Massachusetts voters are being asked a surprisingly simple housing question: Should a single-family home be legal on a 5,000-square-foot lot with public sewer and water? Chuck talks with Andrew Mikula, a Boston policy researcher who spearheaded the volunteer effort behind Question 7, the ballot measure that would make that standard legal statewide. Andrew explains why the coalition chose such a modest baseline, how much control cities would still keep, and what infrastructure and affordability have to do with a seemingly small change in lot size. The ballot question sets the baseline, but the next fight is much more local: turning that rule into something that actually works in existing neighborhoods.
Hey everybody! This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Boy, it was a few weeks back now that I wrote an article contrasting an approach to getting housing built in Massachusetts, which I called a simple kind of bottom-up. I'm not even sure if I used the word participatory or not, but an approach that to me seemed very common sense and empowering. I contrasted that with an approach out of California that had a lot of the opposite instincts. It was a lot leaning into state substitution, is what I've started to call it.
The idea of we don't like the decisions that local people are making, so we're going to substitute state decisions. After I wrote that article, I heard from one of the people involved in what is called Yes on Massachusetts Question Seven effort out of Massachusetts, Andrew Mikula, and I hope Andrew, I said your last name right, Mikula.
It's Mikula.
Okay, so if you were from Minnesota, I probably would have, I probably would have figured that out. But Mikula is not a name I've run into before. Andrew Mikula, is that because you're a cool dude, or is there some other like ancestral reason why your family must have been a bunch of cool people?
I think the ancestral reason is it's Czech.
Oh, it's Czech. All right.
I've heard I've heard it's kind of the Central European version of Nichols, the last name Nichols.
Okay, well, Andrew, who you just heard got a hold of me and said, "Hey, thanks for writing that. I'm like, "Dude, I want to talk to you. Like, let's let's have a chat on the podcast. So we are just actually having a conversation here. Andrew doesn't have a book he's promoting. I don't have a long set of questions. We're just gonna like discover what's going on and talk a little bit, Andrew. Welcome to the Strong Towns podcast.
Thanks so much for having me, Chuck.
It's really nice to chat with you. Where are you? Where are we talking from today? I'm in Brainerd, Minnesota. Where are you at?
I'm in my office in downtown Boston.
Okay, and tell us what you do. You're in your office. What kind of work do you do?
Right. So my day job, I work for a think tank, a public policy research organization. We do a broad array of work from kind of original database creation to policy research, publishing white papers and policy briefs, to downstream talking to lawmakers, talking to the media to communicate ideas about policy reform and evaluations of existing policies on the table, that is separate from the work I'm doing. That's your day job. Yeah.
So okay. So you're doing volunteer work for the Yes on Massachusetts Question Seven Is that part of a larger group? Like, what's the what's the volunteer entity you're working with?
Right. So the Legalized Charter Homes Ballot Committee is the official name of the group. Yes on seven is shorthand because it's going to be Question Seven, and we want people to know that. But before July, we didn't know that. This has been an effort I've spearheaded going back to the previous summer, July 2025, and I'm very grateful to have a lot more help than I did back then. I went to some housing advocates I knew.
I talked to some attorneys I knew about how to put together a petition language that reforms housing at a state level, and for a long time, several months, the main people working on this on a day-to-day basis were myself and someone from a different, relatively aligned think tank in Boston as well.
Okay, I would really like people to know how we got to this point, but I feel like it might be good, at least for like a hook for people to hang on with us because I feel like this is a very unique ballot question, and the way you framed it is very unique. So, can we talk about first what is Massachusetts Question Seven, and what makes it maybe in your estimation different than other questions that would normally be on the ballot in Massachusetts?
Yeah, so we're trying to make it legal to build single-family homes on lots as small as 5,000 square feet and as narrow as 50 feet at the street, so that's street frontage in Planners Parlance, in areas with public sewer and water service statewide. So, in some sense, it's a preemptive zoning law at the state level, but we're unlike.
