Finalist: Alan Wirzbicki and Rachelle G. Cohen of The Boston Globe

The Legislature needs to support Governor Baker’s push to limit municipal control over housing development.

Last month, Massachusetts got a fresh reminder of why the state desperately needs to change its zoning law.

Last week, it got a reminder of why that’s proving to be such an excruciating task.

Start with the news from January: A majority on the Salem City Council voted for a zoning change to allow a 180-unit apartment complex, the kind of development that would make a welcome dent in the state’s gaping housing shortage. Most councilors also favored another smart housing reform, allowing “accessory dwelling units” at existing houses, which can be a low-cost way to put roofs over more heads.

That should be good news — yet under the Commonwealth’s bizarre housing laws, both proposals failed. That’s because it currently requires a two-thirds majority for city councils or town meetings to make zoning changes, a requirement that empowers small minorities to thwart just the kind of housing projects the state so desperately needs. Both proposals fell one vote short.

It’s bad enough that the Commonwealth’s land-use laws tilt so heavily in favor of individual municipalities, whose resistance to change is so often at odds with the greater good — that is, finding homes for an economically diverse and growing population. But the state needn’t make it quite so easy, and the Salem votes were yet another reminder why Governor Baker’s stalled push to reduce the vote requirement to a simple majority is so critical.

Massachusetts needs more housing — period, full stop. It needs more affordable housing for low-income families, housing for middle-class families, and for the young singles who make up an increasing percentage of our workforce. Between 1960 and 1990, the state produced 900,000 new units of housing. But in the last 30 years only 435,000 new units were built, a period of time that not coincidentally mirrors the skyward trend of home prices. Putting more housing in the market, of all kinds, would protect residents of all income levels by absorbing some of the demand that’s now pushing up the whole market.

More sweeping zoning reforms bills — most of which this editorial board has supported — have been introduced on Beacon Hill year after year, and gone nowhere even as the housing imbalance worsens. The governor’s bill is much more modest, and that’s definitely a bitter pill for housing activists and sympathetic legislators. Its limited scope is why this page didn’t support it at first either. But while the disappointment of some legislators is understandable, it’s critical that they get behind this legislation and don’t turn it into a Christmas tree hung with a host of contentious proposals that would leave this bill as dead as every previous zoning reform.

A legislative oversight hearing last week provided a rare moment of insight into that very real dilemma, as Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Mike Kennealy made one more pitch for Baker’s bill.

During the hearing, state Representative Mike Connolly of Cambridge wanted instead to talk about a far broader approach to housing, including local-option rent control and a possible tax on corporations to fund affordable housing.

The governor’s zoning reform bill has been kicking around since 2018, suffering mightily from the Goldilocks Syndrome — way too little for housing advocates and way too much for some suburban communities, which tremble in fear of too much development.

So it sits, and it sits even as another town meeting season approaches. It now rests in the House Ways and Means Committee, which last week began work on the fiscal 2021 budget, a task that generally sucks much of the oxygen out of the Beacon Hill air.

No, changes to the state’s zoning laws will not cure all of Massachusetts’ housing woes; the governor’s office is also working on an economic development bill that will target increasing housing production. But as communities like Salem can attest, moving to a simple majority vote for local zoning decisions will certainly help, and it doesn’t require the state to spend a dime.

The danger now is that lawmakers will attempt to lard up the Housing Choices bill with all their pet housing-related causes until it falls of its own weight. But communities that want to approve more housing can’t afford to miss yet another year. And this state, which cries out for all kinds of housing to meet its economic needs, can’t afford to wait either.

The reigning rules of suburbia have led to a country segregated by income, with the best zip codes and schools closed off to poor families. What happens when a rich city tries to reverse course?

If the city of Newton becomes a trailblazer at tackling inequality this year, it will be because, in 2013, the wealthy, mostly white suburb looked at itself in the mirror — and recoiled.

That was when the city’s former mayor, Setti Warren, bowing to heavy neighborhood opposition, yanked funding for a plan to provide apartments for nine formerly homeless people at an old brick fire station in Waban called Engine 6.

That move shouldn’t have come as any surprise: Opponents were only following the time-tested suburban playbook, honed over a thousand fights against developers. The grass-roots uprising against new housing is not only the oldest story in America’s suburbs, it’s part of what has made them the pricey enclaves they are, ensuring that property values stay high while deepening income segregation and, in Massachusetts, leaving a handful of cities like Boston to shoulder the burden of housing the state’s growing population.

