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David Modica stepped to the microphone Monday night and, in less than a minute, reframed a debate Marblehead has been circling for years.
“Tedesco is, like, a golf course?” he said, addressing Planning Board member Marc J. Liebman during the Annual Town Meeting. “So this is a way to comply with 3A without doing any of the 3A stuff.”
“Yes, it is,” Liebman replied. “We tried the other way, and it was rejected.”
A few seconds later, Modica pushed further.
“Are we kind of being pricks?” he asked.
The exchange drew laughter, unease and, within hours, a much larger audience.
Among those who took notice was Nick Ward, who spoke at the microphone just before Modica. In a comment after the meeting, Ward said: “I think if David Modica had spoken before me I would have limited my remarks to the following: ‘Can we hear a little more from David please?’”
A video clip of Modica’s moment, posted to Instagram by housing advocate Jonathan Berk, spread quickly online. As of 4:18 p.m., the video had drawn more than 450,000 on Instagram and 900,000 on X, along with thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, pushing a local zoning vote into a broader statewide conversation about housing and compliance with the MBTA Communities Act.
In a follow-up with the Independent, Berk said the moment resonated because it distilled a complicated policy debate into a simple question. “David’s remarks exposed how Massachusetts communities have split on MBTA Communities compliance,” Berk wrote. “Some genuinely zoned for modest multifamily housing. Others engineered districts designed to prevent housing construction. Marblehead was obviously in the latter camp.”
At Town Meeting, the issue before voters was Article 4, a proposal to create a multi-family overlay district to comply with the state law, which requires communities served by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to zone for multifamily housing by right. Marblehead’s plan designates two areas — a smaller district along Broughton Road and a larger one centered on land at Tedesco Country Club — with enough theoretical capacity to meet the state’s requirement of 897 units.
Three years, four votes
The vote marked the fourth time in roughly three years that Marblehead voters have been asked to decide how, or whether, to comply.
An initial version of the zoning failed at the May 2024 Town Meeting 377-410 — a margin of 33 votes against, then 2025’s by a vote of 951-759, a margin of 55.6 percent in favor out of 1,710 votes cast, meaning 951 voters supported the measure and 759 opposed it. Two months later, a townwide referendum overturned that bylaw 3,642-3,297, with 52.5 percent of voters rejecting it out of 6,939 ballots cast, or 3,642 “no” votes compared to 3,297 “yes” votes.
That reversal left the town out of compliance and set off a new round of planning, debate and political pressure.
In late January, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed a civil action against Marblehead and several other municipalities seeking to compel compliance with the law. Days later, the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities issued a favorable review of Marblehead’s revised proposal, finding no conflicts with state requirements and stating that adoption would put the town “in a good position for compliance.”
Planning officials said the new plan was shaped directly by the earlier defeats.
“We worked very hard with a lot of different groups to come up with a plan that is not only compliant, but passable at Town Meeting,” Liebman said ahead of the vote. “And if this is not that plan, we don’t know what is.”
The most significant change is geographic.
Earlier proposals placed multifamily zoning in residential areas such as Pleasant Street and Tioga Way, where residents raised concerns about traffic, density and neighborhood character. Those areas were removed. The revised plan shifts most of the required zoning capacity onto approximately 32 acres of Tedesco Country Club, a privately owned golf course on the edge of town.
That move narrowed the footprint of the zoning while concentrating its capacity in a single large parcel.
The plan does not require any housing to be built.
‘We tried the other way’
That distinction became central to both the exchange and the broader debate. Liebman and other officials emphasized that the overlay simply allows development if a property owner chooses to pursue it. If the owners of Tedesco Country Club do not sell or develop the land, no housing would be constructed there.
“All we’re doing is creating a zone where you are allowed to build by right,” Liebman said earlier in the meeting. “If the golf course decides that they never want to sell it, then nothing will ever change.”
Liebman’s comment that “we tried the other way, and it was rejected” referred to those earlier plans that placed zoning directly in neighborhoods, Pleasant Street and failed at the ballot box or at Town Meeting.
The revised proposal reflects that political reality.
Supporters argue it represents the only viable path to compliance after multiple failed attempts and avoids the consequences of continued noncompliance, including the potential loss of state funding and ongoing litigation. Select Board Chair Dan Fox said the plan was designed to address “concerns of residents in regards to traffic and congestion in certain areas” while still meeting state requirements.
Critics argue that by concentrating zoning on a site unlikely to be developed, the town is complying on paper while avoiding meaningful housing production. Meanwhile, the state’s role is complicated by the fact that housing officials reviewed Marblehead’s revised plan before Town Meeting and found no conflicts with state requirements. In other words, the same flexibility critics say allowed Marblehead to design a low-likelihood housing district is also flexibility the state accepted as compliant, at least at the preliminary review stage. The law requires zoning capacity, not construction, and Marblehead’s Tedesco-centered plan appears to meet that test.
That tension — between legal compliance and practical outcomes — is what the viral clip captured.
Berk described Modica’s delivery as “articulate but irreverent,” writing that he “layered sarcasm with an underlying question: ‘Are we being pricks about this?’ He walked through just how the town intended to avoid complying with the law by asking pointed questions to get to the crux of the proposal.”
At the meeting, other residents raised similar concerns in more conventional terms, questioning whether the plan would produce housing or simply satisfy state requirements on paper. Planning officials and supporters emphasized that the law requires zoning, not construction, and that future development depends on private property owners and market conditions.
Town Meeting ultimately approved the zoning change, advancing Marblehead’s latest attempt to come into compliance after years of debate, a successful Town Meeting vote, a referendum repeal and renewed pressure from the state.
Whether any housing is built remains uncertain.
For now, the outcome is a plan that meets the state’s zoning requirements — and a moment that, for many viewers online, raised a sharper question about what that compliance actually means.
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