Pretty much every other, state level zoning initiative I've heard of, we're asking for the explicit permission of voters statewide to do it, and importantly, we are targeting this initiative so that the result is not going to be, 400 unit apartment buildings, but rather small-scale single-family subdivisions, vast majority of which we expect to be owner-occupied, and many of which we expect to be initiated. The developments themselves to be initiated by people who are already owner-occupants on larger tracts of land.
We come from two vastly different cultures, Massachusetts and Minnesota. Actually, I feel like they're the same state in many ways. I've always said if I had to move out of Minnesota, I would get Massachusetts better than just about any other state. So this is sarcasm for all of you non whatever Yankees that we are. One of the things that was astounding is how big this bill was. What is it? 300 pages you put together, Andrew. Describe the length of the ballot initiative. It's literally like 300 words or something.
Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's a good point. So, yeah, 300 might be about it. The entire official ballot language on the AG's website, the Massachusetts Attorney General, and the first 10 signers, so individual lines to sign it, fits on one page.
Yeah, I think the thing that jumped out at me, and again, I'll go back to this. We have preemption language. You've got state substitution, which is basically the state is going to substitute judgment for local judgment, versus what I've categorized in other places as getting people unstuck. It feels to me like what you did is took the most inarguably like smallest step.
Like, hey, can we all agree that if you've got a 5,000 square foot lot, which is a decent size lot that's 50 feet wide, and you've already paid for sewer to that site, which is like kind of if you're going to go bigger than 50 feet with a sewered lot, you really can't afford to do it as a government. Like, can we all agree that you should be able to have a home here? I almost feel like you're saying like, hey, if everything's normal, like why not? Is am I overinterpreting what you're trying to do?
That's totally fair. 5,000 square feet is a very common lot size in most of suburban America. The problem is Massachusetts was built out. A lot of the inner suburbs, at least, were built out between the 20s and 50s, when you not only had much lower land costs than you do now, but there were often places that weren't really fully sewered, and so they needed to make room for leach fields.
But since then, it's changed a lot, and as places have developed, we have serving most of Greater Boston, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which sends all of our wastewater out to Deer Island and Boston Harbor, and so it really is a place where there's been a lot of existing infrastructure, and making good in that investment requires a change to the status quo, in my mind. Because not to get too personal, but I grew up on I grew up on three quarters of an acre, 12 miles from downtown Boston, fully seared, full water pipe service, all centralized, and it would be illegal to subdivide my that house, my friend's house.
Yeah, which is crazy, really. I'll speak as an engineer. If you've got 50 feet of pipe in front of your house, you've got a very expensive lot. That's a that's an expensive lot to develop. As soon as you put water, sewer, roadway, sidewalk in front of a house at 50 feet wide, you're talking about a rather exclusive kind of subdivision. You said three quarter of acre. That is, going to be about 30,000 square foot lot. Under your provision, you could actually fit a number of additional. Of course, the width is going to get you.
I don't know how wide that lot was, but here in Minnesota, if you're on lakeshore property, which is generally like our densest non-urban form of development, it's very common to have 100 foot wide, 40,000 square foot lots. These are big, big lots designed to have their own on-site sewer system and their own that. When you go and provide sewer to those places, it's financially almost impossible to do that without massive ongoing state subsidy at that level of density. I looked at your provision. Thought I don't from a just from a sewer standpoint because you really have three provisions.
It's the 5,000 square foot, it's the 50 foot width, and it is sewer. As a municipality, I don't know how you would not want every lot that size developed if you're already providing sewer to it. Like I don't know financially how you could otherwise do it.
Right. It's a it's a financial issue on the municipal side, but it's also an affordability issue on the buyer side. We have decades of academic literature and lived experience showing that when you require large lot sizes in these places where land is already pretty expensive. You're just going to get million-dollar homes, right?
Because land directly costs money, and you're also placing an essential cap on the number of homes you can build in a given area, and buyer competition just pushes up the prices on the relatively few remaining homes, so undoing that is, or at least at a baseline, allowing it, allowing some development on these parcels is really important. The way we've written the language and the way that municipal planning law kind of works in Massachusetts.
