"Are we kind of being pricks?"

Marblehead’s housing fight reveals the problem with local democracy.

Screenshot from Marblehead resident David Modica’s testimony to the Town Meeting on May 4, 2026

Before David Modica confronted the Town Meeting of Marblehead, Massachusetts, with the question that would make him viral, he already knew the answer.

“Are we kind of being pricks?”

Marblehead is a small coastal Massachusetts town (pop. 20,576) with a median home value approaching $1 million. Almost 80% of residents 25 and over have a bachelor’s degree and more than 93% are white. Modica was questioning his exclusive town’s opposition to a state housing law. And yes, they are being pricks.

Five years ago, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker signed a bill that passed the House 143-4 and 40-0 in the Senate. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Communities Act requires cities and towns served by the state transportation system to do what experts formally call the bare minimum.

The law required that these communities provide just one district “of reasonable size” where multifamily housing could be built.

If a locality refused to comply, it would no longer be eligible for a variety of state funding sources. But for wealthy suburbs such as Marblehead, that’s not a very strong incentive.

While Modica’s charming irreverence went viral, my favorite part of his remarks was when he asked, “We’re trying to make sure we build no houses? People live in houses.”

Here he had struck on the core problem: The problem with more houses was the potential to bring more people to town..

Perhaps the cleanest articulation of this view came from resident Claudette Mason: “You keep mentioning minimal impact — no impact on our town,” Mason said to the Planning Board in 2024. “But we’re talking about another 3,000-plus people in town. Those streets are already parking lots, so there is an impact on our streets.”

There were also concerns that local schools were overtaxed as it was despite the fact that Marblehead Public Schools enrollment has fallen 24% over the past decade.

But Modica is skeptical that rational arguments will sway his fellow Marbleheaders. Instead, he’d like to use shame:

“We have a lot more Black Lives Matter signs than Black people,” he told me on the phone yesterday morning. “You saw the whole post-George Floyd thing, you can shame white people into a lot of stuff.”