Two years of VCOD: What the data actually tells us about housing in Newton
Two years after Newton passed the Village Center Overlay District (VCOD), more than 100 community members and local officials packed Congregation Dorshei Tzedek and tuned in online on March 19 to look at the actual results. Newton for Everyone (NfE) hosted the event to move beyond zoning theory and examine hard data.
To walk us through the numbers, NfE brought in Amy Dain, a housing policy expert, Senior Fellow at Boston Indicators, and Newton resident.. Before Dain dug into the regional pipeline, NfE leadership team member Luke Mann-O'Halloran opened the night by reminding the crowd why the group formed in the first place: to advocate for walkable, vibrant village centers.
“We view our wonderful village centers as places where we can have more housing in a way that makes those centers vibrant,” Mann-O'Halloran said. He pointed to the need for car-lite neighborhoods that give seniors a place to downsize while making room for diverse new neighbors.
Dain's research offered a reality check on how well the new zoning is hitting those targets.
Did the floodgates actually open? No.
Back when Newton debated the VCOD, critics frequently warned that the new zoning would open the "floodgates" to rapid, oversized development. Dain’s look at the actual development pipeline showed a completely different reality.
Right now, Newton has about 15 small- to medium-scale projects in the works across the VCOD. Together, they will add fewer than 100 net new homes. Since Newton already has around 33,000 existing homes, that represents a tiny fraction of a percent of growth.
"Small-scale projects have to happen on a lot of parcels to add up," Dain explained, pointing out that physical changes to the city are moving at a very manageable pace.
Using zoning to save historic buildings
One of the clearest successes Dain pointed out was in Newton's Multi-Residence Transit (MRT) zones.
Developers are actively taking advantage of the MRT's adaptive reuse incentives. These rules actually reward property owners for preserving historic buildings by allowing them to add new units within the existing structure or in a smaller building out back.
This directly combats the "tear-down" trend that residents have worried about for years, where developers buy an older home, demolish it, and replace it with a single luxury mansion or oversized townhouses. Instead, the MRT rules prove that zoning can encourage people to save neighborhood architecture while still building the multi-family housing the region desperately needs.
The quiet commercial centers
Things are much quieter in the commercial Village Center 2 (VC2) and Village Center 3 (VC3) districts.
Dain explained that this lack of middle-sized commercial development is a regional issue, not just a Newton one. Right now, the math simply doesn't work for developers. It is rarely profitable to buy an active commercial building, tear it down, and build mixed-use housing unless the developer is allowed to build significantly taller than Newton permits.
This leaves the city with a real question: should the community make further tweaks to the rules to make these mixed-use projects financially viable, or will these sites just take decades to turn over naturally?
How Newton compares to the rest of the state
Looking at the bigger picture, Dain broke down how Massachusetts towns are handling the MBTA Communities Act. She put them into three categories: towns doing the bare minimum for "paper compliance," towns accepting "incremental" growth, and towns going "above and beyond."
She placed Newton firmly in the incremental group, alongside Arlington, Belmont, and Bedford.
Lexington, by comparison, went above and beyond and now has nearly 1,300 units in its pipeline. Other communities are getting hundreds of units all at once through massive redevelopments on vacant office parks.
Because Newton integrated its zoning directly into existing, active village centers, the city naturally avoids those massive single-site megaprojects and instead gets steady, sustainable growth.
A menu for the future
During the Q&A, Dain made it clear that local zoning alone won't solve the regional housing crisis. The state eventually needs to step in.
She outlined a "big menu" of potential state-level tweaks to help get "more housing in great places... without all the angst of the legal process." Her specific ideas included reforming Chapter 40B, updating parking policies, legalizing duplexes and four-family homes statewide, and using Newton’s MRT zoning as a state model
Mann-O'Halloran closed the event with a call to action. He noted that NfE plans to keep advocating for policies that build on the early success of the MRT zones. The goal remains the same: staying engaged to ensure Newton is a place where people of all ages, incomes, and backgrounds can actually afford to live.