We also expect this to result in a number of what are called A and R or approval not required subdivisions, which essentially means as long as you have the frontage and the land area and other dimensional requirements to support new development under the zoning code, and it's not resulting in a new road or otherwise tripping up subdivision control laws. You can do this subdivision right along the street and along the Dixie Street without going to the planning board for some discretionary approval.
So it's going to result in these kind of small-scale new single-family subdivisions in some areas that haven't really seen a traditional single-family subdivision since the Great Recession.
There's two directions I want to take this. The first one maybe is to just talk about this as being a minimum standard. I've read the work that you've you've done here. I've read the law, all 300 words of it. Very simple, very straightforward. I feel like there's going to be people who will read this and say, "Well, 5,000 square feet. I can put 10 homes in 5,000 square feet. Why aren't we doing more? Why aren't we doing apartment complexes? Why aren't we doing? I've you're in Boston. I've been to Boston and all of this would be extremely low density in most of Boston. Before I weigh in on that, because to me there's an obvious answer here.
But I'll let you, why 5,000 square foot, 50 feet of frontage and public sewer and water access. Why not go further?
Right. This was a big debate when we got our initial coalition together, and some people wanted to do even higher. Eight or 10,000 square feet, and I think we settled on 5,000 for a couple reasons. Politically, we have public opinion polling data, or we did at the time we started this, that show that the idea of allowing homes to be built on smaller lots, allowing larger lots to be subdivided into smaller ones, is generally politically popular when you ask about in the abstract. Upwards of 70% support, but we didn't know exactly what small meant, and so there were a few things that kind of anchored us.
One was that in Maine, which is a state that is, much more sparsely populated than Massachusetts, and has much more land available for development, passed a very similar law to this legislatively in their previous legislative session, I think in June of 2025. The second piece is existing state law in Massachusetts says that you can actually build on 5,000 square foot lots that have at least 50 feet of frontage using the exact same, thresholds, if that lot existed previously and was subject to downzoning, that subsequently, or there's a protection against downzoning on those sorts of lots. Yeah,
Yeah. So
That was an impetus for that was a way to say, hey, the legislature has already in one context, identified these lots as perfectly appropriate for this scale of development, and the third piece I'd emphasize actually is, and I know a lot of folks in Massachusetts don't want me comparing us to other states, but Census Bureau characteristics of new housing survey. The median lot size for a new single-family home last year in the entire western half of the country was about 5900 square feet. So we felt it was totally appropriate in one of the most land-constrained and expensive housing markets in the country to allow 5,000 as a baseline.
Let me get the other side of this equation then, because I feel like there is a, I know that there is a group. Let me make sure I get it right. The Massachusetts Municipal Association, who is objecting to this on local control grounds, strong towns. We tend to be all about cities having responsibility and stepping up and doing good work at the local level. One of the things that I found remarkable about this was how you're not suggesting that states substitute judgment for local governments. You're you're kind of just setting like a boundary condition that seems very reasonable.
Cities will still be able to regulate setbacks and fire codes and other conditions. Talk about that because I feel like there is a there's going to be a pushback. Like why are you imposing this from the state on localities? I almost feel this is like the lightest footprint you could have, and still nudge cities along. Talk about that dynamic of this, Andrew.
Yeah, it's kind of the sandbox preemption framework. Here are the here are the four walls, but you build the sandcastle you want. So, in the petition language itself, we give a state agency the authority to determine what count as reasonable regulations for the purpose of implementing the petition. That's a very similar framework as was used to legalize accessory dwell units statewide in Massachusetts two years ago, and the result of that has been yes, as a baseline, accessory dwelling units are kind of a protected use under state law, so that in areas that have single-family homes, you can build them.
But the guardrails that localities can place around that cover everything else: setbacks, floor area ratio, height. It's all very contextual. It's tied to what the local zoning says is appropriate for single-family homes. You can't enact something stricter for accessory dwelling units than you can for single-family homes. What you can do is say, "Okay, here are these design standards that are objective that will help us integrate these new homes into our neighborhoods, and we envision exactly that sort of thing happening with this petition.