But the silver lining was that the Engine 6 controversy shook the city’s faith in suburban orthodoxy. The ugliness of the fight came as a painful epiphany, exposing how the quality-of-life, traffic, and environmental concerns so often cited in American suburbs to rationalize housing obstruction can serve as smokescreens for darker motives — like keeping certain kinds of people out.

“Newtonians were like, ‘What happened here?’” said Kathleen Hobson, the cofounder of the pro-housing group that formed amid the fight over the firehouse. “It was the thing that got a critical mass of residents up in arms.”

Josephine McNeil, the former director of Citizens for Affordable Housing in Newton Development Organization, who spent decades fighting for affordable housing before the Engine 6 controversy erupted, said the controversy “surfaced” the city’s longstanding gaps. She’s noticed a shift: “The city is more receptive” to housing, she said — while pointing out that opponents have grown more vocal too.

Since then, the saga of Engine 6’s demise has been told and retold, a rallying cry and unhealed wound. Hobson’s group named itself Engine 6, keeping the episode at the forefront of the city’s conscience. And it’s joined a broader movement, including veteran housing advocates in the city, climate activists, churches, and the business community, focused not just on housing for the homeless but also questioning the interlocking rules and zoning codes that have shaped America’s suburbs into the nation’s incubators of inequality.

“We have a long history of zoning and rulemaking that deliberately keeps out the poor and those of color from ‘nice’ neighborhoods,” Hobson said. “But I had no clue at the time. What that fight told me, all of a sudden, my epiphany, oh my god, this neighborhood exists because of a deliberate, longstanding effort to keep poor people and others less fortunate out.”

Antidevelopment neighborhood groups, which have long dominated local activism with a familiar litany of worries about traffic and schools, suddenly no longer have the only megaphone in Newton. Researchers at Boston University have studied the way the local construction-approval process in Massachusetts often empowers an older, whiter, and wealthier minority of residents to thwart new housing projects. Their 2018 study found that Greater Boston, only 15 percent of comments at public meetings between 2015 and 2017 were supportive of multifamily housing. In Newton, however, the figure was 43 percent, according to statistics provided to the Globe.

Housing advocates have scored some successes already, including a 2017 vote in the City Council that allowed homeowners to convert some kinds of garages or detached buildings into “accessory dwelling units,” viewed as an easy way to create more low-cost housing.

Now, in 2020, in no small part because of the movement galvanized by the collapse of Engine 6, Newton is on the cusp of becoming a model of suburban reform. It will hold a citywide vote March 3 on whether to allow an innovative plan for a mixed-income development at the site of an old factory, which would include the largest single addition of affordable housing units in the city’s history. Then, later this year, now-mayor Ruthanne Fuller has promised a redesign of the entire zoning code, which advocates hope will legalize lower-cost housing, allowing more economic diversity.

Those votes will be a barometer of the staying power of Newton’s great housing awakening. A few large cities, like Minneapolis and Seattle, have overhauled their zoning codes to promote lower-cost housing. But Newton is an archetypal rich suburb, with some of the nation’s best public schools and a median home sale price over $1 million. For a community like that to relax its resistance to housing would echo through the state, and possibly beyond.

“If other communities can see that the world doesn’t end when you make these changes, it’s incredibly valuable and could be a nice showcase and model,” said Anthony Flint, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, a Cambridge think tank that researches ways to promote affordable housing.

The turnaround would be especially notable given the ironclad control antidevelopment forces enjoyed until recently. Newton has far less affordable housing than the state’s target (about 800 fewer units, according to the state’s affordable housing inventory), a testament to the extraordinary difficulty of building anything but large single-family homes in the city. Just a few years ago, the city notoriously tried (and failed) to convince the state not to count three private golf courses as developable land in order to wriggle free from the state affordable housing law.

For Massachusetts, a state with staggering housing costs and homelessness that’s shot up 22 percent between 2007 and 2019, clearing the obstacles to more housing in the suburbs would help solve key near-term needs. Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville have filled most of the need for new housing in Greater Boston, and officials there have long grumbled that the rest of the region isn’t doing its share.

But in a country where zip code is destiny, changing the rules in places like Newton could have consequences well beyond housing. The consequences of America’s economic and racial segregation have come under increasing academic scrutiny. Researchers have documented how access to higher-opportunity neighborhoods can boost lifetime earnings and college attendance for children from poor families and break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

The ongoing harm of segregation in America is too grave to ignore. More communities — and, ultimately, the statehouses that dictate the limits of local land control — are going to need to come to terms with the way long-cherished land-use traditions are exacerbating some of America’s worst racial and economic disparities. One community won’t change that on its own — but this year Newton has the chance to show the way.

