Winthrop, Massachusetts

have nice beaches but people hesitate to move here, sometimes, because of those issues.” On the positive side, Winthrop is about the only place on the Massachusetts coast where you can buy a single family house on the water for under a million dollars. The town just had its first million- dollar home sale last year. Much of Boston has been optimized with people converting units and building more; it’s happened in suburban Boston and the whole metro area, as well. Winthrop is one little place where that wave hasn’t come yet, but as public transportation increases, and connectivity improves, it’s going to be a desirable place for people to live. The Metropolitan Area Planning Commission has done a fair amount of work on behalf of the town in terms of specific projects. Faison explains, “We have a master plan for our Center Business District and the first step of that is taking on the infrastructure work. We’ll redo water, sewage, drainage, and rebuild all the surface areas, so it’ll look nice too. Beyond that, over the summer, we’re really going to focus on what we call ‘Win 2030’– a visioning document of 10 or 15 metrics that we’d like to target for the year 2030, i.e. the number of jobs we’d like to see, how many units of housing. Then, we’ll be going through a town-wide master planning process because I want the community to be engaged in how they want it to look in the future. We can shape that by doing a master plan and subsequently updating our zoning based on that plan.” Winthrop’s population hovers around 17,500, but while every other community in Metro Boston is growing and getting younger, Winthrop is actually contracting and getting older. They’re now trying to figure out how to flip that demographic to have more young families move to town, and help senior residents transition their living accommodations, so they don’t have to look after a big home. Being part of the boom that’s happening in Greater Boston is very important for the future. “This area was one of the finalists for an Amazon location, just outside Winthrop, at a former racetrack called Suffolk Downs,” says Faison. “They didn’t get Amazon but, regardless, there will be 10,000 units of new housing going in there – it will mean a population bigger than Winthrop’s living right next door. So we’re trying to engage with these partners and different projects that are happening. I work in the Metro Mayors Coalition; it’s 16 municipalities, including Boston, who are looking at things regionally. We’re anticipating northwards of 600,000 people moving here by 2030. Our metric is 150,000 additional units of housing needed by 2030. With all of Boston’s educational institutions and major national and international companies, there are a lot of good, high-paying jobs in the area. Luckily, Winthrop can offer lower housing prices, with the proximity to the city that people are looking for, but still feeling like you’re in a small town neighborhood with a