I really don't think that small-scale single-family subdivisions are inherently incompatible in any neighborhood in Massachusetts that already is well served by this infrastructure, which, in theory and in practice, are either village-like or metropolitan areas.
Let me say this in my way, and I'm I'm going to welcome you to push back. We just said the most normal thing possible should actually be legal everywhere. Yes, if you're if you're going to allow this. You should like this very normal thing that is exactly like If you can build a house on 10,000 square feet, you can build the same house on 5,000 square feet and have a little bit smaller yard. That's going to be okay everywhere.
Right. We have a kind of failure of imagination when it comes to building in existing neighborhoods, in not just Massachusetts, but a lot of this country, and over the course of the campaign, I, people have reached out to me who are very angry and have said, "Hey, this is supposed to be about affordability, but I moved to the first ring suburbs because of affordability. My kids move for the second ring suburbs when they couldn't afford the first ring suburbs, and we just need to keep doing that if we want my grandkids to afford a home too. One of one person who kind of used that line of argument with me was a home builder, right?
So I think that speaks volumes about we need a culture shift on this issue, and I think that at its best, policy can be an impetus for those conversations happening, right? It's not a replacement for the hard one-on-one conversations that are necessary to form a culture shift, but my experience from running this ballot campaign is, you kind of make your own luck. You put yourself in the room by putting something down on a piece of paper and submitting it to the attorney general's office.
Andrew, I feel like that is the brilliant thing here. Is that I feel like your target. Housing policy, but I feel like you're also targeting a culture shift here. As much, if not more, I feel like what's on the ballot here is a deeper question of: Are we going to not allow what is like a very normal, historic, consistent with who we are, kind of a thing. I feel like the same thing with the accessory dwelling units, right?
Our backyard cottages, which is like a normal thing that we see throughout not only all of human history but throughout Massachusetts, we can go to neighborhoods all over, and it's a very traditional, historic kind of way of building, are we going to not allow that? I, I think sometimes it is easy for people to not be confronted with change when it's like one. We want to do it here, we want to do it there. But I feel like having a ballot initiative like this, where we say, as a state, is this a reasonable thing or not?
Actually, ask people within a culture to confront something about themselves and the type of people they want to be and the type of place they want to be. I know I'm editorializing here, and I, I'm kind of maybe affirming why I feel like this is a really strong way to go. You almost ask people to confront something that, if we just made this a decision of the legislature, we could not participate in otherwise, right? Like the legislature should just do this.
You're actually asking Massachusetts residents to participate in forming a-I don't even want to say a different kind of culture, but like affirming a culture that says we're going to build houses that people can afford to live in here,
Right? That participation is important because our democracy functions in very different ways at different levels of government, and I hear arguments about this is usurping democracy because we have a sort of strong tradition of grassroots democracy in New England, and my response to that is always democracy works best when people have a say in matters that they have a stake in, as long as transit systems are regional, housing markets are regional.
There's a reason why some of the most blue collar hard scrabble parts of the immediate Boston area have home prices that are as high or higher than the most upscale suburbs of Cleveland, and what I worry about is people who would be living in these new homes don't really have a say right now at whether they're built. Transportation systems, infrastructure systems are regional. I think we need to think more about the kind of collective action problem around housing-related decisions.
That's not to say that local control isn't valuable for the kind of contextual nature of development that is not normal a normal project in your words, but this really is about setting a baseline and getting people to think differently about the scale at which these decisions are made, because not only do we have people who have a say in housing growth in one town or another who don't live there yet. We also have a much higher participation rate, a much higher voter turnout rate at the state level, for better or worse.
Yeah, it's funny because I do think Minnesota and Massachusetts have historically, and Utah to a degree, have historically led the country in like voter participation and all this. I, I do think that part of the part of the culture, as I see it, is strengthened by, especially in a place like Massachusetts, inviting people to weigh in on something like this. I do hope you get a 70% There's a part of me that feels like what you're asking is, hey, do you can you affirm that like humans should have clean air and clean water and like eat food every day? Like, yeah, of course. Like we should do that.
