For years, town officials have been subjecting Plymouth to one of the highest rates of development in the state. Developers openly bring a steady stream of new residents to Plymouth, with the support of our Select Board, Planning Board, town manager, and Planning Department. I’ve yet to meet a Plymouth resident who isn’t upset about the rate of development. Luxury housing proliferates, despite the acute shortage of affordable apartments and starter homes.
Town officials now claim that if hundreds more housing units are built, Plymouth will quickly approach the state’s mandate of 10 percent affordable housing, which would mean that developers would no longer get 40b exemptions from zoning laws. In other words, if we just allow a few more years of development, then development will finally slow down. However, the heralded figures are wrong. No new, non-affordable units were included in determining the percentage that officials claim should soon reach 9.26 percent. The worksheet divides future totals of affordable units by the same current total of all housing units.
Residents deserve to know the true number of all proposed housing units, and how close Plymouth will actually get to the 10 percent mandate with each new development. As long as town officials and their pro-development appointees on town boards and committees keep rubber-stamping endless “market rate” housing, Plymouth will never achieve the 10 percent mandate, and the town will be able to keep allowing overdevelopment while blaming 40b
We’ve been told for decades that more development will “increase the tax base” and bring down our property taxes. However, more development means taxpayers must fund more services and infrastructure, which are already strained. Our hospital is at a breaking point, the forests that filter our drinking water are being razed, the sand that makes up our aquifer is being hauled off for private profit, and cyanobacteria is increasing in our ponds. We are headed off an environmental and financial cliff; the Town of Wareham is a cautionary tale. After a few companies made millions overdeveloping and mining sand there, taxpayers are now stuck with $536 million in water treatment and sewer lines.
Meanwhile, Select Board member John Mahoney cast some of the blame for undercounting affordable housing units on the volunteer Community Preservation Committee, which was chaired then by Bill Keohan. Paid town employees in the Planning Department should have tracked that. John Mahoney and Bill Keohan are both running for Select Board.
– Sandy Fosgate