MBTA Communities Act
April 2024
A spatial comparison between Milton and Brookline voting patterns on zoning compliance
In an attempt to expand the pool of housing available, the Massachussetts state legislature passed the MBTA Communities Act. This law requires towns served by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to “have at least one zoning district of reasonable size in which multi-family housing is permitted.” Despite the modesty of the demand (no actual construction was required) NIMBYist backlash was vociferous. The first cities impacted by the law were those served by rapid transit. These included Milton and Brookline which both had major opposition movements pushing the towns to defy the law and refuse to comply with the zoning requirements.
The goal of this project was to explore the spatial and demographic components of that opposition based on precinct level results from ballet initiatives in each town. You can find a more detailed write-up of the work here or check out this poster.
Topics
- Urban Data Science
- Geospatial Data
- Principle Components Analysis
Technologies Used
- R
- sf
- tmap
- dplyr
- regeoda
- spdep
- lmtest
- ggplot2
Challenges & Learnings
This project helped shake the rust off of my R, which I hadn’t really used since stats classes in undergrad. I was hampered somewhat in my initial goal of examining regional trends in non-compliance at the township level by the availability of data at the time. Better data has since been collected by the Boston Globe (paywalled), leading me to want to revisit this analysis at some point.