I feel like when you put something so simple like this, yet so radical from what currently is allowed. I do think that what you're doing is starting a conversation that hopefully cities will, if they get unstuck, say, "Hey, 5,000 square feet was not scary, and over here we actually have a transit line, so we need to do." Way more than that here, and like, look at it's not no one's dying here. It's not fearful, and in fact, we can actually build a lot of housing and get people into it. Let me ask about your group: is this part of a discussion that you think will go on after this ballot initiative?
There seems like there's a lot more work to do, right?
Absolutely, and we are grateful to have well-established housing advocacy groups statewide in our coalition now. Abundant Housing Massachusetts and the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, or CHAPPA, are among them. I actually had some people when I was reaching out for initial. You need 10 signatures just to send it to the attorney general's office. Some people said no, or they wouldn't sign unless Amma and Chapa were on board. So, a year and change later, having that coalition who's doing canvassing for us, who's doing field organizing, helping us get endorsements at the state and local level.
That is an immense honor, and it's a coalition that predated this initiative for sure. But it was about kind of legislative access mostly until this work.
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the technical details then, because I think people are interested. Andrew, I'm going to say this: you seem like a very like normal, down to earth person. For people listening on the podcast, you've you've just got a nice tie. You've got a nice demeanor about yourself. How does like I'll use the word again? Normal. How does like a person who cares about something like this, how do you end up at the attorney general's office getting a ballot initiative? Did you have to raise $10 million? Did you have to get 500,000 signatures? Like, what, what, what did you have to do to make this happen?
Yeah, well, the kind of barrier to entry here is lower than you might think. The easiest part of the campaign was using my connections in my day job to talk to a lawyer who was going to do some pro bono work, helping me draft the petition language itself. So that was a couple of conversations over the phone in July last summer, July 2025. Then it's just a constitutional check, that we're not violating Article 48, which is governs ballot questions in Massachusetts. From there, you do need signatures, you do need some funding, but all of that came very late.
It was mid-October, so two and a half months after we submitted to the Attorney General's office, that our bank account hit four figures for the first time. We had some people writing press releases for us on a pro bono basis, with the hope of it turning into something down the line, a lot of political consultants and operatives do things pretty speculatively, which is incredible to me as someone who has a salaried position. But it's worked out incredibly well. We've raised $1.7 million.
We have a lot of contractors now, including four fundraising contractors to help us with the TV and digital ads we still want to do in the three weeks before the election. We were lucky enough to also have professional help for the signatures. Not entirely. I gathered 2,500 myself over the course of last fall and this spring, but talking to voters is as good an experience you'll have at understanding how people think about issues like this who aren't working on it every day, and that's a really invaluable experience.
What do you feel like you learned? I'm imagining you going door to door talking to people, and I've I've chatted with people who have done this before, and they always have a story going in and a story coming out that are different. What did you feel like you learned chatting with people about this?
Yeah, well, it wasn't exactly door to door. We went to places that have high concentrations of people. I was advised you should all you should be asking someone to sign the petition or have someone actually signing every 10 seconds, right? So this is street fairs. This is, outside a busy grocery store in a Sunday afternoon, that sort of thing. What I learned, first of all, just how much apathy there is. Actually, 90% of people won't even respond to you when you ask, "Hello, interested in making housing more." Affordable, sir or ma'am, even when you're trying to keep it pithy and direct.
But there were people who would respond pretty well and say, "At least I want to get it on the ballot. I care about this because it's something you're asking voters about, I think there is a sense in general in Massachusetts that our legislature isn't doing enough across certain areas. There was a report a couple years ago that we were, one of the least productive legislatures in the country, and there are also people who will bring up concerns that motivated me to better educate myself about what comes next. Maybe that's a part of the kind of failure of imagination. Maybe, well, let me give you an example, Chuck.
