Updated November 21, 2008 - Click here to download a PDF of Strategy #1

 MetroFuture is a bold and achievable plan for a Greater Boston Region, and requires all of the region’s stakeholders to work together to make that vision a reality.   Cities and towns, state agencies, regional organizations, business and industry, advocacy organizations, and individuals all have a role to play.  Most of these stakeholders are already involved in activities that effect the region’s growth and development: planning, funding, building, voting, and more.  Greater coordination across all sectors will help to harness these many existing efforts toward a common purpose.  This Strategy outlines mechanisms to establish that coordination, thereby reducing redundancy, contradictory efforts, and conflict.  As a result, the region will be able to take a more proactive approach to growth and development, using scarce resources more efficiently.  

Effective growth and preservation efforts in Metro Boston are currently inhibited by fragmentation, reactive planning, and lack of resources.  Organizational, geographic, and topical fragmentation is typified by permit approval processes that fail to consider long-term costs, planning efforts that do not reflect a regional perspective, and state policies that provide conflicting directives to municipalities, to name a few.  In an absence of policy continuity, each new challenge must be dealt with as it arises, in a reactive process that requires stakeholders to resolve their differences in the heat of the moment, rather than through deliberate, forward-looking consensus building.  Meanwhile, lack of resources—fiscal, technical, organizational—limit the ability of communities to make informed choices or investments that would have long-term benefits.   

The negative outcomes of this broken process rapidly proliferate.  For example, planning boards promoting commercial growth may require developers to large parking lots – but the runoff pollutes water supplies and prevents the recharge of the aquifer.  In an effort to protect the water supply, towns zone for two-acre lots, only to see vast sections of woodlands and fields converted to subdivisions with expensive homes beyond the financial reach of most first-time homebuyers.  Searching for homes they can afford, people move farther and farther away from employment centers – only to spend the money they save on gasoline for longer commutes.  Municipalities build new interchanges to stem traffic congestion, but the interchanges draw businesses away from town centers and urban downtowns, with little long-term benefit on traffic patterns.  

Coordinated planning can break this cycle of negative consequences.  Comprehensive local planning efforts provide a structure to evaluate many critical interests and values—economic development, environmental preservation, housing creation, transportation choice—and to build consensus around broad approaches to balancing those interests.  Such efforts should have two essential products: municipal policy recommendations consistent with each other, and a local constituency to advocate for the adoption and faithful implementation of those policies.  Building such plans requires significant local capacity: municipal staff, knowledgeable committees, technical assistance, and innovative planning tools. Creating that capacity will require resources from the Commonwealth and MAPC.  Implementing those plans will also require modernizing the region’s zoning statutes and supporting broad application of modern planning and zoning tools that are common in other states but underutilized in Massachusetts.  

State and regional actors also have a role to play in creating consistency across various geographic levels.  Regional plans should be consistent with the Commonwealth’s Sustainable Development Principles, and MAPC should create a framework for making local plans consistent with MetroFuture.  Most importantly, the Commonwealth needs to send a strong message by aligning its many programs with the Sustainable Development Principles and establishing strong incentives for local planning efforts to be consistent with regional plans.

Of course, the private sector will be ultimately responsible for much of the development that occurs in Metro Boston over the coming decades.  Individuals and corporations can contribute to a more sustainable future through their decisions about where and how to build, and they need information and education that will support regionally-minded decisions.  

The recommendations in this Strategy represent significant changes in many aspects of Metro Boston’s development process—the way residents engage in planning decisions, the relationship between municipalities and the state, the priorities that private entities use when selecting a location.  Yet only through these changes can the region make progress toward a brighter future.  Without a strong framework of coordination, all the other policies recommended by MetroFuture—for economic development, transportation improvements, healthier families, or environmental preservation—will be inefficient at best, and conflicting at worst.