The Davis Square Community

...THIS is the "explosive" piece?

Don't get me wrong, it's interesting, to the extent that local politics is always interesting for those who live in said city, but there's nothing here beyond the usual intra-city pissing matches you find in any sort of city politics, especially construction work.

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londo.livejournal.com

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achinhibitor.livejournal.com

It's a disease that is particularly intense in Massachusetts, since any building has to be specifically approved by the city and the city government has an intense interest in preventing high-volume, low cost housing being built. (Because it would reduce the tax-base-per-child-in-school.) In saner parts of the country, building is done in large subdivisions by ordinary businesses, because they don't have to do a lot of political fixing to get permission.

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A big part of the problem is simply the fact that there isn't a lot of buildable land around here, a lot of people bought it up decades ago, and the value of land around here keeps going up. Nowhere are market forces more intense than in real estate.

Also, how we house people in need is a miserably shitty nightmare of a system that needs both funding and more protections for tenants and landlords.

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achinhibitor.livejournal.com

Actually, there's a lot of buildable land -- Just drive around Waltham and Lexington and look at all the trees. And housing could be built far denser than it is in most places. But most towns have large lot-size restrictions (increasing the number of acres of expensive land per housing unit). Even for a prosperous city, Boston costs about twice as much as normal (though it is cheap relative to NYC, DC, and San Francisco). And detailed analyses show that the cost of a house is not in the land area it contains but the "right to build" that is incorporated in it -- the price of a building in an area doesn't rise quickly with the amount of land it covers, but does rise quickly with the number of housing units it is allowed to contain.

The deep problem is that schools are largely funded by towns, despite that people commute across many towns. So the tax burden of a cheap house is borne by the town that permits it to be built, but the benefits of a cheap house (the people who might live in it and the business that might employ them) are spread over much of the metro area. In a lot of metro areas, schools are funded at the county or state level, and those places have relaxed building permissions.

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Just for the record, it's true there's plenty of buildable land in MA. But Somerville? Not so much. :-)

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achinhibitor.livejournal.com

But Somerville? Not so much.

But how much of Somerville is over three stories tall? As someone said about downtown Chicago, it would probably be a lot quainter without all those 60-story apartment towers, but it would also be a lot more expensive to live in. Back when I lived in Cambridge, someone proposed building a mere 15-story apartment building in Central Square (which was a lot grottier then than it is now), and the outcry was horrendous.

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I hope the rest of the series is better than that. It seems a bunch of BANANA* arguments mixed with vague insinuations of impropriety.

* "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything" (as opposed to NIMBY which is just "Not In My Back Yard")

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miss-chance.livejournal.com

I'm not sure how you read BANANA arguments in there. The article is explicitly a discussion of the process of how bidding and zoning variances are being handled and not at all about whether any particular project should be built or not.

I was thrilled to see this article! For so many projects the process has been:

1. Developer proposes project

2. City approves it without the proper process, without looking into any of the legal misdeeds of the developer, without going through the proper legal steps, and without listening to resident input

3. Residents complain about the way the zoning process was handled improperly

4. Other people start shouting NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY

The fact that the process is rotten to the core with corruption gets lost every time into a discussion about whether the particular project should be built or not. The point here is not pro- this project or anti- that project, but that this is not transparent government and not the way things should be done, whether you want something built or you don't want it built.

It's excellent to see the core of the matter, the corrupt process brought to light. Please don't bury that in another NIMBY argument, because that's not what's at stake here.

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I would prefer if the focus was more explicitly/loudly "The ZBA is horrific", and perhaps a later article on "The parking department is pretty damned bad, too", but yeah, I think starting to talk about all of this is worthwhile.

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Arguing that you shouldn't develop a vacant lot *because* it's near a busy intersection is about as BANANA as you can get in my book.

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Develop? Sure. Overdevelop, making sure the intersection never flows cleanly again? Maybe not.

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Is Davis Square "overdeveloped"? Traffic certainly doesn't flow through cleanly, not by a long shot. At some point we need to decide if we want to be a city or we want to be a thoroughfare for cars going other places. I'd certainly prefer the former.

Traffic gets wicked backed-up there currently because of poor light sequencing. Some of that might be unavoidable, given the street pattern, but saying that because an intersection is badly designed, you shouldn't build densely around it make zero sense.

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ext-2016736.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)

There's also a T stop right around the corner. And people who are trying to make it easier to bike. But that's not cool either apparently.

If they want to write a better article, how about focusing on how stupid the zoning is anyway? Every single thing you could possibly want to do with your land/lot has to be approved by a variance, which requires running the gauntlet of NIMBY/BANANA folks. If the ZBA says no, they never have to hear about it again. If they say yes, the people who complain start complaining even more loudly that no one listened to them! That's why it's so hard to build and why the process gets corrupted so that only favored players can get things built. The zoning rules should be scrapped and redrafted from scratch.

Now Somerville is going to have a physically ugly environment of triple deckers forever (I know some folks say they like them, but I think objectively most folks would say they are ugly), because you can never tear them down, and you can REALLY never tear them down when they are all condos owned by 3 different people. Somerville should build UP, esp. in Davis/Porter and Sullivan areas. But it won't b/c of zoning. It will just continue with the status quo like Cambridge where all of the residents eventually get priced out. No one will be able to afford East Somerville in 20 years, let alone Davis.

