By: David A. Smith
As long as the world keeps making more people, the world needs more houses, and for there to be more houses, they must be developed, permitted, and physically located somewhere, and it was a principal topic of November’s short list of long posts (three, six, and six parts), starting with new Boston mayor Marty Walsh’s commendable common sense in suggesting common cause with Boston’s principal economic engine, the educational industry, and where to put its matriculating widgets, in Adding new dormers: Part 1, Where would you like me to put them?, Part 2, Armed with housing lists, and Part 3, A list of suitable locations:
With a quarter of a million students living in the immediate metropolitan area, more than half of them in universities domiciled in the city, Boston has as good a claim as any to be the world’s university capital, counting 60 institutions of higher learning, eight of them (BU, Harvard, Northeastern, BC, UMass Boston, Suffolk, Tufts, and MIT) with enrollments of 10,000 or more, and five of those with their campuses wholly in the city proper.
And that’s just some of them
[In the map above, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline are independent cities, but everything else is a neighborhood of Boston: that is Allston/ Brighton, Fenway, Back Bay, Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, South End, Dorchester, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain – Ed.]
As there aren’t enough dormitory beds for all the students, they spill into neighboring areas, particularly the Fenway, Jamaica Plain, and especially Allston/ Brighton, which has turned into largely absentee-landlord off-campus housing zones. Among other things, this puts tremendous upward pressure on rents, which makes student dormitories – or the shortage of them – an issue of city housing policy. [Snip]
Boston’s economy depends on the area’s universities, which among them have 250,000 students and out of which have spun aerospace, software, and genetic engineering inventions, innovations, and job a-plenty – and that the universities want to grow. So it makes sense for Boston, for the city to forge a pragmatic working relationship of the kind that served Yale and New Haven so well, and although the former mayor never thought so, the new mayor is making it a priority:
Another reason more campus leaders seem to be on board with the city’s plan: a new mayoral administration.
New mayor Walsh (BC graduate) being inaugurated at Boston College, January 6, 2014
University expansion requires only that it align four things:
1. Applicants. Nearly all of Boston’s universities have more applicants than they can accept – a great position to be in, and one that not all American universities enjoy.
2. Faculty. There are (for better or worse) plenty of them.
More who want to teach than adjunct places available
3. Classrooms.
4. Housing. And here we are: back to the problem of on-campus or off-campus.
If you want lots of students on-campus, build up
The plan, part of the mayor’s new housing initiative, would encourage colleges to work with private developers to build the new facilities.
By implication, the new student housing will be built off-campus:
Devin Quirk, director of operations at Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development [Which handles affordable housing, and has taken over BRA linkage disbursements after Mayor Walsh stripped the BRA of that authority – Ed.] , said the city would facilitate partnerships between colleges and private developers to build new dorms, with one or more colleges agreeing to lease all or portions of the buildings.
That’s the student-housing model of the proposed off-campus student housing in Flagstaff, Arizona that I profiled six months ago, which faced so much opposition that its development has been tabled.
City officials said they plan to work with neighborhood residents to establish, by 2015, a list of suitable locations and other criteria for new student housing.
And that, boys and girls, will be where the mayor’s real political capital will be required – when the desire for improved student housing clashes with the NIMBYs.
I’ll be against development … once I get my dorm room
Naturally, university expansion, job growth, and pressure for more housing isn’t limited simply to the capital city; across the river, in Boston’s left bank (in more ways than one), some of my fellow Cantabrigians have demonstrated that NIMBYism makes strange political bedfellows, as I profiled cynically in Whose woods these are? I think I know: Part 1, His house is in the village, though,
With the demise of as-of-right zoning, I’ve likewise discovered that people who would otherwise never associate with one another can band together to oppose affordable housing (collectively, I call them the antagonists). Even more cleverly, the various tribes of antagonists learn how to take turns being the antagonists, and will foreground whichever among them can gain the most sympathetic audience.
I like the arguments you’re making
In Milton we saw exhaustively (Milton’s Paradise Lost? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8) how the town burghers were able always to find ‘just one more hurdle’ on Tantalus’s obstacle course for any developer to surmount.
This time, we’ll painstakingly examine a microcosmic case study of people whom George Orwell would call ‘objectively anti-poor,’ and their endless part-time campaign to prevent people from moving into another Boston inner suburb, Belmont:
Belmont is a town [Of 25,000 – Ed.] where a meager 3% percent of the housing stock is classified as affordable.
