Nataliia Novoseltseva
Bard College
Faculty Advisor: Prof. Daniel Hidalgo
Department: Political Science
Biography
Nataliia Novoseltseva is a senior at Bard College, majoring in Sociology and Economics
with a minor in Data Analytics. Nataliia has long been drawn to questions of trust, authority,
and control: why people comply, and who bears the cost of broken trust. This shaped her focus
on social control and inequality, studied through quantitative methodology. This summer,
Nataliia worked as a Research Assistant with Dr. Daniel Hidalgo on a project examining
paper compliance in housing policy, specifically, land-zoning practices for multifamily
housing development in Massachusetts, by modeling parcel-level financial feasibility to assess
development outcomes. After graduation, Nataliia plans to pursue a PhD in Sociology. There,
she hopes to enrich theoretical understanding of how institutions of control shape inequality
in everyday life and produce research that speaks to policy on housing, labor, and criminal
justice. Outside of research, she enjoys hiking, going to the gym, and pottery.
What Paper Compliance Looks Like: Evidence from MBTA Communities Zoning
Nataliia Novoseltseva1 and F. Daniel Hidalgo2
1Department of Social Sciences, Bard College
2Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In 2021, Massachusetts ordered 177 municipalities to zone for more housing near transit.
Nearly all of them complied, but adoption alone does not guarantee construction. The state’s
MBTA Communities Act sets municipality-specific housing capacity targets but leaves local
officials discretion over which parcels to include in new zoning districts. This discretion
creates room for “paper compliance”: zoning that satisfies the state’s numeric housing targets
while steering development toward sites unlikely to ever be built on. Existing compliance
checks can confirm whether a town meets its target, but cannot tell whether that target was met
in good faith or through strategic parcel selection: a gap in current housing policy research.
This project builds an empirical method for detecting paper compliance. Based on a review
of planning board minutes across several municipalities, we identified site-level conditions
associated with paper compliance and the main strategies municipalities use to satisfy the
law without enabling development. These indicators will inform a parcel-level feasibility
model estimating realistic development potential. These findings will provide a framework
for evaluating whether zoning reform produces genuine housing, with direct relevance for
researchers and policymakers overseeing state housing mandates.
