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Boston's housing stock is old (surprised?)
By JohnAKeith on Fri, 06/29/2012 - 1:15pm
Why does it cost so much to live in Boston? Why is housing so expensive?
Simple question, and there's a simple answer: supply and demand. Too many people want to live in too few homes.
Solving the problem is where things get tricky. Do you increase supply? Do you decrease demand?
High housing prices obviously limit demand, but no one would thing that's a good idea - you keep making people not want to live here and eventually they won't live here.
Increasing supply is trickier because, as we all know, much of downtown Boston is off-limits to any sort of residential development, due to its historic nature (and, something called NIMBYism).
The US Census Bureau collects data that shows just how bad things are.
Boston's housing stock is old. Like, older than just about any other major US city.
This handy little chart compares Boston to San Francisco, New York, and several other major US cities (these are city statistics, not "metropolitan areas"). It shows that in Boston, 57% of its housing stock (condos, single-family homes, apartments) was built before 1939. Other cities are different: half of San Francisco's housing stock was built prior to 1939, but look at Las Vegas and Miami; not surprisingly, little of their residential housing is old.
What's striking is that, since 1939, every other major US city similar to Boston has had periods of growth during different decades. New housing in Boston has dropped, percentage-wise, in just about every decade. (I don't know if the data includes "public" housing, FYI.)
Obviously, uncontrolled growth has its own set of problems - according to the data, Miami and Las Vegaas continued to increase their housing stock during the recession at rates higher than other US cities; it's not a coincidence that they're now facing a glut of housing, which is stretching out our bad economy.
Separately, the BizJournals website did its own tally, by county, and found that Suffolk County has had very little growth. Suffolk County is Boston, Revere, Winthrop and Chelsea. Boston's housing stock makes up about 90% of the total.
Suffolk County came in 17th out of 3,143 counties when it came to percentage of housing built prior to 1939 1960 and 3,003th out of 3,143 counties when it came to percentage of housing built since 1990. That's the highest 0.5% for the first, and lowest 4.5% for the second.
What do you think? Is this data useful when analyzing our city's housing problem?
What's your solution? Housing subsidies? Better public transportation to expand the options people have over where to live? More housing in downtown Boston to take some of the pressure off everywhere else?
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Comments
Very interesting. The
Very interesting. The problem with new apartment developments in Boston is that they are all luxury and overpriced. I understand the developer needs to do this in order to have enough money to build, but its damn near impossible to afford those places unless you are in the 1%. Why would I pay over $2k for an apartment when I could buy a place for the same payment?
Chicago is an interesting example. There was a boom of building in the Loop and those apartments were hard to fill. So, now the prices are much more reasonable. I say loosen the hold of the BRA and let people build. Eventually the developers will get desperate and will lower prices.
But Why?
We aren't building any where near the rate of demand. If I'm a developer, I want to build what's going to make me the most money. If lots of high end stuff is getting built, I'll move to middle to low end stuff to avoid competition. But if nothing's getting built, I'm more than happy to pick off the high end first.
So we can complain all we want that the only things getting built are luxury condos, but the real problem is that the only thing getting built is a small fraction of the number of units we really need.
where are the teardowns
If Boston was in such demand you would be seeing lots more teardowns. The price for these three deckers is inflated because it's rental housing for students and post-students and other people who don't care or can't pay enough to affect what their house looks like.
Really if housing was this simple you would see the small cities like Chelsea, Lynn and Revere done over. In spite of valiant efforts by a few these places still basically look like dumps, run along outdated lines of ethnic politics and patronage.
Costs
One reason the building is luxury is the City forces the builders to include low income housing. To recoup the full cost of the development, which includes a protracted permitting process, the development has to be luxury.
Plus, the city and area needs more housing, period. Even what is being built is upscale, the increase in supply in that market lowers the pressure on the rest of the market. There isn't an unlimited number of people looking for upmarket housing. Building it does draw some people into the market, but most are just leaving slightly less nice places that they "overpaid" for. If enough of it is built, you will see less "regentrification" and all housing stock will become to some degree cheaper.
Something tells me,
while that's a nice story people probably use, the 1-2 low rent / low mortgage units out of 50 don't hurt the bottom line enough to force everything else to luxury.
The problem is simple; only a few well connected developers are in this city and strong, irrational backlash to change of any kind.
