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Southborough housing committee refines goals and strategy matrix for updated housing production plan
Summary
Members of the Town of Southborough housing committee discussed draft goals and the structure for a housing production plan update, agreeing to refine goal language, map how strategies support goals, and circulate a revised draft ahead of the next meeting.
The Town of Southborough Housing Trust met remotely and spent the meeting reviewing draft goals and the strategy framework for an updated Housing Production Plan. Sarah Brent, the plan presenter from Community Scale, led the discussion and said the meeting’s “goal today was to talk through that, I think especially around some of the strategies.”
Committee members agreed the draft should emphasize existing community outreach and earlier planning work. “We’re really building off of the processes that have already been completed related to the 2020 housing production plan and the 2021 master plan,” Brent said, noting the update should show how strategies align with goals.
The group directed Brent to organize the draft so each strategy maps back to the stated goals. Brent said she will revise wording (for example, clarifying the phrasing that currently reads “families and older adults”) and produce a clean draft for committee review “in the next few days” so it can be posted before the next meeting.
Committee members recommended removing or moving a reference slide that lists goals from previous plans so the presentation does not confuse prior goals with proposed goals. Members also suggested clearer language to focus on Southborough residents at “different stages of life” and to call out maintaining compliance with the Department of Housing and Community Development inventory goal (the committee discussed a 10% benchmark).
Discussion included procedural and outreach items: querying whether the municipal technology committee’s community survey covered housing and asking staff to check with planning and building department contacts about ADU permit history. Brent noted the committee will keep comment access open in the shared draft and that she will indicate, on maps and slides, where new policy tools (for example the MBTA Communities overlay) apply.
Meeting business concluded with a motion to adjourn that passed unanimously. Brent will circulate an updated draft and the group planned to review it at the next scheduled meeting.
The update is intended to produce a goals→strategy matrix that shows which proposed tactics support specific goals, plus a short list of “parking lot” strategies for further study.
