The first public meetings about a proposed housing and retail complex near the Riverside T station in Newton happened in 2007.
The final one was this year.
That’s 18 years. The meetings for a single apartment project have taken longer than building the Eiffel Tower, the Hoover Dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge — combined.
Construction is now expected to begin in 2028.
Massachusetts has a severe housing shortage: State officials say we need at least 200,000 new housing units just to keep up with demand. Dense, transit-oriented developments like the Riverside project — which includes more than 700 housing units near the Green Line — are one of the best ways to reach those ambitious numbers.
But state and local permitting and zoning rules that can trigger the need for endless, repetitive meetings before officials can reach a yes-or-no decision pose an unnecessary obstacle to reaching that goal.
The state and municipalities need to place some reasonable limits on when meetings are required, how many must be held, how long they can last, how they’re conducted, and, ultimately, how much weight is given to the views of the immediate abutters who tend to dominate those gatherings and often oppose housing construction.
It’s not that the views of neighbors shouldn’t matter. Neighbors deserve opportunities to ask questions and offer input on private development plans that affect them most directly.
But decision-makers need to strike a better balance, taking those opinions into consideration while weighing the broader public’s needs as well. After all, whether projects like the Riverside project go forward also affects the rest of us, and the steps officials and developers often take to address complaints aired in meetings — shrinking a development’s size, or even killing it altogether — have an impact on the rest of the state.
The first and most practical problem with meeting-mania in Massachusetts is cost. Unnecessary or redundant meetings take time, adding to the overall price of housing construction. Requiring an excessive number of them can be a backhanded way of killing a project with delay.
Sometimes, as at Riverside, the need for so many meetings can also create a vicious cycle of delay: By the time the planning process wheezes across the finish line, the economic outlook may have changed, forcing developers to start over — triggering another round of meetings.
In California, the state set a limit of five hearings per project for those developments that require public meetings. Other states, like Oregon, set time limits on how long a government body has to review project applications (Oregon’s is four months). Either would be an improvement in Massachusetts.
But the problems with meetings go deeper than just time and cost. They are also unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The people who have the time to attend in-person meetings, many of them on weeknights, are often not representative of the community.
Compared to the general population, they are more likely to be older, male, longtime residents, and homeowners, according to an analysis by Boston University associate professor of political science Katherine Levine Einstein, who analyzed minutes of three years of housing-related planning and zoning board meetings in 97 Boston metropolitan-area communities.
They overwhelmingly — and to a greater degree than the general public — opposed new housing construction.
“The neighborhood groups that tend to dominate the conversation in places like Boston play a de facto role in determining what types of projects go forward in their neighborhood, yet they aren’t representing the community at large,” said Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, a pro-growth advocacy group, who pointed out that polls show a majority of Massachusetts respondents value more housing being built more than they value preserving local control or protecting neighborhood character.
There are ways to improve representation at public meetings, like requiring developers to notify abutting renters as well as homeowners, allowing testimony remotely or in writing, or holding meetings at different places and times.
Those reforms are all worth trying. But they will likely have only marginal impact, since they don’t change the greater incentive that opponents have to participate.
“You can be the most pro-housing person on earth, but it’s not a rational use of my time to go to every planning and zoning board meeting about the development of housing in Greater Boston,” Einstein said. “The people who live nearby have all the incentive in the world to show up and fight that development.”
Given the reality that abutters will probably always be slanted against new development — but that new housing still has to happen somewhere — the broader reform would be to limit how often meetings are required at all, and, when they are held, to make sure officials aren’t unduly influenced by the opponents.
One way to reduce the overall number of projects that require meetings would be through rezoning. One reason that so many projects require so many meetings is because zoning across the state is antiquated and overly restrictive, meaning developers almost invariably need zoning variances to build large projects.
By rezoning, towns decide where development should happen in an orderly way instead of in project-by-project meetings. That’s the logic of the 2021 MBTA Communities law, which requires communities to set aside some land where developers can build denser housing by right — without going through the laborious public process — but leaves it up to communities to decide where within their borders these projects are built.
When communities debate zoning at a townwide level, development supporters and opponents can have a more equal voice, and the tradeoffs are more likely to get a full airing. Decision-makers are more likely to consider the big picture.
Salim Furth, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said even in a town like Milton — which unsuccessfully sued to avoid compliance with the MBTA law then had a long, drawn-out zoning debate about how to comply with it — the townwide zoning ultimately got done in a way that a majority of town meeting members approved.
Without that process, Furth said, “You might have spent more weeknights and elections arguing about one project than about this thing that rezoned a quarter of the town.”
When meetings do happen, the state could also remove some discretion from local officials, by making clear that not all objections raised in public meetings are legitimate reasons to stop a project.
California is one example of a state that limited local officials’ role in project approvals. The state requires certain types of projects to be approved “ministerially” or administratively, which means staff must approve a project if it adheres to all applicable standards. California also limits the ability of local officials to impose conditions that lower a project’s density.
Public meetings aren’t going anywhere, and citizen input will always have a place. But there have to be limits — and the views of nearby homeowners who show up for meetings can’t be the last word on whether Massachusetts gets the housing it needs.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.