The Northland project would create the largest infusion of affordable housing in the city’s history and give momentum to a movement to rethink the suburbs.

America’s wealthy suburbs need to change. They need to allow more affordable housing, so that low-income families can access top-notch public schools and the lifetime opportunities they create. They need more housing, period, to cool the real estate market that’s crushing middle-class families. And they need denser housing as a way to address climate change.

In other words, they need more housing like the Northland project, a proposed 800-unit development at an old factory site in Newton Upper Falls, whose fate Newton voters will decide in a hotly contested March 3 referendum. The Globe Editorial Board strongly endorses a “yes” vote to approve the project — and not just for its many practical benefits for Newton and for the region, from new parks to set-asides for mom-and-pop businesses.

The greater significance of the project is that it represents a new way of thinking about the suburbs, at a time of growing awareness that the land use restrictions of the last century have exacerbated racial segregation, environmental destruction, and income inequality. The vote is shaping up as a referendum not just on the Northland project, but also on a movement that has been gaining steam over the last decade to rethink long-cherished traditions and laws in order to forge solutions to some of the most deeply entrenched problems in American society.

Those restrictions, some of them on the books since the 1920s, have been close to sacrosanct in Massachusetts, guarded by vocal neighborhood groups and a timid Legislature. Like many other states, the Commonwealth largely defers to municipalities on local building decisions — even when their decisions run counter to broader public goals like housing the homeless or encouraging transit use to cut pollution.

The maze of local laws and rules, which one analyst called a “paper wall” against housing, has had an insidious impact, making costly delays the rule and ensuring that spread-out luxury housing is often the only kind that’s feasible to build. On the whole, according to the Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card, the region is permitting less than half as much housing as it did in the 1980s, and about a third of homeowners and half of renters are now considered “cost-burdened.” The high price of housing is a deadweight on the economy, making it harder for businesses to recruit employees. The indirect consequences are more devastating, barring poor children from the state’s highest-performing school districts and pushing development into far-flung towns where it does more environmental damage.

In Newton, though, a majority of the city council — backed by climate, religious, and housing activists — have coalesced around the 14-building Northland project, which calls for the preservation of a historic factory building; one building designed specifically for the needs of older residents; innovative low-carbon heating, cooling, and construction techniques; and electric instead of natural gas-powered appliances in all the site’s apartments. “It will be a model green building project,” said Dan Ruben, the chairman of Green Newton, which has endorsed the project. “We think this is a signature project. It’s very visible, it’s going to be influential.”

Other direct benefits to the city include 10 acres of open space (where there is now broken pavement and stubs of old railroad track); a $1.5 million payment to the public schools; a splash park for kids; and the rehabilitation of a brook that’s been confined to a culvert for a century.

The project also includes office and retail space and 10,000 feet of commercial space that’s reserved for non-chain retailers and restaurants, a way to hold on to local businesses unable to compete with banks and other national chains for storefront space. It will be one of the first developments in Greater Boston to include such a requirement, according to Greg Reibman, the president of the Newton-Needham Chamber, which supports Northland.

The most important benefit to Newton and the region, though, is the housing itself. The project will include 140 apartments of subsidized housing for low- and middle-income renters — believed to be the single largest infusion of subsidized units in the city’s history. The market-rate units will undoubtedly be more expensive (Peter Standish, Northland’s senior vice president, said the company hasn’t decided on rents yet), but they, too, will help by soaking up demand and easing the bidding wars for existing homes. The developer also contends that many senior citizens in Newton want to downsize, which would free their homes to be resold to young families, but haven’t because they can’t find any rentals in an apartment building with an elevator — a problem that Northland would help solve.

Opponents of the project say that 800 units are too many and that a smaller development with more affordable units would be preferable. They also worry — understandably — about the impact on parking, traffic, and schools.

Those are concerns that any sizable development should be expected to address — and that this one has. At the urging of the City Council, which imposed a 45-page set of conditions on Northland, the developer has agreed to provide subsidized T passes to residents; run a free shuttle to the Green Line that will also be available to the public; and charge for parking spaces as a way of limiting the number of renters who drive. They’re also ponying up $5 million to study better MBTA service and underwrite traffic-calming and bicycle and pedestrian improvements.

The city is already well equipped to handle the 138 new children the developer forecasts would enter Newton’s schools if the project is built, even before the $1.5 million the developer has promised. The local elementary school, Countryside, has an unused classroom, and the city has projected slightly declining enrollment there.

