Opinion By Evan Naismith
Several years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones came to UMass to discuss her seminal work, The 1619 Project. As she listed off accomplishments for the Black community, the crowd cheered enthusiastically. The applause, however, subsided noticeably when she mentioned racial diversity in public schools. Lightning-quick, she quipped, “Oh, I see. You all celebrate Black excellence except for when it actually impacts you.”
Ouch.
Hannah-Jones is one of America’s most prominent historians, but her biting comment was rooted in the present: Amherst claims to be anti-racist, but we balk at making the sacrifices necessary to achieve racial equity. At first, I didn’t really buy her assertion. After all, Amherst had established Caminantes, CRESS, and the Reparations Assembly. We are the good guys, right? But then I started researching housing.
The US Census shows that white Amherst residents own homes at twice the rate of Black residents. That disparity has profound effects on wealth. Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that homeownership is the primary vehicle for wealth in America and that, for most of the 20th century, African Americans were locked out of it by policy. Because of our homeownership ratio, Amherst’s anti-renter bylaws have a disparate impact on minorities–possibly in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
These policies originated during the Town Meeting years, when zoning decisions were written almost exclusively by homeowners. Eventually, the Amherst Charter Commission found that the Town Meeting “did not reflect the demographics of the Town,” with renters and minorities being significantly underrepresented. Town Meeting was a classic tyranny-of-the-majority situation, with students and renters having virtually no political representation.
During this period, Amherst imposed strict limits on homes occupied by four or more unrelated individuals and layered on environmental and design requirements that made new housing exceedingly difficult to build—even as the town struggled for additional property tax revenue.
These anti-growth policies proved popular with homeowners, in part because they caused real estate values to rise at roughly twice the national rate. But this intentional scarcity turned the housing market into a high-stakes game of musical chairs, with the greatest harm falling on those with the fewest options—disproportionately renters and communities of color.
Today, the consequences are clear. Landlords can pass through the vast majority of regulatory costs to tenants, contributing to strong profits as rents continue to climb. In that sense, Amherst’s long-standing resistance to development functions like Trump’s tariffs: the burden falls primarily on consumers rather than corporations. Meanwhile, homeowners have continued to see substantial gains in wealth.
But these gains have come at a steep cost. An estimated 68% of Amherst renters are now cost-burdened, compared to just 21% of homeowners. Rising housing costs have also contributed to broader economic strain: roughly 4,000 Amherst residents face food insecurity, prompting the Survival Center to open a satellite location and report that it is sometimes impossible to secure shelter for families in need.
The African Heritage Reparation Assembly’s Harm Report documented “profound and widespread discrimination and economic exclusion in contemporary Amherst” and called out the outsized rent burden on Black residents. The Town Council endorsed the Comprehensive Housing Policy that followed — which outlined feasible pathways to increase Black homeownership — but then ignored the vast majority of its recommendations.
In his book How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi maintains that, “[a] racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity… Antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity.” By Kendi’s metrics, our current policies are racist since they dramatically advantage homeowner interests over those of renters. An antiracist housing policy (one that seeks to reverse inequities, not just slow them) must instead elevate renter interests above those of homeowners.
The current town council has been empowered to do better, yet some councilors continue to indulge wealthy homeowners who don’t want homebuilding in downtown, North Amherst, or South Amherst. They don’t want market rate or luxury. And they will literally sue the town if it tries to permit affordable housing. These residents are implacable, and their policies are demonstrably harmful to racial equity.
It took me half a decade to digest what Nikole Hannah-Jones recognized in one instant. Amherst is expert at diagnosing racial inequity and negligent at fixing it. The town council knows what needs to be done. The Harm Report told them. The CHP told them. The Census data tells them every year. The question is no longer whether Amherst understands its housing crisis — it’s whether our elected officials will finally stop protecting the people who created it.
We need to codify the recommendations in the CHP and the Housing Production Plan. And anybody standing in the way should be forced to explain why the character of the town is more important than racial equity.
Evan Naismith is a five-year resident of Amherst and a graduate from the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst. He is the VP of the American Constitution Society at UConn Law School, where he specializes in public interest law.
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Amherst Current hasn’t always been the most daring of town websites, but I appreciate the skewering of hypocrisy that occurs here. Thank you, Mr. Naismith. Of course, we still don’t have the naming of names, just “some counselors”….that needs to occur somewhere. Some of us who follow somewhat closely know who you are talking about. But the instigating and obscuring problem remains, year after year after year: election campaign seasons that never identify, delve into, and play out explicitly the central issues of The Town of Amherst going forward. Just one campaign of identity politics after the next. We fear politics in Amherst (one of the reasons we don’t have a mayor), and, therefore, in the public square, our candidates get to skirt the matters that reasonable people in town might disagree about, and then get reelected year after year.
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I appreciate the urgency of this piece and agree that Amherst must take racial inequity in housing seriously. The disparities in homeownership, renter burden, and wealth-building are real, and they deserve more than symbolic concern. Amherst should be held accountable for whether its housing policies expand access or preserve exclusion. As a decades long renter in this community it is personal to me that I am able to remain in my “home town” and not be priced out due to increasingly unaffordable rising rental prices.
Where I part company with the argument is the suggestion that pushback on particular development proposals, or concerns about wetlands, wastewater, flooding, traffic, tax impacts, and infrastructure capacity, can be folded too easily into a single category of racist or anti-communities of color opposition.
That conflation is not fair, and it is not helpful.
A town can be serious about racial equity and still ask whether a proposed project is appropriately sited. A resident can support affordable housing and still be concerned about building in or near wetlands, increasing flood risk, overburdening sewer and water systems, or adding long-term municipal costs that will affect renters and homeowners alike. Those questions are not excuses for exclusion. They are part of responsible planning.