Yeah, yeah. So
I was outside a farmers market in Somerville, and I was ascribing this petition to a couple, and the woman said, "This will never work. Infrastructure capacity isn't there to accommodate this. At the time, I didn't know what to say. I'll admit, but you can bet that motivated me to think about that more deeply and understand, things. Some things engineers do at least.
The more conversations I had about that, Massachusetts has a lot of old infrastructure, and not to get too technical, but there are going to be separations and leaks and other inefficiencies that mean that stormwater is going into the system and contributing to that capacity limit at the wastewater treatment plant.
So part of what you can do, and what we expect towns to do, after this is hopefully implemented, is to require developers to free up capacity in the existing network, fix up those leaks, maybe redirect illegal tie-ins back to the stormwater system from basements and whatnot, and that should not only free up more capacity for the development that is happening, but it's also better for the environment and better for towns' budgets ultimately, because they don't have to necessarily put sewer upgrades onto their existing taxpayers, and a lot of these programs have like four to one, ratios.
So you have to remove a lot more of the capacity from the stormwater tie-ins than you do contribute to the new demand with the housing. So hypothetically, it's it's going to broaden your tax base to contribute to when you eventually do need to replace the infrastructure, while at the same time guaranteeing that there's no harmful effects on existing residents from the new development.
Let me, as an engineer, answer that one for you.
Oh, please!
If you don't have at least a house every 50 feet, you're never going to be able to afford your sewer long term anyway. So, when you're thinking about fixing it, repairing it, maintaining it, sustaining it, taking care of it-a house every 50 feet is the minimum you need to be able to afford to do that work.
So, whatever other problem you have of like the infrastructure can't sustain it is all like metaphorically downstream of actually being able to financially afford the system you have, so it's interesting because I run into engineers every now and then who will say we can't add backyard cottages, we can't add more starter homes in neighborhoods, we can't thicken up and mature because we've got these infrastructure systems that won't handle it. My response to them in an engineering context, not in a political statewide ballot initiative context, my response to them is, dude, that's why you're an engineer.
Like that, that's the problem we have to solve. Like there are technical solutions to that problem. That's what engineering is solving that problem. What I hear them saying back to me is to change anything would be difficult, and my ants, my response to that is yes, of course. To not change anything is also difficult. It's there's no like not difficult path. That's what you got to fix. Like that, you take a you take a state like Massachusetts where you have old cities with old infrastructure. I remember once I was I was at a forum and Andrew Card was speaking. Andrew Card, you're probably too young to know who he is.
Have you ever seen the photo of the guy with. In George W. Bush's ear on 911, yes, George W. Bush was speaking to a bunch of kindergartners, and Andrew Card came up. He was George W. Bush's chief of staff, and he whispered in his ear, "Miss President, the nation's under attack. He was in the George H. W. Bush administration, the Secretary of Transportation. So I was at this forum, and he was one of the speakers, and he did this whole presentation about how it's so much easier to build in Texas and Arizona, and what have you, than it is in say. He actually used Massachusetts as an example.
He goes than it is in Massachusetts because everything's so much more expensive there in Texas, we can acquire land and build all the infrastructure way cheaper. I remember looking at that, going, "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say. Yeah, in Texas, everything is 10 times further apart. If you can acquire the land for half the cost, you're still money behind because you have to build so much more infrastructure to connect things. In Massachusetts, it's more expensive because everything's closer together. It's the land's more valuable; like stuff is worth more.
I feel like there is a really strong case to be made for the development pattern in Massachusetts having this tremendous financial productivity, that if you yeah if you want to have the development standards of Texas, okay you can build things cheaper up front, but you're not going to be able to maintain them. You're not going to be able to sustain them. You're not going to be able to have the high productivity, high value state that you have in Massachusetts.
I'm glad that I wasn't standing outside the grocery store when the woman said that to me because we probably would have been talking for 45 minutes about my annoyances with engineers not being able to solve that problem, which is wholly solvable, right?
