Are We Being Pricks?

At a Marblehead town meeting last month, David Modica walked up to a microphone and said what housing advocates have been trying to say for years.

"Tedesco is, like, a golf course?" he asked the Planning Board. "So this is a way to comply with 3A without doing any of the 3A stuff."

"Yes, it is," the Planning Board member replied.

Modica paused. "Are we kinda being pricks?"

What is 3A, Where is the Gap, and How are Towns Exploiting It?

The MBTA Communities Act, known as Section 3A, requires towns served by the MBTA to zone for multifamily housing by right, at least 15 units per acre, within a half mile of transit. The Commonwealth's intent was to crack open exclusionary zoning that makes Massachusetts one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

The gap is that towns can drive straight through the law by zoning unusable land. This is known as "paper compliance" and Boxford describes it as a means that fulfills the state's requirements "without creating a realistic potential for new, multi-family, high-density housing development."

Everyone at that Marblehead town meeting knew exactly what Modica was saying. He called out a town that satisfied the MBTA Communities Act by rezoning an active golf course for 780 units of housing that will never be built, because the golf course will never sell or develop the land. Massachusetts reviewed the plan and signed off. Legal compliance achieved. No new housing required.

The state can mandate zoning, but it cannot mandate a developer to build on a Par-4.

Same Game, Smaller Scale

This is not just a town-level problem. The same dynamic plays out on individual parcels throughout Massachusetts every day. A town can "allow" ADUs by right while making them functionally impossible to build. Towns stack setback requirements, owner-occupancy rules, design review roadblocks, parking minimums, and utility connection hurdles to ensure no one actually builds one. Most homeowners hit one of those walls, assume the project isn't feasible, and stop there.

That assumption is often wrong.

The walls aren't always real. Some are paper, the zoning equivalent of a golf course. Others are real but navigable if you know where the actual constraints are versus the perceived ones. The difference between a project that gets built and one that doesn't often has nothing to do with the town's intentions. It has to do with whether anyone did the work to figure out what's actually possible on that specific parcel, under that specific set of rules.

What We Do

Pathfinder exists at the parcel level, not the policy level. We're not going to change your town's zoning and neither are you. What we can do is look at your specific property: your setbacks, your utilities, your lot coverage, your town's ADU restrictions, and tell you honestly what's buildable and what isn't.

Sometimes the answer is "not much." More often, the answer is more interesting than the homeowner expected. Massachusetts towns that make ADUs hard to build still have homeowners who build them. They just tend to be the ones who had someone in their corner who knew where the real walls were.

Check out the Marblehead Independent's original clip here, and reach out if you're thinking about building an ADU in your town.