MARSHFIELD — September 14, 2026 — The Marshfield Select Board voted 3-0 on Monday not to endorse a 32-home friendly 40B off Forge Lane, declining to sign the local initiative application the developer needed to reach the state and ending a plan the town’s own planning board had already rejected without a single vote in support. The board also directed staff to put its reasons in writing.
The Full Story
The application from 89 Forge Lane LLC would have put 32 single-family homes on about 11 acres of upland inside a 15-acre parcel, three and a half acres of it wetlands. Eight units would have been sold by lottery at roughly $350,000 and deed-restricted as affordable in perpetuity. The remaining 24 would have carried a flat price of $725,000, which the applicant’s attorney set at 80 percent of area value in a neighborhood where, he told the board, the average house now sells for more than $900,000.
That discount was the pitch. The price restriction on the 24 would have lapsed after five years, letting buyers sell at full value and pocket the difference, an arrangement the attorney described as a way to build middle-class equity. The company was leaving roughly $4 million on the table to do it, he said, and he was blunt about what a no vote meant: “You are the last stop. If you don’t approve this, then this project is dead.”
It was the first project filed under the local initiative policy this board adopted in February 2025, and the policy asks a friendly 40B to do more than a standard one. A board member went through the criteria: innovative site design, an affordable share above the mandatory 25 percent, density that does not maximize the site, and a location in harmony with the needs of the community. The design is ordinary for the market, he said, the affordable share sits at exactly 25 percent, and only the abutters can judge harmony. He called it a reasonable project in the wrong place.
Town Planner Karen Horne, who also serves as housing coordinator, gave the board the arithmetic behind the planning board’s unanimous opposition. State-defined starter homes are capped at 1,850 square feet, and the applicant’s own narrative invited buyers to finish attics and garages toward 3,000. A starting firefighter in Marshfield earns about $55,000. Median income for a family of four is $164,600, which supports a house of roughly $536,000, not $725,000. The site has a perched water table and a history of drainage and icing problems, and the plan leaves no buffer to the houses already on the street.
Vice Chair Eric Kelley objected on different ground: signing the application would have sent the project to the Zoning Board of Appeals, which issues the comprehensive permit, and he would not hand that decision to a board voters do not elect.
“They’re an unelected board. The buck stops with me, all right? So I could not cast a vote, and then I’ll cross my fingers that they do right, which we don’t know what that would be.”
Kelley also said he believes “this project is too massive for the area.”