Southie is actually one area that's booming right now because there just isn't the push back of other areas..... yet. Pretty soon it'll also turn into a fight of new vs slightly new worried about their views, or traffic, or noise, ect et al.
The BRA requires affordable
The BRA requires affordable housing NOT low income housing to preserve the middle class in the city. If you look at the BRA site the income guidelines are between 47,000 and 82,000 for a household of one.
The city has a program to preserve housing prices and neighborhoods by offering pre-qualified homebuyers access to foreclosed single-family, two-family, or three-family units in specific neighborhoods of Boston - before the property is listed on the market - through a housing lottery.
Developers seek the greatest return - anywhere
Big developers are not constrained to build in Boston. They invest their money in any city or state that makes them the most money. That seems not to be the Boston area. Little local developers who lack resources to build elsewhere will still choose areas, and make smaller housing increases. The most money is in mid-high end condos. Developers get their investment and profit back in a few years instead of a few decades with rental apartments.
Boston's old housing stock is a blessing in some ways. Today, people have so much more stuff than 50 or 100 years ago. Nationally, housing space per person is about double what it was 75 years ago. Its just to hold all the stuff we buy. Space taken up by cars is small in comparison to all the extra furniture, clothes, electronics, luxury bathrooms and granite kitchen counter tops. Old housing hasn't bloated like new. With height limits, it can't. Allow 160 foot high condo buildings in Central square, and the result is more 1,500-2,500 units like in the Kennedy Biscuit Lofts, only stacked.
40B housing is only attractive to developers because a few "affordable" units allows them to strong arm communities into allowing their cheap, ugly, profit maximized, complexes. Seldom do the glossy brochures and artists renderings in proposals ever resemble the final product!
Start by
allowing buildings in Southie to exceed 3-4 stories. Its obvious theres a huge demand to live in Southie (look at rental rates right now). Yet its impossible to development to expand as it should when you hinder it with things like height limits
That's fine
but make the rents or costs of these units just as high to keep the frat boys out. Southie needs residents who care about the neighborhood, not animal house residents.You want to live in something over 3 stories? Move to the Seaport or Fort Point Channel section of Southie. What, you can't afford it?
Don't realy need it.
although I think it should be 5 stories, the real problem is the lot and a lot of southie's claim to cars] that people just don't want to give up.
This really isn't a problem
This really isn't a problem at all. The issue is that the total supply is too low, so building even luxury housing helps alleviate the problem of chronic under supply, even if it isn't you who's moving into the new development.
Your point about Chicago is a good one. If we allowed 50 story apartment towers to pop up all over the place, that would certainly do something for the supply/demand ratio. Instead, all we get is stories from NIMBYs about the horror of "shadows" and "traffic."
Kind of misleading numbers
Downtown may not have a lot of new residential development (aside from 45 Province) and yet there are now several thousand people living downtown - thanks to the continuation of Boston's centuries-old knack for recycling old buildings (in this case, creative redevelopment of vacant office space). Maybe in a city with exorbitant land prices, that's part of the answer - creative zoning that allows for such reuse, rather than trying to create vast new tracts of housing or towers atop a creaking infrastructure (taken the Dead Line recently?) that can barely get out of its own way.
Not old enough!
In 30 odd (!) years I've lived in 6 different buildings in Boston. Only two of them were built after 1900.
you can't increase supply
What's needed is densification and infilling--for those acres and acres of three-deckers to get replaced with highrises a la NYC. Densification would not only increase the supply for a youthful population that's increasingly focused on an urban lifestyle. It would also increase ROI on new rapid-transit infrastructure, which in turn would make car-free living more feasible.
But that's not gonna happen in anyone's lifetime. There is an endless army of people who are willing to spend every moment of their lives that they can possibly spare sitting in church basements drinking bad coffee in order to ensure that no new housing gets built anywhere, ever. They'll greenwash it in environmentally correct lingo but what it's really about is maximizing the value of their own real estate holdings by imposing artificial restrictions on supply. Some people might refer to this as "kicking away the ladder", or, less politely, "I got mine and the heck with you, Jack."
The majority of NY's residents
Do not live in high-rises. I wouldn't rule out their construction, but they aren't necessary. The kind of density you want would benefit more from consistency than height. Remember, the greatest housing unit density in Boston is found in the low-rise North End. If you avoid having your residential land chopped up by parking lots, highways, median strips and useless tiny bits of greenspace, then you can have lots of housing and still plenty left over for REAL parks for people to actually use and enjoy. Instead of little clusters of bushes that people drive by and throw their cigarette butts in, which is what most suburban-style greenspace ends up being.
