Thank you for your recent article on Westford. While the article indicated a “no” vote on the project was due to a wish to keep Westford rural, I believe it is a much more complex issue than that and deserves a deeper and more complex story.
Drive down the first mile of Woods Hollow Road coming from Essex and compare that to a map of Westford 20 years ago and you will see that Westford never stopped developing. The difference is that those houses are single-family homes, while the wastewater project offered a provision (and this is important: it was not going to be built without town approval, so not a mandate) for a multi-income housing development.
Front Porch Forum posts mentioned our town becoming Essex. Since we are not zoned for that level of development and commercialism, I can assume it was a reference to the town’s diverse population. The fact that we had two websites devoted to the topic in a town of approximately 2,000 people and that Front Porch Forum voices that were questioning or stating facts were often drowned out by posts soliciting fear was a big change in our local culture.
I believe the people who voted “yes” were not trying to turn Westford into a small city but believed they were carrying out their civic duty to the benefit of our neighbors and public offices, including our library and town office, which are the literal center of our town, offering our community resources, fundraising for locals in need, after-school programs, internet access, etc.
The Boston Globe did a recent series on small towns’ responses to MBTA requests for multi-income housing, and I think this is a nationwide issue that has played out in our small town and greatly impacted all of us. I hope it gets a deeper dig. Thank you.
Beth Nichols
Westford
