maintain large, single family homes well into their retirement, or move out of town to find housing elsewhere
Families are the heart of any vibrant community. Many people’s fondest memories are interactions across and between generations. Learning to fish with a grandparent. Wrestling with the challenges of parenthood alongside our siblings. Imparting the wisdom of years and decades to grandchildren.
But these memories can only be made in communities and neighborhoods that reflect the needs of the people who live in them. In Marblehead, we have maintained strict single family zoning over the vast majority of our buildable land since the 1970s. And that has prevented our built environment from keeping up with the changing needs of our population.
You have probably heard this play out anecdotally. Young adults who would like to stay in Marblehead, or return after time away but can’t find somewhere to live. Or retirees you know who would like to downsize from their single family home to something easier to maintain, but can’t find suitable housing.
In many ways, this is a tragic irony of single family zoning: It was meant as a tool to prevent change. Instead it forced our community to change instead of the built environment changing to accommodate our community.
You can see this play out in the demographics of our town. To illustrate, we collated Marblehead’s census data by age breakdown from the US Census between 1970 and 2020 and created a population pyramid. Population pyramids allow us to compare the number of people in different age brackets living in the town at different points of time. Note that the totals here are 21,295 and 20,441 respectively for 1970 and 2020.
This data shows clearly the extent to which single family zoning, rather than insulating Marblehead from change, just shifted change onto the backs of families, especially children and seniors.
Our under 5 population has halved, while our over 85 population has more than doubled. Young adults are rapidly disappearing from the town, the number of 25 to 34 year olds has fallen by more than half. We could make many such observations but the trend away from families with young children is clear.
This has negative consequences for extended family networks. With Marblehead’s single family zoning effectively squeezing more and more families out of the town over time, it puts more distance between family members and makes it harder for them to connect. It is much easier to see your grandmother every week if she lives a few streets over. It becomes much harder when you have to drive across multiple towns.
It also creates challenges for young and new families, who may not yet need or want a single family home. The average number of people per household is falling across the United States, a trend prevalent here in Marblehead as well. Our smaller families should be able to find smaller housing if they want it.
The effects here are most acute for seniors who wish to “age in place”. Rather than moving away to a retirement community or nursing home, these seniors prefer to stay in Marblehead where they raised their children and where their social networks are. But to do so they may need or want to move out of their large family home which requires a lot of maintenance, and to move into a smaller home. Perhaps they also need ground floor or single floor living to facilitate their mobility. But this is extremely difficult to achieve when so much of our land is reserved for one type of housing: single family.
So our seniors are faced with a choice: Continue to bear the burden of maintaining their single family home, or leave to find suitable housing. In July 2024, the Marblehead Current reported on a senior who was forced to make the latter choice.
For all of these reasons, the Marblehead Housing Coalition sees 3A zoning as fundamentally pro-family and pro-seniors. By reducing the stifling restrictions on housing development created by almost uniform application of single family zoning across the town, we create opportunities to build housing that satisfies the unmet demands of current, returning and future Marblehead residents.
Comentarios