Forum Looks at Cluster Zoning
At a Grange-sponsored open forum on cluster zoning at the end of January 1978, a resident recommended the formation of a community group to carry out some of the recommendations of the Housing for the Elderly Committee.
Five years earlier the committee had issued to the town a comprehensive report that found Harvard had a “demonstrable need” for elderly housing. The report said that, in a survey directed at Harvard residents age 55 and older, residents said they wanted an alternative to single-family dwellings in town. The committee recommended the formation of a “limited dividend” corporation of interested residents to build such housing.
At the January forum panelists observed that, if cluster development had been started 10 years earlier, it might have had a “significant and beneficial impact” on the community, but that the amount of construction that had taken place during those years had reduced the number of possible sites for that type of housing.
One observer noted, “By now, some of the terms commonly used in discussions of future housing trends and development in Harvard have become catchwords, ringing hollower and hollower the more times they are used without being brought to life.”
Terms such as “cluster zoning,” “elderly housing,” and “low-income” housing, he said, had been bandied about repeatedly, without any being implemented.
Deer Protection Urged
In January 1978 Chapter 131, Section 82 of the Massachusetts General Laws went into effect, authorizing the state director of the division of fisheries and wildlife to issue an order “to restrain all dogs from running at large in any city or town where, in his opinion, such a restraining order is necessary to prevent dogs from chasing, hunting, molesting, attacking, or killing deer. Any such order shall be in effect 48 hours after publication in one or more newspapers circulated in such city or town. When, in his opinion, the director determines that such restraining order is no longer necessary, he shall, by like publication, rescind such order.”
Noting that, in Harvard “deer have been sighted during the past year by a few residents in various parts of town,” Dog Officer Holly Goodspeed urged the cooperation of dog owners.
“Let’s all work to preserve the wildlife we have in Harvard,” she said.
—Based on reports in the old Harvard Post
