He asked if Marblehead was 'kind of being pricks.' Then the internet found him.

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David Modica settles into a blue foldable chair outside Java Sun on Atlantic Avenue, just past 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday. He is wearing the same green hoodie and black headphones he wore Monday night, when he stepped to a microphone at Marblehead's Annual Town Meeting and asked, in a single uncertain breath, whether the town was kind of being pricks.

The clip — around 90 seconds — has now drawn millions of views combined across Instagram and X. A housing advocate in Salem posted it. Strangers are stopping him at the trash drop-off.

Over the course of the next hour at Java Sun, four people will recognize him. He does not appear to enjoy any of it.

"I'm really not a public figure," he says. "I'm not well known in town as it is."

He is 35. He grew up between the high school and the Glover School, and moved back a few years ago to be closer to his parents. He owns a small online business and works from home. He does not drink — “five or 10 times in my life,” he estimates — and he does not eat meat.

'I felt like a jerk'

He dropped out of college, drifted through Pittsburgh and came back to a Craigslist e-commerce job he held for four years — hired on his birthday, quit on his birthday — before trying to make politics a career.

It mostly did not work. Without a degree or experience, he took bottom-rung work: door-knocking, phone-banking, volunteer hours that cost him money. A few years in, he began to feel like a fraud.

“I bought myself a car. It was a Dodge Charger. It was a convertible. I loved it,” he says. “And then I felt like such an asshole, because I’m going door to door, saying, the environment, the environment — and I’m a guy who eats meat and drives on it.”

He sold the Charger. He bought an electric car. He stopped eating meat.

“Honestly, I did it for political reasons,” he says. “I felt like a jerk.”

His grandmother, who recently died, had dementia in her last years. She loved feeding people — the mailman, neighbors walking by the house. What she most wanted to feed her grandson was meatballs.

He never told her he was vegan.

“I didn’t want to. I didn’t want my grandma — he pauses. “So I was just like, ‘Oh, Grandma, thank you. I just ate at home.’”

It is a small story, but it tracks. Modica is the kind of person, he says, who would rather absorb a private inconvenience than ask someone else to participate in a fiction.

‘The tyranny of townhouses’

That is essentially what he stood up to say Monday night.

Voters were considering a multifamily zoning overlay — the fourth attempt in three years to comply with the state’s MBTA Communities Act. This version put most of the required capacity onto Tedesco Country Club, a private golf course unlikely to be sold or developed.

Modica had not planned to speak. He had come for the override. He had tried last year and did not get to the mic — the moderator, he says, cut off the line after "everything had been said but not everyone had a chance to say it." This year, he listened to the speakers before him and grew confused.

“I was reading, and I was like, one of us is confused,” he says. “Either these people are confused, or I’m confused, because I don’t think anything’s going to get built.”

He stepped to the microphone and asked Planning Board member Marc J. Liebman whether the plan would, in fact, produce housing. Liebman said it was unlikely. Modica asked his question.

He had written nothing down. He never does. He had nearly sat back down; Nick Ward, the resident before him, had made a similar argument more succinctly, Modica said. He stayed at the microphone anyway.

What he was trying to do, he says, was translate. Speakers had asked the wrong questions — was Tedesco on board, what about affordability — as if anyone seriously expected housing on the golf course. He had read enough to suspect almost no one did.

What unsettled him was the contrast. A year earlier, the fight had drawn a crowd so large the meeting had to be rescheduled.

“Last year we spoke for hours,” he says. “Everyone wanted to say something. You guys were getting up there talking like you were revolutionary soldiers fighting the good fight against the tyranny of townhouses.”

This year, the same debate ended in under 30 minutes.

“I had the sense it was fake,” he says. “I wanted someone just to say it that way. We couldn’t all pretend anymore.”

The stakes were measurable. Adopting a compliant plan restores Marblehead's eligibility for state grant programs it had lost after voters overturned an earlier version in a July referendum. Town Administrator Thatcher Kezer had outlined more than $4.6 million in state grants already lost or now ineligible, including funding for Council on Aging medical-transport vans and a $2.98 million Village Street Bridge reconstruction. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell sued the town in January.

He has little appetite for the role of giant-slayer. He defends Liebman as working in good faith. He defends residents, like Yael Magen and John DiPiano, who led last year’s successful referendum repeal, for being open about their stances. He voted “yes” on the plan Monday night, then second-guessed it.

“It would have been more honest, if we’re going to be uncompliant, to be openly uncompliant,” he says.

He talks like this for a while — about candor, mostly. About the damage done when public arguments become something other than what they claim to be.

“Who is this for?” he says. “It’s a performance at that point. I guess we’re performing for the state, but I think they probably know it’s a lie too. I don’t even know who the whole jig is for.”

The same Town Meeting weighing what he saw as a hollow housing plan was also debating whether to send an override to the ballot box.

“We are the luckiest bastards alive,” he says of living in Marblehead. “We can’t also be the most self-interested bastards alive. They can’t be the same thing.”

When asked how Marblehead should balance historic charm with new development, he is careful to say he is not an expert. Then he is not careful at all.

“This place isn’t nice because the houses are all old,” he says. “It’s nice because we’re very fortunate. It’s wealthy. It’s near the water. We’re not nice because there’s an old building with a plaque.”

“We’re not talking about skyscrapers,” he says. “We’re talking about townhouses. Three stories. If you put one next to a single-family house, what’s the difference?”

‘You can write that down’

He has worked, in years of political volunteering, on Andrew Yang’s presidential run and on local candidates who made housing a centerpiece of their platforms. He has never been on a winning team.

“I’ve never won,” he says. “You can write that down.”

He says he has no interest in becoming a housing advocate; housing is not even his issue.

“I don’t want to be taking the oxygen from the other people who can speak,” he says.

He wants people to hold the line on their own values. Not his.

“If you ask people in Marblehead what their values are, they’d say they love everyone, they like neighbors, they’re inclusive — whatever,” he says. “But then you get a vote like that.”

His sudden fame came at him faster than he could process. He sleeps with his phone in another room. Tuesday morning, he found a text from a friend’s wife with a screenshot of his question circulating online. He does not have Instagram on his phone; she had to forward the clip itself. Strangers wanted him on the radio.

“Any moment we spend bullshitting each other,” he says, “is just a sin.”

The interview is wrapping up. He stands and gathers his things.

An SUV slows along Atlantic Avenue. The driver’s window rolls down. A woman leans toward him.

“You’re our hero!”

Modica looks down.

Because you read stories that turn a 90-second Town Meeting clip into a fuller picture of the person, policy and stakes behind it, we keep showing up for the civic moments that travel far beyond the room. This feature took reporting time, local context and careful editing — and it stays free because neighbors make that possible. Join today so Marblehead can keep getting useful, independent coverage of housing, Town Meeting and the people caught in the middle. 🟦 Become a member here.