Revisiting Bill McKibben's thoughts on Lexington and Article 34

[Jay Luker]

I went back to review what Bill McKibben wrote about our original Article 34 in 2023, plus some of his other writing on housing, land use and zoning, and how those things intersect with both climate action and social justice. I’d like to share a few things and how I think about them in the context of STM Article 2 and the amendment to preserve the Center MFO district.

Two years ago last week, Barbara Katzenberg shared an excerpt on this list from some correspondence she’d had with Bill McKibben on Article 34.

Since writing The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, I've heard from hundreds of present and former Lexingtonians, and I'd say the message is almost unanimous: people are ashamed that Lexington did not make more of an effort on multifamily housing decades ago, and very hopeful it will start to make up for that now. Rezoning for denser, transit-oriented housing not only allows the town to play a positive role in opening up to different kinds of people, it also can help play a serious role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Lexington has often talked a good game; now it's got a wonderful chance to actually walk the talk!

Town Meeting ended up doing the right thing and six weeks later McKibben tweeted proudly about the “happy suburban housing story” that passage of Article 34 represented.


The tweet linked to a short piece he had written in the New Yorker about the outcome in Lexington. If you're a newer Town Meeting member who missed the first go around of some of the same conversations we‘re having now, it might give you some missing context.

At the time, McKibben had recently published a book detailing an earlier period in Lexington’s history when the Town had grappled with allowing multi-family housing. I think because of that his focus in the New Yorker piece was mostly on the social justice aspects. I went looking for something about housing that was more in his climate action wheelhouse and found an interview in Commonweal Magazine that included this:

The suburbanization of America was even more carbon intensive than the industrialization of China, producing the largest puff of carbon dioxide that the atmosphere has ever had to absorb. What America spent most of its money on since World War II was the project of building bigger houses farther apart from each other. Once you’ve built them, you have to heat and cool them, you have to fill them with stuff, and you have to travel the distances between them, which really could only be accomplished with an automobile.

The reason that Lexington couldn’t have affordable housing was because its zoning laws mandated that everybody have their own driveway and their own yard and their own house detached from the one next to it. And that’s by definition expensive and inefficient. In order to build diverse communities, we need zoning that allows multifamily housing and densification, especially on transit corridors. And those are precisely the same things that help with the environmental footprint. We’re finally starting to realize that this has to happen, but we need to move quickly, because climate change is a timed test. And if we don’t get it right soon, then we will not get it right.

I'm extremely not Bill McKibben, but I tried to make a similar case last fall in a letter to the Observer. In the universe of concerns wrapped up in The Housing Theory of Everything, car-dependency, sprawl, and climate change are the ones that resonate the most with me. 

It's an objective fact that climate change is going to cook this planet if we can’t do something about it, and correcting for decades of bad land use is a huge part of that. We don’t all have to go car free and start biking and taking the bus everywhere. We do have to make it possible for other people to have those choices about how much they drive. The transportation network available in the Center makes it ideal for enabling those choices. To undo the work that went into creating the Center MFO district because we think it's possible to get 5% more inclusionary homes is focusing only on one piece of a very big picture. The housing is the point.

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Jay Luker, Precinct 1

 

[Avram Baskin]

Thanks for posting this. I’ve actually been wondering what Bill McKibbon thinks of article too and reverting the zoning in the center back to two stories.

Avram Baskin
Be yourself, 
everyone else is already taken
Oscar Wilde

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On Mar 15, 2025, at 10:39 PM, Jay Luker <jay....@gmail.com> wrote:



I went back to review what Bill McKibben wrote about our original Article 34 in 2023, plus some of his other writing on housing, land use and zoning, and how those things intersect with both climate action and social justice. I’d like to share a few things and how I think about them in the context of STM Article 2 and the amendment to preserve the Center MFO district.

Two years ago last week, Barbara Katzenberg shared an excerpt on this list from some correspondence she’d had with Bill McKibben on Article 34.

Since writing The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, I've heard from hundreds of present and former Lexingtonians, and I'd say the message is almost unanimous: people are ashamed that Lexington did not make more of an effort on multifamily housing decades ago, and very hopeful it will start to make up for that now. Rezoning for denser, transit-oriented housing not only allows the town to play a positive role in opening up to different kinds of people, it also can help play a serious role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Lexington has often talked a good game; now it's got a wonderful chance to actually walk the talk!

Town Meeting ended up doing the right thing and six weeks later McKibben tweeted proudly about the “happy suburban housing story” that passage of Article 34 represented.

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The tweet linked to a short piece he had written in the New Yorker about the outcome in Lexington. If you're a newer Town Meeting member who missed the first go around of some of the same conversations we‘re having now, it might give you some missing context.

At the time, McKibben had recently published a book detailing an earlier period in Lexington’s history when the Town had grappled with allowing multi-family housing. I think because of that his focus in the New Yorker piece was mostly on the social justice aspects. I went looking for something about housing that was more in his climate action wheelhouse and found an interview in Commonweal Magazine that included this:

The suburbanization of America was even more carbon intensive than the industrialization of China, producing the largest puff of carbon dioxide that the atmosphere has ever had to absorb. What America spent most of its money on since World War II was the project of building bigger houses farther apart from each other. Once you’ve built them, you have to heat and cool them, you have to fill them with stuff, and you have to travel the distances between them, which really could only be accomplished with an automobile.

The reason that Lexington couldn’t have affordable housing was because its zoning laws mandated that everybody have their own driveway and their own yard and their own house detached from the one next to it. And that’s by definition expensive and inefficient. In order to build diverse communities, we need zoning that allows multifamily housing and densification, especially on transit corridors. And those are precisely the same things that help with the environmental footprint. We’re finally starting to realize that this has to happen, but we need to move quickly, because climate change is a timed test. And if we don’t get it right soon, then we will not get it right.

I'm extremely not Bill McKibben, but I tried to make a similar case last fall in a letter to the Observer. In the universe of concerns wrapped up in The Housing Theory of Everything, car-dependency, sprawl, and climate change are the ones that resonate the most with me. 

It's an objective fact that climate change is going to cook this planet if we can’t do something about it, and correcting for decades of bad land use is a huge part of that. We don’t all have to go car free and start biking and taking the bus everywhere. We do have to make it possible for other people to have those choices about how much they drive. The transportation network available in the Center makes it ideal for enabling those choices. To undo the work that went into creating the Center MFO district because we think it's possible to get 5% more inclusionary homes is focusing only on one piece of a very big picture. The housing is the point.

--

Jay Luker, Precinct 1

 

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[Steven Kaufman]

So Gibbons was happy we added housing. Moreover, we have added much more than we expected when he praised us, and more than our fair share of the state total — so he should be very happy. I’m sure he would not expect us to wreck the towns finances by allowing much more housing than anticipated too quickly. But if he does now object, he can go to…Concord. Seriously we need to do what’s right for our town now, not earn the merit of ex-residents. 

-Steve Kaufman 

On Mar 16, 2025, at 6:54 AM, 'Avram Baskin' via LexTMMA <lex...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Thanks for posting this. I’ve actually been wondering what Bill McKibbon thinks of article too and reverting the zoning in the center back to two stories.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lextmma/1AAD92AC-B155-4FA2-874F-E74DC1FC8F4B%40icloud.com.