“Are We Trying To Do Nothing?”

This week, a new champion was crowned in the housing advocacy world. This champion does not wear a cape, but a large hoodie, and had the courage to ask a different question during public comment on a citywide zoning change proposed in the name of housing abundance.

David Modica’s public comment at a Marblehead, Massachusetts, town meeting has gone viral, and it was so powerful because everyone immediately understood what was happening.

Marblehead is like many Massachusetts towns struggling to balance state-level housing mandates with local implementation. That balancing act has resulted in the town finding a way to technically comply with the MBTA Communities Act while functionally avoiding the construction of any new housing. The town’s creative response meets the requirements of the state mandate by placing most of the zoning capacity on a golf course, where housing is unlikely to ever be built.

Standing at the microphone, hoodie sleeves pushed up, David Modica saw through all the technical “creativity,” recognized what was really happening, and posed this question:

“Are we trying to do nothing?”

The internet treated the moment as a triumph for the YIMBY movement, elevating it into a literal David-and-Goliath story. The problem is that nothing was actually solved or addressed. The question simply exposed something housing advocates already know to be true but have yet to tackle: Local governments often comply with the letter of reform while resisting its intent.

The housing crisis cannot be solved from the top down alone because where the rubber meets the road, and where the real action is needed, is at the local level. Every housing project depends on local government approval. Whether we are talking about a backyard cottage or an infill multifamily apartment building, the permission to proceed, and whether the project is financially viable, rests in the hands of local planning commissions and municipal building officials.

That does not mean state reform is misguided. Massachusetts lawmakers understood the problem clearly. Exclusionary zoning has constrained housing supply, driven up costs, and limited opportunity across much of the state. The MBTA Communities Act was written by serious people trying to address a serious problem.

The legislation itself is not the failure.

The problem is that even the best reform eventually collides with local implementation, and that collision changes everything.

Housing reform conversations often assume that once restrictive zoning is removed, housing will naturally appear. But cities are not passive systems waiting for deregulation. They are active political organisms with their own incentives, fears, financial pressures and institutional habits.

That means local governments can adapt to any reform without actually producing meaningful change. Sometimes this happens intentionally, as it appears to be happening in Marblehead. Sometimes it happens unintentionally in communities where the permitting process resembles more of a tangle than a path. But the result is often the same.

A state may require multifamily zoning and a city may technically comply. Yet the actual sites selected for housing may be politically untouchable, economically infeasible, infrastructure constrained, or otherwise unlikely to develop for decades. In Marblehead, it is a golf course that will never develop. In other places, the processes are so layered and complicated that the risk and cost discourage anyone from even trying.

On paper, capacity exists. In reality, nothing changes. Or worse, the housing trap grows.

This is why so many housing debates feel disconnected from lived experience. Residents hear announcements about “thousands of units enabled,” while year after year they see almost nothing built except a handful of large projects disconnected from the surrounding neighborhood fabric.

The spreadsheet says progress is happening through countless comprehensive plan updates and zoning changes. The neighborhoods prove otherwise.

The deepest housing problems are not merely ideological. They are operational.

A city can publicly support housing while at the same time extending approval timelines, applying parking requirements, restricting subdivision standards, creating ambiguity around utility costs, increasing fee structures, and dragging out public hearings, all of which make small-scale housing nearly impossible to build.

This is the part many national housing conversations miss. The future of additional housing will not be determined solely by governors, legislatures, or federal agencies. It will be determined by whether thousands of local governments are willing to change the everyday systems that shape development.

These reforms do not start with giant leaps or at the state Capitol. They start at the level of the block and neighborhood, with residents and housing advocates shifting how we talk about housing. 

• Can I add a backyard cottage to my house to help stabilize my income?
• Can my children build a starter home as their first home in our community? 
• Could a builder remodel a vacant single home into a duplex or into 3–4 small apartments? 
• Could the vacant lot on my street be subdivided into two or more lots?
• Can a small local builder survive the permitting process?

These are intensely local questions, and they are where the housing shortage actually lives.

Marblehead is not unique. Across the country, local governments are caught between two pressures: residents who say they support affordability in theory but fear visible change in practice, and state governments increasingly demanding measurable housing outcomes.

The result is often a search for political equilibrium. Cities try to satisfy the state without significantly disrupting the existing development pattern that current residents have grown comfortable protecting.

This is how you end up zoning a golf course for homes that will never be built there.

Not necessarily because local officials are uniquely malicious or foolish, but because political systems often reward symbolic compliance over structural change. And, to be fair, local officials are responding to real pressures. Residents worry about traffic, schools, parking, infrastructure, taxes, and neighborhood character. Some of those fears are exaggerated and some are legitimate. But all of them are politically powerful.

Housing reform cannot simply be imposed from the top down. For reform to result in action, it must be operationalized locally. Strong Towns has long argued that resilient places are built incrementally from the bottom up. That insight matters here because the traditional pattern of development that once yielded abundant housing evolved through many small local decisions.

For most of American history, our neighborhoods evolved and adapted over time. A duplex appeared beside a single-family house. A small apartment building emerged near downtown. A homeowner added a rental unit over a garage. A corner lot intensified as demand increased.

That pattern created affordability through adaptation and many feedback loops.

Modern zoning systems largely outlawed that process, requiring everything to be built to a finished state.

Now many cities are trying to solve decades of suppressed incremental growth through large, politically explosive upzonings. When that happens, every housing conversation starts to feel existential because communities are no longer accustomed to gradual change.

The irony is that incremental housing is often the least disruptive path forward. A duplex on a residential block is less destabilizing than a massive apartment complex approved after years of political conflict. A backyard cottage changes a neighborhood less than skyrocketing housing costs that force families to leave altogether.

Small-scale adaptation can be a little messy, but that used to be normal. We made it illegal in an attempt to prioritize order. The lesson from Marblehead is not that state reform failed. The lesson is that housing reform succeeds only when local governments are prepared to translate policy into reality.

That requires more than legal compliance. It requires local leadership willing to ask difficult questions to shift the conversation:

• What kinds of housing are currently not permitted here and why did we make those illegal?
• What approvals and steps in the process could be simplified tomorrow?
• Where can incremental growth happen naturally?
• Most importantly: Are we actually trying to solve the problem?

Because communities eventually answer that question not through speeches, plans, or zoning maps, but through outcomes.

The housing crisis is not merely a shortage of units. It is a shortage of local systems capable of responding to change. And until cities rebuild that capacity, even the smartest legislation in the country will continue colliding with the same reality David Modica exposed in a Massachusetts gymnasium: We can comply with reform without ever truly embracing it.