To really get the most out of this one, I highly recommend you watch the video above. You’ve got to see David’s delivery to really appreciate the viral moment.
David Modica is a man from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who went viral a few weeks ago for speaking to his town’s planning committee. He described, with hilarious surgical precision and in a very Massachusetts style, what paperwork compliance looks like. Or rather, what appears to be a scam.
Here is the background: In 2021, Massachusetts passed the MBTA Communities Act (also called 3A). The law mandates that 177 towns—including Marblehead—rezone at least one area for multifamily housing (three or more units) by right, or face millions in lost state grants and potential lawsuits.
It’s a mandate approach. The state said: You will allow density, or we will take money and sue you.
Marblehead tried the honest path first. In 2023 and 2024, town planners proposed rezoning actual neighborhoods, but voters rejected the plans. They didn’t want apartments near their homes. They didn’t want their neighbors to have the power to build more.
So the planning board got creative.
Instead, Marblehead rezoned 32 acres of a private golf course—Tedesco Country Club—plus a small patch of Broughton Road. Technically compliant. Practically useless. The golf course owners aren’t building apartments, and the rest already have townhouses. So housing supply will not budge. The state law is satisfied, but the housing scarcity problem remains.
David saw it immediately. You can’t build houses on a golf course. There were already townhouses on Broughton Road—this designation changed nothing. So what was the vote actually for?
He said it. “We’re trying to make sure we build no houses.”
“Are we trying to do nothing? Because it seems like we’re doing nothing.”
Why Mandates Fail (And Why Locals Get Away With It)
Town officials (a planning board) respond to the people who show up to meetings—property owners, current residents, people with skin in the game. They don’t respond to renters who don’t live there yet. They don’t respond to future residents. These people have no vote. They fund no campaigns.
The core problem is best understood through public choice economics. Politicians, like everyone, respond to incentives. In many towns, there is a tremendous disincentive to restore property rights because they perceive that not doing so maximizes their reelection odds by catering to current constituents.
When a state mandate says “rezone or lose money,” towns will rezone. But they’ll rezone in a way that satisfies the letter of the law while gutting its purpose. A golf course rezoning is compliant. It’s also useless for the spirit of the law.
The mandate approach assumes towns will act wisely under pressure. They won’t. They’ll act narrowly—doing the minimum required to avoid punishment while preserving what matters to the political process, not necessarily what would be best for the individuals who live in their town.
The Empowerment Approach
Contrast the mandate approach with solving the problem through empowerment through property rights. Empowerment reallocates power from the locality back to the individual property owner. It says: you can build on your land without asking permission from the planning committee.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. Eliminate the variance process, scrap minimum lot sizes and parking mandates, allow ADUs, and let any owner build 3+ units by right if it meets basic fire and infrastructure codes.
This flips the incentive structure. When an owner can build without a vote—when the permission system gets out of the way—housing gets built regardless of whether the town council likes it. Empowerment works better because builders and property owners respond to incentives as well. When the permission system is the bottleneck—when you need a vote, a variance, a conditional use permit, public hearings, legal fees—builders don’t build. When they can build by right, they do.
Massachusetts 3A tried to thread this needle. It’s a mandate that, in theory, results in more housing but fails to empower in reality. So it fails to resolve the core barrier: the political question of who is empowered to do what.
Following His lead
David’s sardonic and Socratic delivery was hilarious, but he wasn’t joking—and Marblehead isn’t alone.
This same quiet sleight-of-hand is playing out in dozens of other towns right now. Rezoned industrial parks no one will touch. Empty lots behind shopping centers. Remote parcels that will never see a shovel. The law gets checked off, the grants stay safe, and nobody outside the planning-board meeting ever hears about it.
We only spotted this one because a single resident stood up and said the quiet part out loud on camera.
So here’s the ask: if your town just pulled a similar move—rezoned a golf course, a gravel pit, or some other nowhere-land to “comply”—tell us. Drop the details in the comments, shoot us a message, or send a screenshot of the town meeting vote. The more of these we surface, the harder it gets for any of them to pretend it’s working.
Because the American Dream isn’t dead, it’s blocked. We will unblock it when we empower the everyday land owner to solve the problems his community faces. That starts with exposing the government. Help us out.
