zoning zoning zoning. it's all county level in VA and progrowth factions can stomp out the type of pastoralist nimbyism we see in Weston. Not necessarily enough to build things denser than single family homes outside of essentially urban arlington and alexandria though.
yea Ive posted about this before -
Massachusetts has 351 municipalities compared to 412 in Florida, 138 in Virginia or 552 in North Carolina - in turn, they have 6, 4, and 7 times the area of MA. Some land uses are less controversial- a community is unlikely to oppose a new fire station. But say a jail, homeless shelter, or density? On the scale of a place like say Fairfax County Virgina, the political interests are spread out far enough across the jurisdiction that someone in Lorton VA likely won't have a strong opinion to commercial development in Tysons Corner - the minimal impact to the vast majority of their constituency may mean that a county commissioner may well be OK with siting a project somewhere that a local majority would oppose it. What's left of our historical county system is the various county houses of corrections - usually located in some out of the way corner, like a highway median.
http://archboston.com/community/threads/boston-and-the-homeless.2924/post-495664
This actually kind of ties into a thought I had recently. In MA the counties are essentially useless, they serve almost no purpose, but what if we empowered them? Boston is never going to be able to annex any more of its neighbors, but what if like LA we expanded suffolk county to include the metro? Suffolk is tiny, but what if it was expanded to include everything inside 95 and then was given a lot more powers for development? Even just suffolk as it is now includes boston, winthrop, chelsea, and revere. Even just empowering that more would be something.
Ive previously posted about this, and its one of my political passion points, but unfortunately probably politically unrealistic inside 128. In my view, to do so you have to provide tangible benefits to municipalities and their residents to get them to support something along those lines and give up local control, so its really more likely to begin out in the more rural parts of the state where individual towns are less able to provide comphrensive services. Its much harder to break the status quo - if the status quo is that someone else does it, a local government is very unlikely to want to take up that responsibility - but to give up local control? You would need a reason, like your entire police department quit. That basically eliminates everything inside 128 where the municipalities have ample resources to provide services. Theres a few exceptions, like MWRA that prove the rule though - most municipalities other than Cambridge aren't going to be able to provide their own water supply.
The other examples I tend to reach for are police and schools - recently several towns in Western MA have merged police departments ad-hoc because they're individually too small to support full departments. (Russell-Montgomery, Hardwick-New Braintree and Chester-Blandford). Western MA is prime "Sheriff's office" territory, while Regional school districts are even more common - we have 60, covering towns rich and poor alike, such as Lincoln-Sudbury or the Central Berkshires. The problem is, because we lack those county level structures, all of that happens on an intermunicipal basis - regional boards of health, regionalized emergency dispatch, regional assessing, all of it tends to be a group of towns agreeing to do a thing together, rather than reaching for a more centralized structure. MPOs and their regional planning tools and programs and RTAs are regional structures that towns take advantage of, but otherwise the things towns would want? There's no framework.
But notice those are expensive things... things that require staff, facilities, buildings. A planning board is less than 20 folks who are generally unpaid and have a meeting or two a month. The state would have to legislate it, and they did to create the Cape Cod Commission - but even that isn't fully empowered. It may be a centralized planning/historic/transportation board for the entire cape, but even as they write model bylaws for the entire cape, its up to each town to implement them and provide services.
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