In fact, environmental and infrastructure concerns often matter most to people with the fewest resources. If a project is built in a place with poor drainage, inadequate wastewater solutions, limited transportation access, or foreseeable climate vulnerability, the future residents of that housing may be the ones who bear the consequences most directly. Affordable housing should not mean housing placed wherever political resistance is weakest or where land happens to be available. It should mean safe, durable, well-sited housing that strengthens the community over time.
Amherst absolutely needs more housing, including affordable housing and housing that helps address racial and economic exclusion. But that does not require dismissing local review as bad faith or treating conservation, fiscal responsibility, and infrastructure planning as inherently anti-equity. The harder and more honest task is to hold all of these obligations together.
We should reject exclusionary zoning and reflexive opposition to housing. We should also reject the idea that every objection to a specific project is therefore a defense of racial inequity. Amherst’s challenge is not to choose between racial justice and environmental protection. It is to insist on both.
Disclosure: I am a plaintiff in the complaint related to the proposed Beacon development. I want to be clear that my participation is not rooted in opposition to housing or affordable housing, but in concern for responsible siting, environmental protection, infrastructure impacts, and the integrity of local review. My position on this and other related matters can be found on the Amherst Indy.
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Robin,
I am greatly saddened by your actions and your justifications for doing so.
Regardless of what reasons you claim to have done this for, your actions have carried a great negative impact – hundreds of people who could have had access to housing in Amherst no longer have the opportunity.
The needs of the many should outweigh the desires of six.
At this point, the great need for housing should take higher priority than almost anything else.
The capability of a small number of neighbors to stop a large, beneficial project such as this speaks to a systemic deficiency that needs to be corrected so this does not happen in the future.
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Robin,
I plainly stated that anti-development residents promote “policies [that] are demonstrably harmful to racial equity.” I never said those residents are racist people.
It is beyond doubt that the withdrawal of Beacon’s proposal–at the behest of your lawsuit–will have a disproportionate and hugely negative impact on minorities and low-income individuals. Some of those residents sought to escape abusive relationships, homelessness, and unsafe living conditions. To them, subsidized housing in Amherst represented the biggest “fresh start” of their lives.
And now it’s gone.
You claiming that “future residents of that housing may be the ones who bear the consequences most directly” is pure victim-blaming. These people are desperate for economic opportunity, and subsidized housing was the bedrock of their social safety net. Did any of them nominate you to advocate so fiercely on their behalf?
Your environmental concerns are equally poorly-taken. When environmentally-stringent municipalities like Amherst restrict housing development, affected residents don’t simply disappear. Instead, they move to less-regulated jurisdictions, like Belchertown or Chicopee (study by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti). In other words, we’re not preventing environmental destruction, we’re simply exporting it to less fortunate communities. Economists call this “spatial substitution,” or (in climate contexts) “carbon leakage.”
The Beacon project met “passive house” standards with incorporated solar panels and a community garden. There are only 6,000 such homes in all of MA. Whatever alternative housing emerges will almost certainly be more environmentally destructive than the Beacon proposal.
Your lawsuit has made our environment worse. Our community is less diverse, and the local wealth chasm between renter and homeowner is larger today than it was yesterday. Architects wasted millions of dollars trying to design progressive community homes for low-income Amherst residents.
You and five of your friends just destroyed the social safety net for hundreds of low-income families. If this is what “local review” looks like, then it’s time for reform.
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Evan :
The lawsuit did none of what you state . Beacon would be warmly welcomed at Hampshire College and they know it .
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Hi everyone,
My name is Jerah Smith. I’m an Amherst resident, dad of two boys below five, and a planning board member. I’ve never commented before but feel compelled to in this case.
I also have a Master’s Degree in Community Planning from the University of Maryland. I’m the former Municipal Services Director for a comprehensive planning consultancy, where I specialized in land use planning, infrastructure planning, and scenario planning, among other things. I’m currently the Associate Director of Equitable Housing Solutions for a national affordable housing non-profit (with zero connection to Beacon) with an explicit goal to advance racial justice.
There was mention of how this was “responsible planning” so I thought I might chime in, given my background. To keep it simple, the best planning is done when you consider all outcomes and weigh all trade-offs. Ensuring that planning produces racially equitable outcomes requires looking at all possible outcomes through the lens of racial equity.
One resource I like to use is Race Forward’s nationally acclaimed Racial Equity Impact Assessment. Even in the absence of a formal REIA, it is pretty plain to see that the loss of these homes more likely hurt people of color. Let alone generally hurting people of all races who just need help finding and affording a consistent roof over their head. To imply otherwise would be insulting.
But we can’t even do a REIA now. In part because this use of legal privilege made sure that the interests of six residents spoke for the entire town and all those future neighbors.
I also want to make sure those future neighbors and “140 units” is not an abstraction. Those senior “units” were for the retired teacher who is priced out by property taxes or rent. Those family “units” were for the people who make our town run and just want to be embedded in the community that they serve. They are parents who want their kids to go to good schools.
I genuinely understand the concerns about traffic, the wetlands, tax base implications, etc. – it’s been my job, after all. I even genuinely sympathize with how terrifying it might be for the abutters who had a certain vision of what their lives might look like, only to have that vision threatened and possibly disrupted.
I’m a professional planner, but I’m also a human. The choice to pursue legal action against a proposal for affordable homes for seniors and working families is plainly wrong.
I do not think that is who we are as a town. And I think that includes the petitioners. If only they had understood the unintended consequences of that single, irreparable choice.
I will be pursuing solutions that embody a different mantra for this town and it is, in the words of Fred Rogers: “Won’t you be my neighbor?”
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