When Amherst Voted Down the Future: Revisiting Form- Based Zoning

Social Inequality Goes Global

In Amherst, around 2010, the Planning Department tried to introduce form-based zoning  a forward-thinking way to shape buildings and streetscapes by their physical form rather than their use. The idea was simple: let growth happen, but make sure it looks and feels like Amherst. Keep the college-town buzz without selling out its soul.

Consultants came with charts, renderings, and design codes for North Amherst and Atkins Corner. But when the proposal hit Town Meeting, it failed not because it was wrong, but because no one understood it. Confusion won over comprehension. Amherst kept its old 20th-century zoning: boxes of “residential,” “business,” “limited business.” The form-based proposal became a ghost file buried on some municipal server.

Years later, the consequences stand five stories tall. The “boxy” apartments on North Pleasant — Boltwood Place, Kendrick Place, One East Pleasant — are all technically legal but just not lovable. They’re what happens when you regulate use instead of form.

One retired high school math teacher told me outside the polls who I just met yesterday on November local elections 2025,

“You know what happened? They didn’t understand it. The council members paid to read the reports just shrugged and then they voted it down.” His sigh carries a civic heartbreak.“We hired experts, they made the guidelines, and Town Meeting voted it down because they didn’t understand. Fifteen years later, they’re spending more money to fix what form-based zoning would’ve prevented.”

He’s right. The skyline tells the story. Amherst is now reinventing what it once rejected, piecemeal, under new names: Downtown Design Guidelines, Overlay Districts, character zones. It’s municipal déjà vu with a design budget.

But the missed vote of 2010 didn’t just shape the skyline but shaped the housing crisis. The resistance to form-based zoning froze the town’s evolution. Developers built to the path of least resistance: luxury, vertical, downtown, where land was zoned permissive and profit predictable. The result wasn’t UMass’ fault but a local choice. The town’s inaction fifteen years ago created the very pressures now blamed on students.

And here’s the irony: those same vertical apartments people love to hate, are now the town’s fiscal lifeline. They generate dense, sustainable tax revenue from small footprints — revenue that helps pay for schools, roads, and public services. The fear of “too tall” buildings became the cost of lost foresight.

Compare Amherst’s paralysis to Princeton, where the university decentralized student housing by partnering with local landlords and incentivizing them through LLC structures. Princeton didn’t wait for a market correction created one, balancing the student footprint with town affordability. Amherst could have done the same, but its zoning debate got lost in translation.

The fear of new language whether “form-based zoning” or “structural change” paralyzes the moment. It’s not ignorance so much as nostalgia — what Zohran Mamdani calls the allure of a monoculture, that 1990s comfort zone where everyone watched the same shows, read the same magazines, and believed in the same middle-class dream.

That era — Giuliani’s New York, Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair, the Balthazar brunch crowd — congratulated itself on normalcy while ignoring the cracks: Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and the names that never fit the party narrative.

Mamdani’s generation that toppled Cuomo and speaks in the plural, not the singular and doesn’t want the “immovable feast.” It wants something new, structurally different. The way Amherst could have had it in 2010.

The math teacher outside the polls looked at me as though he’d already seen the sequel.
“People don’t like to admit they don’t understand,” he said. “They just vote no and call it wisdom.”

That’s the quiet tragedy of both Amherst and Washington, not corruption, but comprehension failure. A refusal to learn the new grammar of our time. Amherst’s missed zoning reform and the Democrats’ cautious centrism are twin symptoms of a deeper fear: that admitting confusion is weakness.

But it is the first act of learning and that’s what the younger generation — Mamdani’s voters, the students renting those boxy new apartments, juggling debt, climate anxiety, and the collapse of shared truth — already know. They don’t want another committee report or another safe compromise but a language that finally matches the scale of the crisis and the courage to understand before rejecting.

The change begins not in the next election, but in the next meeting, when someone finally raises their hand and says,
“Wait — explain that again.”

The Other Side: UMass and the Housing Crunch
UMass Amherst is enormous for a town of 40,000. With over 31,000 students and only about 14,600 undergraduate beds on campus, roughly 9,300 of them live off-campus in Amherst and surrounding towns. The university’s land and dorms are mostly tax-exempt, and the town estimates the cost of educating children living in that tax-exempt housing at about $185,000 a year.

Amherst’s housing and tax revenue isn’t just “students vs. residents” but about who foots the bill when so much of the land base is off the tax rolls, and so much housing demand falls on the private market. The off-campus student population squeezes rental availability, drives up prices, and contributes indirectly to the financial pressure on year-round residents. In a system where developers are more incentivized to build luxury apartments for students than affordable housing for families, Amherst’s tax base grows unevenly — vertical student housing generates property tax revenue indirectly through fees, municipal service contributions, and state payments, but the social cost is felt in classrooms, infrastructure, and streets crowded with rentals.

So yes, those boxy five-story North Pleasant apartments are not UMass’s “fault.” They’re the town’s response to 15 years of missed zoning reform and a market skewed toward student dollars. And the question for voters is clear: Do we reward the status quo, or do we demand policies that balance revenue, community, and the right to stay home?

Rizwana Khan is a writer, educator, and human rights advocate in the Town of Amherst.