The City of Boston announced last week – as readers may notice in four advertisements in this paper – that six new meetings are scheduled for the city’s Neighborhood Housing zoning initiative.

This article will be a primer for those who may be sketchy on the details, as the last meeting took place back in the late fall of 2025, as well as a calendar reminder for those meetings.

The six meetings will focus on Hyde Park, West Roxbury and Roslindale, with each neighborhood getting a virtual meeting and an in-person meeting to go over current drafts of the plan. Go to https://gvimes.link/nhbrhdzng for more information on the city’s web page.

The initiative started in the fall of last year with the stated goal of both creating more housing opportunities in the city and making zoning more consistent with what’s already in the neighborhood. The oft-cited example is that most housing upgrades for single-family, owner-occupied housing are taking place on sites that don’t conform to current zoning, and therefore require a variance from the zoning code, granted through the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA).

The problem is that, even with a new subcommittee created to deal with such requests, the wait list is extremely long. Even when you get to your ZBA hearing, the hearings themselves can have dozens of applicants at a time, making the wait just to be heard hours long. The July 14 ZBA meeting, for instance, has 32 scheduled cases, and the most recent ZBA hearing from June ran about four hours.

And just getting a hearing date alone could take six-to-12 months.

So, the Neighborhood Housing initiative is aimed at putting in new language for the zoning code relevant to West Roxbury, Roslindale, and Hyde Park to allow for minor additions, repairs, modifications and certain types of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to go in as-of-right, meaning they won’t have to go before the ZBA and they won’t need abutters meetings and public input.

Boston Planning Department Senior Zoning Reform Planner Will Cohen said back in the fall that the department looked at all 10,000 housing units in West Roxbury. He said they looked at six of the most common ZBA violations residents incur when trying to build, and of those 10,000 units, very few didn’t butt heads with the code.

“There were about 100 that didn’t violate these six (violations), but there were a bunch of rules we didn’t look at,” he said. “Parking, building height and others that we didn’t analyze, so we didn’t want to over-promise and say there are some that follow all the rules.”

One thing that has made some residents nervous is the inclusion of allowing “small-scale” developments to go ahead as-of-right. The Planning Department’s page states that “small-scale” means up to four units of housing on a single lot.

At the Hyde Park meeting, ADUs were brought up as a concern, citing worries that property owners could just build carriage houses on their lots and not worry about zoning requirements. Cohen said at the time that this was unlikely, as fire access requirements trump all zoning allowances, and added that most lots don’t have the space to allow for a separate structure that needs fire truck access to be built.

The ADUs could be built, but they would have to be inside the existing envelope of the structure, or as an addition.

The meetings are set for this July and August, with specific dates listed below:

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Hyde Park

Monday, July 20 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM | Virtual Meeting

Thursday, July 23 | 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM | Hyde Park Branch of the Boston Public Library | 35 Harvard Avenue, Hyde Park, MA 02136

Roslindale

Monday, July 27 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM | Virtual Meeting

Thursday, July 30 | 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM | Roslindale Branch of the Boston Public Library | 4246 Washington St., Roslindale, MA 02131

West Roxbury

Monday, August 3 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM | Virtual Meeting

Thursday, August 6 | 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM | Boston Police District E-5 West Roxbury/ Roslindale | 1708 Centre St., West Roxbury, MA 02132