Right. I'll I'll say I used I did do a planning internship in grad school in Texas, and it was pretty striking because it gave me a much more well-rounded perspective about how development approval works in a very different part of the country that I had lived in my whole life up to that point. I certainly remember at one point saying to one of my supervisors, "Hey, I think what we're doing is kind of unsustainable, and there was general acknowledgment that's the case. A lot of the cities and towns there felt like their hands were tied by what the state requires them to do on the process side.
Approve developments very quickly, plan for growth very proactively in the sense of public infrastructure in and of itself, but it's a again a very different ball game in Massachusetts, where a lot of towns will simply refuse to adopt sewer to begin with because they don't want the development that could come with.
Right. No, that's exactly right. On one hand, I feel sympathetic to that. Like my answer is, if you want to, I grew up on a farm. If you want to live a rural lifestyle, I think you should go live a rural lifestyle. But a rural lifestyle means you're going to have a dirt road. You're not going to have sewer and water. When the barn catches on fire, there will be no fire department that shows up in time to put it out. Like your barn's literally going to burn down. This is what a rural lifestyle is. I remember as a kid, we like call the sheriff for something, and they shut up 45 minutes later.
That's actually what it means to live in a in a rural area. If you're going to live with public utilities and fast response times and all that stuff, which is a that's a that's a great way to live. You're going to have to have higher levels of financial productivity in order to do it, and I don't know. To me, 5,000 square foot lots is-I feel like that is like the baseline of what you would need in order to make that kind of approach even begin to be financially viable.
In Massachusetts, we have kind of a soft version of California's Prop 13, where property tax growth is capped at the municipal, not the property level, year to year at two and a half percent. Of course, there's an exemption for new growth. So hypothetically, cities and towns already have a strong incentive to allow, new homes to be built in existing neighborhoods, and they just a lot of them, at least, are not really making full use of that possibility. So, if our petition helps communities think more proactively about planning for growth with this framework that applies in a broadly but with at an incremental scale, that's a good thing.
This is a responsible framework that doesn't involve kind of the speculation of extending sewers or planning 15 years in advance where the sewers are going to go. To accommodate the pace of growth you're maintaining now,
Yeah, I have seen the polls not just in your state but across the country that say legalizing starter homes is something that broadly people agree with. It polls really, really, really high. When we talk about building new houses out in green fields, that pulls really, really low. When we talk about increasing sewer and water systems, extending city boundaries, annexation, those do not pull nearly as high as a simple idea building starter homes. You are a volunteer. This is not part of your first step towards running for governor someday. What are you hoping happens here?
What do you want people outside of Massachusetts to know about what you're doing? I guess any maybe final thoughts you would have that a broad, strong towns audience would be interested in knowing about what you all have put together there.
You're right. I'm not planning on running for governor. That's for sure. At a broad level, it requires a strong coalition, a strong culture shift to make reforms like this workable in practice. This campaign has been challenging, but I know implementation is going to be the most challenging and engaging part. That's when the public comments are coming in. That's when we need to get a lot of stakeholders in a room and make sure that the shape of the sandbox is conducive to actually implementing this petition and making these homes viable, and not only viable but also making good on the promise for affordability.
Because I've seen some of the studies from places like Houston that have done this, and shaving off $200,000 from the cost of a new single-family home, it's hard to follow in those footsteps without a lot of careful attention to detail. At the end of the day, I hope Strongtown's advocates are able to find ways of making what seems big and scary into something they can start with a friend of theirs, and I know a lot already have. Chuck, you're a big inspiration of mine. Oh, come on! Honor just to have an hour of your time. It really is even more so when you're interviewing me about something I'm doing,
Dude. You're you're doing the hard work. It's one thing to be able to sit here and talk about public policy and what have you. It's another thing to actually step up and volunteer and build a coalition and go stand in that parking lot and get signatures and go to the attorney general, get something on the ballot, campaign for it, raise money. I deeply admire what you're doing, and I particularly admire not only what you're doing, but the way you're going about it. Whatever like divisiveness, I think sometimes comes out of us versus them. The NIMBY's are the bad people. We got to beat them and fight them and knock them to the ground.
