A draft of the Allston-Brighton Community Plan (ABCP) and neighborhood zoning reform will be released next month.
Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Breadon, city councilor for Allston Brighton described the community plan and zoning reform as a guide for development in the neighborhood.
“I think it’s just like a roadmap for the next 30 or 40 years of development in the neighborhood. You know, identifying spaces and places where you need particular types of development,” said Breadon. “I just hope we haven’t missed anything […] the demographics of the neighborhood change over time.”
The community plan will be released along with updated zoning, which is a set of local laws and restrictions that defines how land is used in a city. And much of Boston’s zoning laws are ripe for change, Brighton resident Grey Black explained. Black serves as the Community Engagement Manager for the City of Boston’s Planning Department.
For instance, Black explained that older zoning rules have attempted to preserve single-family areas based on 20th-century assumptions of big, stable families. He said that triple deckers originated as ways to keep multi-generational families together and allow for scenarios where a grandparent downstairs could provide childcare for their grandchildren upstairs.
“And that single family house had maybe seven people in it, right? Now, we know that a single-family home, at max, is having three or four. […] People are living in studios by themselves, which was pretty rare, you know, 40, 50 years ago,” said Black. “Times have changed. People are living differently, and we need to create rules that are kind of at least in touch with that.”
This perhaps is causing zoned land to support fewer people than it could today, thereby contributing to a mismatch between the supply of and demand for housing in Boston.
Black has been making his rounds in Allston Brighton, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Roslindale, gathering and balancing the reflections of residents and city officials by hosting public meetings.
Residents have shared a range of perspectives with Black, ones that he described, cannot be gathered “through reading through research and reports because there’s a different lived experience by the people who just walk in and out of Allston Brighton every day.”
One neighbor told him: “Hey, man, I own my home. I’m pretty stable. I support what a lot of the young contingency thinks and want to see more housing. But the thing, the only thing that really is personal for me is eggs spiked heavily in the last two years, and I’ve got a large-ish yard. What are some of the things that I could do so I could have some of my own chickens?”
I asked Black if it was accurate to describe the work of the ABCP as time-proofing the zoning rules.
“There is no time-proofing in planning, but adding a little more flexibility and thinking about the things that we actually want to detail and manage, as opposed to, again, micromanaging,” he responded.
The Boston Planning Department launched the ABCP in June 2024, marking two years since the process began. The process has faced delays with the original date of release set for December 2025.
“I would go as fast as the process allows us to go without violating one of the principles that I’ve already shared, which is that we don’t want planning done to people. We want to do planning with our residents,” said Kairos Shen, chief of the Boston Planning Department, in a hearing on May 5.
Black explained that the ABCP came as a reaction to an intensification of development in Allston Brighton, without a universal engagement process.
“With all these different projects going on, there’s a lot of different information and data to consider, and we’re restarting that engagement process almost every time,” said Black. “Having one document, like, ‘Here’s the overall view on what’s happening in the neighborhood over the next decade, two decades, and a place for us to get the context — not the full context, but like a context for what you’re building off of,’ I think, is a huge benefit of having something for people to reference.”
When the plan comes out in September, Black encourages Allston-Brighton residents to provide constructive and concise feedback.
“Having a thing that you’re dogmatic about, right, in what you’re giving feedback on, allows people to support and build on and address the thing that you need fixed, and it doesn’t mean that you don’t ever change that point or you don’t add nuance where appropriate or when it comes up, but you hammer something in.”