I think the explanation its simpler than that.
All of this figures in, but I think that the biggest factor is also the simplest one.
This is a desirable place to live (and far more so than many of the other cities listed) and it has a relatively robust and high-value economy which leads to higher prices for everything. The cost of living here is relatively high, but then again, so is the pay (although I do not believe that the pay to COL ratio here is quite as high as NYC, so we loose out a little on that score - but that's probably at least partly because people there demand higher premiums to put up with more crap (e.g., far worse traffic and a city income tax)).
The best way
Invent a time machine, go back in time and build more housing in the city. After killing Hitler.
The second best thing after that is to allow the conversion of existing buildings into new uses.
Just because a building is old doesn't mean it's bad. Actually, one of the nice features of Boston is that so much was built before the era of urban renewal, and has survived. Old buildings can be renovated. Although sometimes this can be just as expensive as rebuilding, if you're not careful.
There are currently many places in Boston where there is opportunity for infill construction, especially now that we are mindful of that value. It doesn't even require high-rise construction, which can be extra expensive per unit, and even counterproductive if NIMBYs force the developer to abide by excessive setbacks. There is still some anti-density prejudice in some parts, but hopefully that will be fading further as time goes on. Zoning restrictions simply need to be eased up to allow more housing unit growth.
Smart Growth isn't
You can thank "Smart Growth", limited building height zoning, 1970 highway building freeze, 1935 era roads, rent control, and car hate policies. Many problems were worsened in the 1960s with Chapter 40B and rent control. Keeping roads at 1935 sizes forces people to live closer to work, increasing demand for even old, bad housing rather than drive to and from housing in cheaper, lower density areas (suburbs).
Unfortunately high density demand from "smart growth" led to much conversion of commercial property to more profitable residential; property and too expensive for business - they went to I-95 and I-495 areas where public transit hub and spoke don't work.
Housing and transportation are closely linked. Sparse areas with less demand and more supply of housing require more/longer travel, almost certainly by car. Higher gas prices and traffic congestion make distant areas less attractive. Hell, congestion is so bad in Cambridge that even driving across it kill productivity and quality of life. Making transportation time/cost, housing cost, and commercial rents high all hurt the local economy, jobs, and attracting skilled workers. They often go to Research Triangle, North Carolina, Texas, or Florida.
So, what will motivate builders? Relaxed zoning, road expansion, lower construction costs, faster and less litigious project process. Surplus new housing stock will force old stock to compete with improvements or lower prices. Lower prices on dumpy old places most benefits low income people who can then afford to live closer to work. Current property owners vote against zoning liberalization because more supply reduces their property values.
Do even know what "Smart Growth" is?
Probably not.
Your solution of wider roads and more cars will produce LESS housing and HIGHER prices. Your cluelessness about this is probably ideologically-driven, since we've had plenty of examples of what happens when you built automobile-addicted neighborhoods in the last 50 years.
Wider roads means LESS land for housing. Wider roads means more cars. More cars means more parking spaces needed. More parking spaces means LESS land for housing. Less land for housing means higher prices!
Yes, we need less restrictive zoning, and the removal of most height limits. But that also means removing the regulations which subsidize automobiles. Having the government subsidizing car ownership and usage will only lead to further sprawl and higher home prices in the city itself. As has been amply demonstrated by history.
Actually he is offering a
Actually he is offering a solution. The problem is that his solution means instead of increasing supply, he is lowering demand. The problem with that is it makes suburbia and a autocentric world where the only way to live is by car far from the city center. A great irony of the idea. The problem is too many people wants to live in the city. So the solution is make the roads wider so everyone have to settle for making an occasional drive to the city.
Smart Growth like Traffic Calming
Smart Growth is like Traffic Calming and Road Enhancement - the results are the opposite of the name. Constricted roads are not an enhancement, and traffic calming produces no tranquility.
I'd invite you to construct some housing by bicycle where workers and materials come and PARK. Squatter tent camps aka Occupy X, Y, Z don't count as real housing. Much of the world makes great use of motorcycles and motorbikes that we discourage with excessive cost penalties. There are actually choices in between bicycles and SUVs for non-binary thinkers. Motorcyclists do a far better job at staying off sidewalks and crosswalks, stopping at lights, signs, and crosswalks, not "salmoning", and not hitting or killing pedestrians than bicycle riders. Motorcycles allow longer distances and are compact on roads and parking.