Arlington has 19,900 homes, 5.6% of which are affordable under Chapter 40B. Cambridge has 46,700, of which 15.2% are Chapter 40B-affordable. Belmont, leafy Belmont, has 10,100 homes, only 3.8% of them affordable, and it echoes the duality that we saw in Milton: a streetcar suburb glued together with a mansion-filled exurban enclave:
Belmont remains a primarily residential suburb with little growth since the 1950s. It is best known for the mansion-filled Belmont Hill neighborhood, although most residents live in more densely settled, low-lying areas around the Hill.
I then demonstrated further that whereas isn’t opposed to property development in the abstract, just every single tangible development anyone proposed, Belmont is ready to see this property move forward, only to be stymied by its ‘allies’ across the border in Cambridge, in Part 2, He will not see me stopping here:
Belmont’s zoning board permitted the project because Chapter 40B allows for zoning leeway in towns where less than 10% of the housing stock is affordable.
This location was and is ideal – close to jobs, close to transportation, close to Cambridge.
Philadelphia-based O’Neill Properties introduced its $70 million plan in 2005, finding fierce but so far futile opposition from environmentalists and lovers of the densely wooded forest and its wildlife.
Fiercely opposed
Their opposition hasn’t been futile: It has slowed the development, shrunken the development, and cost the Town of Belmont and the developer nearly ten years – so sixty families that would otherwise be living affordably in Belmont are living somewhere else.
Despite a series of court decisions that could not be less ambiguous or emphatic, those opposed have been endlessly inventive in raising new objections, repackaging old ones, or changing the basis or venue of their objections, as documented in Part 3, Between the woods and frozen lake, Part 4, To ask if there is some mistake, Part 5, But I have promises to keep, and Part 6, And miles to go before I sleep:
“The fact of the matter is there is nothing left to be appealed here. The project is lawfully permitted and should be allowed to proceed,” [developer attorney Julie] Barry said in court.
Some people – say, a state legislator – realize that eventually protest becomes not civil disobedience but law-breaking:
“Even the staunchest defenders of the forest admit we are in a very difficult position” in terms of blocking development, [Cambridge environmental attorney Mike] Connolly said, citing two attempts at preservation funding by state Sen. Will Brownsberger that were blocked by Gov. Deval Patrick and constraints faced by Belmont in stopping a project bringing the town even the minimum amount of affordable housing.
And, governor, I’d like to spend thirteen million of the state’s dollars to thwart affordable housing in my district
The sad thing is that when opponents of development grab a sound bite concept (Save the trees!) they make it all too easy for a busy elected official to become a low-income dupe:
Though Senator Brownsberger presents himself as a thoughtful progressive, it seems extremely odd (aside from spending the state’s money on what is purely a local issue) to placate the locals by opposing something that the Town of Belmont so plainly needs.
The Democrat from Belmont said he opposes developing the land, and would like to have the silver maple forest become part of the Alewife Reservation.
If so, then the senator is objectively anti-affordable housing, and should explain to his constituents either why he believes Belmont should remain so exclusionary, or alternatively how he proposes to have Belmont develop affordable housing.
Antagonists also adopted the tactic that when losing the argument, introduce a fallacious and irrelevant claim as if it were a devastating indictment:
I’m just devastated over it
“Prudential Financial and their partners are the only ones who stand to gain from this project,” [development antagonist Rozann] Kraus said –
That statement is a total howler, wrong in every respect. Start with the simplistic: Prudential is a lender, not an investor, so it its renting its money and wiill have no share in the profits.
– “while the town and city residents and wildlife will lose a vital floodplain habitat and the protection for current and future generations.”
The 60 families who will move in to the affordable apartments will clearly gain, and I submit the 238 more families who will buy the condos will also gain because they’ll be able to move into a desirable town with minimal affordable housing (and, as far as I can tell, not a single affordable property in town).
Finally, there’s Rozann Kraus (self-taught Masters of BS, Arts, Homo Sapien Antics and Commitment), who decided to start a hunger strike:
After seven hours of hunger-striking, Ms. Kraus tweeted: “Getting really hungry; this will pass. I will not eat until the SMF carnage is stopped. Are you listening, Deval?”
Eleven days later, a day after the Cambridge hearing [With nothing about the forest on the agenda – Ed.] she referenced, Ms. Kraus tweeted:
Perhaps the anti-development fight is not over for Ms. Kraus, and those who like her are objectively anti-affordable housing, but for the Acorn Park development, I think it is.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]