Regardless, the potential for more children to attend Newton’s excellent schools, including children from less affluent families, actually provides the most compelling reason for voters to approve this project March 3 and for the city’s leaders to then continue breaking down the barriers to more and cheaper housing in the city. The economic and racial segregation that housing restrictions inscribe into American life, and the ceilings they place on upward mobility, are simply too outrageous to ignore any longer.

Stroll through the industrial wasteland of the Northland site now (yes, it’s okay to poke around, a spokeswoman for the developer assured the Globe). A yes vote would do more than turn a weedy eyesore into a vibrant new neighborhood. For Newton and other communities whose land-use decisions have contributed to America’s deepening inequality, it would show the way to a fairer future.

Beacon Hill is poised to strike against the racist legacy of zoning laws that have long segregated communities in the Commonwealth.

Who gets to live in America’s safest, healthiest, and most prosperous communities? Who gets to send their kids to the best public schools, walk their dogs in the best parks, breathe the freshest air?

That question is suddenly front and center in the 2020 presidential campaign — and, finally, after years of failed efforts, in the Massachusetts State House, where a long-debated proposal to weaken the ability of communities to exclude newcomers seems to be on the cusp of passage.

By seeing that effort through to completion in this session, Massachusetts lawmakers can both make the Commonwealth fairer to all its residents and take a timely stand against the president’s latest appeal to racism.

At the national level, President Trump is rolling back regulations that were enacted by former president Obama meant to make communities more accessible to low-income people. Since geography determines so much about life in America, from schooling to availability of grocery stores, the Obama policy was a critical tool to address racial discrimination and segregation caused by a century of local and national housing policies designed to keep poor Black families out of more affluent white neighborhoods.

Not only did Trump end the Obama program, he’s also trying to turn his defense of suburbia into a campaign issue. In a tweet, he warned the “Suburban Housewives of America” that an administration headed by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would ruin their neighborhoods. Democrats, he said, would force suburbs to accept low-income neighbors who, the president maintained, would bring crime.

“People fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home,” he said after announcing the rollback of the Obama policy. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.”

One upside to Trump’s noxious rhetoric: It’s exposing the euphemisms often used to justify exclusive zoning in the suburbs, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, for what they are. Since zoning became legal in Massachusetts, in the early 20th century, a whole vernacular of doublespeak has developed to mask its racist origins and consequences — that homeowners just care about maintaining the bucolic character of their communities, for instance, or about keeping greedy developers at bay.

When the state was considering zoning, at least one representative at the constitutional convention wasn’t fooled. “This resolution, while undoubtedly such a thing has never occurred to anybody who is interested in it, plainly would authorize the segregation of the Negro, for it authorizes the limitation of buildings according to their use to certain zones or districts,” noted Albert E. Pillsbury of Wellesley in 1918.

And indeed, exclusionary zoning — that is, rules on minimum lot sizes and building types that make it so expensive to build homes that the natural result is housing that’s out of reach for low-income residents — has been the driving force in racial segregation, here and across America. Landowners who might have built apartment buildings in the Concords or Newtons of the world, so that renters and low-income workers could live there alongside white-collar professionals, walking in the same parks and attending the same schools, were no longer allowed to. Chapter 40b, the so-called “anti-snob” law passed in the 1960s, allows developers to circumvent zoning under limited circumstances in towns and cities that don’t have enough affordable housing, but geographic segregation remains entrenched.

The Obama policy ended by Trump would have challenged that legacy. And so would the Housing Choice legislation introduced by Governor Charlie Baker that is now, after years of wrangling, finally nearing the legislative finish line.

Both the House and Senate have passed versions of the bill as part of larger legislative packages; now a conference committee just needs to hash out the final legislation. It falls well short of what housing advocates once wished for, and indeed makes only one change. But it’s a big one: The bill would make it easier for towns and cities to relax their zoning restrictions by requiring only a simple majority in their local governing bodies instead of a two-thirds supermajority.

The governor introduced the legislation as an economic measure, and allowing more housing in more settings certainly has economic implications, too. Allowing multifamily housing that’s denser than allowed by current zoning, for instance, could both reduce its cost and lower the environmental burden. Allowing more housing of any type should moderate demand for existing homes, and thus relieve some of the upward pressure on the real estate market.

As it does, more and denser housing would also strike at one of the root causes of segregation. It’s certainly true, as critics have noted, that the new housing that might be built if Baker’s legislation passes probably wouldn’t be cheap at first and won’t, by itself, make communities more affordable or diverse. It took decades for exclusionary zoning to shape Massachusetts communities, and it may take decades to reshape them. But reducing the power of anti-housing voices at the local level would help start an overdue shift. As the president tries to stoke fears of change in suburbia, Massachusetts should send the message that it embraces a more equitable future.