Mandating communities to build multifamily housing in their neighborhoods against their will is a replay of forced school busing of the 1970s.
And like forced busing in Boston, it is bound to fail.
But not before it divides communities like Milton and others abutting the MBTA the way the forced busing of school children divided communities in Boston during that chaotic and sorry era.
Even though Milton residents voted against changing zoning laws to enable such housing by 5,115 to 4,346 votes in February, the state, under Gov. Maura Healey is going ahead with the plan anyway. She has begun to withhold state funds from the town to force compliance.
Healey considers dealing with the lack of affordable housing in Massachusetts to be her biggest challenge.
And fellow progressive Democrat Attorney General Andrea Campbell has sued the town over the issue, insisting that “compliance with the law is mandatory.”
If you don’t think the state means business to force compliance, note the remarks by state Sen. Lydia Edwards of Boston, another progressive, who is chair of the Senate Committee on Housing.
“The state has to crush Milton,” she said to the Boston Globe.
She added, “It’s zoning today, but what if it’s gun laws tomorrow?”
Listening to these well-meaning progressives talk about punishing Milton for standing up for its community, one would think they were a bunch of hard-core authoritarian Republicans instead of liberal Democrats.
It is true that under the MBTA Communities Law all 177 cities and towns in the MBTA service area— to one degree or another — are mandated to pass zoning laws to permit multifamily housing in their neighborhoods.
It was debated and passed by the Legislature and signed into law by former Gov. Charlie Baker in 2021.
It came about at the time President Biden opened the southern border to allow more than ten million illegal immigrants to invade the country.
The influx of illegals has put a tremendous strain on the resources of cities and states across the country.
Massachusetts, which already had a crisis in the lack of affordable housing, is now faced with housing thousands of mostly poor immigrants on top of finding housing for its own working-class citizens.
Milton, a town of some 28,000, which has the MBTA’s Mattapan Trolley running through it, is the first town to openly defy the law which would open the town up to a couple of thousand state multi-family dwellings.
The town must do it because it is mandated by the law.
There was also a time when the mindless busing of schoolchildren in Boston was the law. It forced the mandatory busing of school children from one Boston neighborhood to another to deal with school segregation under the Racial Imbalance Act. It was passed in 1966 and went into effect into effect in 1974 following a court order.
Rather than improving the quality of education of all school children, black students from poor-performing schools in Roxbury were bused to allegedly better-performing schools in white South Boston.
The result, in many cases, was chaos and violence. It led to white flight from Boston to the suburbs, like Milton. It also led to the decline of quality education for everyone involved. It was a disaster.
Slowly it came to an end as the school system under Mayor Tom Menino was overhauled. Schools were improved and children allowed to attend schools close to their homes.
Forced school busing did not work.
What did work back then — and is still working — is METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity), the voluntary school desegregation program that, with state funding, went into effect in 1966.
Under the voluntary program, tens of thousands of Boston students of color have been enrolled in 190 predominantly white public schools in 31 participating suburban towns.
Not only do METCO students receive a better education in a diverse environment that prepares them for college, but they also build life-long relationships.
METCO works because it is voluntary, not mandatory.
The state does not always know what it is doing. If it did, it would collaborate rather than crush.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
