The Boston Planning Department (BPD) presented what will likely be its last draft of a contentious Downtown zoning amendment at a public meeting last week, to wildly mixed reviews.

The amendment project, called PLAN Downtown, has been in the works for six years. And community leaders are not happy with this final draft.

“At this time, I have received nearly 200 letters in opposition from constituents,” said City Councilor Ed Flynn, who represents the Downtown, in the meeting. “I continue to believe that residents of a neighborhood must be heard during the community engagement process. They haven’t been heard. Listen to my constituents.”

Under the latest draft, which the BPD has dubbed its final one, Downtown is divided into two districts. In the historic “Ladder Blocks” to the west of Washington Street, adjacent to the city’s central parks, buildings can have a maximum height of 155 feet, or less if city or state shadow laws require it.

East of Washington Street, towards the Financial District, building height complies with whatever the smallest number is between state shadow regulations, parks shadow regulations, and the critical airspace limit of 800 feet. That means that, as buildings get farther away from the parks, they can increase in height in progressive stages, up to 700 feet.

The plan also calls for Planned Development Areas (PDAs) in the Ladder Blocks, which would allow developers to build virtually unrestricted, so long as their area includes a historic landmark, they commit to investing in.

Those who spoke out in opposition at the meeting repeatedly voiced the same points of concern. One big contention was with the city’s stated goal of fixing the housing crisis by allowing towers Downtown, through an inclusionary zoning law that requires marketrate housing developments to support the creation of income-restricted housing, ranging from 15 percent to 17 percent of units,” according to the city website.

“The zoning makes room for new development to meet the urgency of our housing crisis,” senior planner Andrew Nahmias said in a presentation at the meeting. “Residential projects are required to be affordable under the city’s inclusionary zoning regulations. This would really enable affordable housing at a scale not feasible in other parts of the city.”

But, as multiple residents pointed out, no part of the city’s inclusionary zoning laws require affordable housing to be built on site.

“It’s a false narrative that if we tear down these buildings and build towers, we will create affordable housing,” said Kimberly Trask, a Downtown resident. “That is not going to happen. It’s the opposite. We will get more luxury housing. There is no requirement that any affordable housing be on site, and it’s not affordable to build it that way, so we won’t have any. That’s what happened with the existing towers as well.”

Opponents of the plan also repeatedly emphasized that they are not against development or growth, and that the Financial District is the best place to house that growth, but that the PDAs were their cause for concern. Tony Ursillo, a member of the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association, pointed out that Mayor Michelle Wu had vehemently opposed PDAs in her time as a city councilor.

The other main problem is that the BPD has apparently done no planning. The department had released no shadow or traffic studies showing how the zoning might impact the neighborhood when built out.

“There’s no 3D modeling of the maximum build-out that would be allowed,” said Judith McDonough, a member of Revolutionary Spaces, a nonprofit that stewards historic landmarks in the neighborhood. “The [Planning Department] model room is not a dinosaur. All previous rezoning proposals. Park Plaza, the Combat Zone, the Midtown Cultural District effectively showed to the public the various outcomes of the given different heights and massing.”

Despite these objections, the meeting struck quite a different tone than its predecessor in January, when the BPD unveiled its previous draft and over 230 people joined a public meeting to dissent. At this meeting, however, a number of people voiced support for the plan as a “compromise,” and suggested that those who opposed it were “afraid of change.”

A number of those in favor represented construction unions in the city, such as the Congress of Union Carpenters. Many others in support said they did not live Downtown.