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avjudge

OK, I'll bite - I like triple deckers, but even more, I like the three-story peak- or gambrel-roofed two- to three-family homes that are actually the dominant form around here. They make a much more human scale of environment. The sky is not blocked out, and we know or have some idea of the people who live in each unit on our part of the street - at the least, we can associate people with a doorway, which maps to an apartment. Most people have a front porch at street or 1st floor level and many actually sit out there in the summer, so we see each other. We don't have a tall building covering multiple lots with numerous anonymous interchangeable people disappearing indoors. A lot of people have a small garden by the street (as well as back yards), providing another chance to interact, plus adding actual character to the lots, not the anonymous uniformity of professional low-maintenance landscaping you see around an apartment building.

All this, and there are single-family homes mixed in for people like me who are at a stage in life and of an inclination to have undivided control.

Somerville's development pattern is why we chose to live here.

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Yeah, that's my biggest problem with the whole article: implying that a zoning variance is somehow a shady illegal thing, when in fact it's standard practice.

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Were we reading the same article? I read one saying that the way variances are handled - by ignoring the law - was shady, not that needing them at all is.

.. and everything I've ever read about the ZBA backs this up.

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twe.livejournal.com

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avjudge

Thank you, I had the exact same reaction to gruene's post!

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Exactly why I said what I said. You would get that impression from the article if you didn't know how zoning works. His frequent use of phrases like "clear zoning violation" or " in violation of a Somerville zoning ordinance" or "prohibited in the current zoning" gives the impression that laws were ignored, when they were not. It's true that zoning doesn't allow for the project without a variance. But it's not at all shady, much less illegal, to apply for a variance and be granted one. Rather, it's fairly typical, if not the norm, for most urban developments.

Edited Date: 2013-06-13 09:01 pm (UTC)

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I used to live near there, and the argument that the intersection "flows" cleanly now is... a questionable assertion.

Not that I think a hotel is a good idea either, but come on, have you driven through there? Cthulu eating cars couldn't make it less of a clusterfuck.

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clevernonsense.livejournal.com

I also lived near there (though my condo was closer to Oxford St) and while I certainly wouldn't call that intersection "clean" (it's quite messy) I also wouldn't say it is particularly hard to drive though, which I still do quite often. I think a hotel would work well there so long as it isn't some 8-story beast :)

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miss-chance.livejournal.com

Once again: If you re-read the article you will see that it was not arguing that the lot should not be developed. The article was questioning the process through which the specific proposal had been pushed through.

Edited Date: 2013-06-13 05:57 am (UTC)

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I realize that, but his argument is basically that no development of any size should happen there, despite the extreme proximity to the T and the com rail, because it would cause traffic.

We're not going to agree on this, apparently, but it's not because I didn't read the article.

In particular I'm referring to this:

A nearby homeowner, he believed that planners overlooked the havoc that such a large building could reap on the already gnarly intersection, and sued the city. Unmoved, Somerville used public funds to defend itself despite what appeared to be a clear zoning violation, only to be told by a commonwealth land court judge two years later that the hotel application be amended, and resubmitted on behalf of an existing business.

"Violation of zoning" is a rather trivial complaint in my view, giving that zoning is meant to be flexible. That's why the ZBA exists in the first place.

Edited Date: 2013-06-13 02:30 pm (UTC)

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clevernonsense.livejournal.com

Maybe. But is it actually any sort of crime to have the mayor or other parts of the city government push things through? Isn't that sort of the point of the mayor (to expedite certain tasks)? Favoritism/corruption are obviously issues to be concerned about, but the mayor deciding we need a hotel in lot XX, then pulling the right strings to make it happen seems to me exactly what I'd want my mayor to do. If I don't like the decision/strings involved, I'll support a different mayor.

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totient

I'm not sure what side Faraone would take on the controversy itself; his point here seems to be about no-bid contracts. He is pointing a finger at DCI and using Hayes Morrison's intransigence (all around, really) to ascribe generally ulterior motives to the city.

At this point I think there's a very real concern that the work DCI is producing for that million and a half dollars is not going to be good enough for MDOT, and Morrison who is used to getting BS through the works will push it anyway and fail, meaning we get nothing at all. This is something to be upset about regardless of what you think we should do with Beacon St.

Edited Date: 2013-06-12 08:12 pm (UTC)

From:

samcoren.livejournal.com

Thanks for this because you saved me some time writing something similar. Your concern about the MassDOT and continued rejection of designs is valid. The 25% design that was submitted in Jan which had a DOT hearing early Feb was rejected, and Dot asked the city to resubmit. The city then hosted a meeting in March after presenting a more or less the SAME design that was rejected. Last month the city was supposed to send in a new 25% design submission - I sent Hayes an email asking what was different in this May submission vs what was presented in March and she said that THERE WERE NO CHANGES. So why the heck is the city submitting DCI's rejected cycletrack design over again instead of fleshing out an alternative that meets MassDOT's standards so we can get the project approved for funding? By the way DCI is still getting paid a pretty penny for all this work on rejected designs whether this project gets funded by the state and Feds or not. And as this article has pointed out, when DCI gets paid, so does the mayor's campaign fund.

I'll gladly post the email chain with Hayes once I get back in the states to verify the above. I'm supposed to be taking one of those "vacations" right now.

I'm interested in seeing how the next installment shapes up. I'll admit that it was a relatively dry read, but it seems like the writers were doing their best to present a lot of primary sources within a word count limit so readers can draw their own conclusions. A lot of this is sort of like the whole citizens united issue happening in your own backyard: money in politics preventing any possibility of a valid public process.

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