I feel like what you have done, and I think this is why I admire you and your coalition so much is that you said let's let's build the biggest circle around us that we can, and just say, like, how do we make life better for all of us? What's the simplest way we can do that? Yeah, this is a start. There's a lot more to be done. I appreciate the fact that you say like the hard work will come after this is approved, but you're changing the culture in ways that is really, really inspiring and impressive, and I, I just wanted people to hear that part of it from you. So, thank you for what you do.
Well, thank you, Chuck, and that's yeah, that's very flattering. We certainly want to engage a broad audience with this, not just within Massachusetts, but beyond the people that I are part of our coalition now, I'd say are starting to think that things are possible that weren't before. I've certainly heard from homeowners who are frustrated that they can't build a shed next to them, and they have a 5,000 square foot lot, and they're talking about doing something next that on non-conforming lots or something like that. It certainly the work continues, but having voters on board first should inspire some of those other changes.
That's my fervent wish.
It really is, Andrew. That feels like culture change to me.
It is. I mean,
I really do. I think that it is easy to have a anti-YIMBY kind of legislative movement and try to paint an enemy and fight against them. It takes a it's a much more sophisticated and I think much more long-term successful approach. To say, hey, let's not fight against something. Let's fight for something, and let's fight something that we can all agree on. When I read, when I went to your website, when I read the bill, when I saw it, I said, "This is the most. I feel like you are standing at the top of the hill, rolling the snowball down, and it will just gain momentum from here on out. So I'll be watching.
Thank you. Can I also say? In addition to the kind of the YIMBY NIMBY thing,
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of other people I've talked to kind of make it into a generational thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And for me, it's like yes, starter homes invokes young people starting out. That's not a revenge on anyone, but importantly, starter homes are also what a lot of seniors want. Right? It's easier to navigate, easier to maintain in your older age, and it helps. If more people could downsize, and we know a lot of people want to, and that could help free up more family-sized homes for other folks too. So we've heard from, and we've also heard from individual homeowners who want to carve out 5,000 square feet from their lot and move into that home because they have a spouse with mobility issues.
Right, they like the neighborhood. They don't want to move. There's there's no other house that would fit them in the neighborhood. Yeah,
Right. It takes. It's not everyone can afford to do that. Build the home and then sell before selling their old one,
Right?
But this is very much we're trying to make the implementation of this as grassroots as possible.
Well, Andrew, there's a lot of people who are sitting on a 10,000 square foot lot who would actually like the cash more than the extra 5,000 square feet they have to mow, and allowing them to be able to say sell that lot, and get their house repainted, fix their roof, replace their heater, do the maintenance things that they probably are behind and struggling to do. Those are just common sense ways for people who have home ownership equity, the NIMBY's that don't want change to actually be part of the success of this. When we're talking about the sandbox, you're just making the sandbox a lot bigger with a lot more people in it, right?
Yeah, absolutely, Chuck.
Andrew Mikula, did I get that right?
Oh yes, victory.
I'm I, I, I feel like for some reason the Minnesota upbringing, and I if your name is Anderson or Olson or Johnson, like I can get that really well, but it comes with this limited package of names, and I always struggle with people who have really beautiful names, but not names that are native to my part of town. So I'm I'm I'm trying and I'm getting better. When we get to meet in person, I will try again, and you can correct me, and I will keep working at it. Andrew, thanks for being on the podcast. I'm so happy you're here.
Thank you for having me, Chuck. Thanks so much, dude.
Thanks for all the work you're doing and everything, and I'll be watching. Strong towns can't endorse anything political. We're not a 501 c4, so people would make up their own minds. But I wanted the nation, the world to hear the stuff that you're doing, and also keep an eye on it. So thanks, man. Thanks for taking the time.
Yeah. Well, thank you, and thanks to everyone in the movement for inspiring me.
Oh, that means a lot. Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. We'll chat again soon. Take care.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns. Org/membership.