Cars and trucks make communities grow and prosper. If I-495 had been a bike path instead of a road, there still wouldn't be any development of housing and jobs out there, just farms. Cars and trucks were the modern, more flexible growth engine replacing rail.
As for roads and cars making housing more expensive, you are wrong. Places with lots of road and parking capacity have lower land costs per acre, not higher. People seek more land for bigger houses and yards, not fitting more cars in their driveways.
Where has reducing the supply of roadway and parking ever reduced housing cost? The only way that is possible is if substantial public land used for parking or road is converted to housing, and that doesn't happen. Turning it into park or sidewalk doesn't add housing. Road or park, its still public land. Make a road into a park or "sustainable" space with tax dollars, the place becomes more attractive and housing costs go up, while poor people again get priced out.
"Smart Growth" only increases housing costs and developer profits. Smart only for them.
First, why did you brought up
First, why did you brought up Occupy? They may lean towards being bike friendly, but it has no bearing to what is being talked about here. It seems you are assuming anyone disagreeing with is ideological thinking towards bikes. Else there no reason to bring them up to counter the disagreement against you.
Your motorcycles point is absurd. Yes, there should be more motorcycles (or the scooters I guess, but motorcycles are cooler and can be done quieter) but it can't take the full place of cars. Mainly because this is Boston and not Miami or Taiwan or Vietnam or anywhere that wouldn't have to deal with snow. The regular hostility is keeping it more down, but even without that, it can't be that much higher.
Your cars and trucks point of allowing I-495 communities to exist as communities rather than farms is true. But the points of this discussion is people want want to live in Boston not Billerica. No one is advocating 495 to be a bike path. Your solution is to build more roads which will allows us to live farther out, but again, that defeat the purpose to those who want to live in the city. The topic is how to put more grow in Boston, you are talking about how to put more growth outside. Trying to add more roads inside Boston can bring more growth outside, but the aim is to live inside and have growth inside.
Your point about that the biggest cause for taking more land per person is for yards and not for driveways is true. But again you miss the point of Matthew's criticism. He is talking about land in the city. Not land in the suburbs. His criticism that if you encourage more roads that will encourage more car usage who would live in the suburbs but make their life in the city, they will have to park their cars somewhere. For the infrastructure to park all the cars from the suburbs into the city, that will cause incredible strain as you know, there's isn't that much land in the city in the first place. That is the thrust of the criticism. Not supply of roadway in the suburbs, but in the city.
But again, all your argument is moot because the aim is the desire to live in the city. Your solution is to call for everyone to live in the suburbs and entail drive to the city. That defeat the idea of living in the city. As well to forcing more roads and parking infrastructure in the city which entail the remain land to have higher cost per acre in the city.
Edit: Short version: You misunderstand completely. The talk is about how to let more people in the city, not outside. Your solution is about outside the city and applying it to the inside doesn't work and I don't think you were trying to argue that anyways.
Roads allow city living with suburb working
Occupy people created urban housing by bike - tents, the only kind possible via bicycle. Motorcycles are not kept down by hostility, but by having nearly the same cost of a car without protection, comfort, or space. Registration, insurance, and excise taxes bicycles don't have.
Restored or added travel lanes in urban streets allow people who like to live in the city expanded employment opportunities outside the city, or even other parts of the city. You assume its just people living in the burbs driving in to work. With residential use being more profitable than commercial, most jobs are outside the city, so that's where city dwellers often need to go. Transportation options allow people to live, work, and play where they want.
Kids are a big reason to head for burbs. They have lots of stuff. Toys, bikes, skates, hockey, soccer etc gear, swing sets, play dates... With a house and yard, all the care stuff is then needed... Living packed in with housemates no longer works and people want more space, thus fewer housing units fit in the same area. Without kids to consume all time and money, people need the richness of urban living.
This is completely irrelevant
We're talking about city people living and working in cities. Not about living or working in the suburbs. Parking is antithetical to cities, it destroys them from the inside, by wasting so much space that it tears them apart. We don't want to New Haven-ize Boston.
And the occupy stuff? Completely off-topic. What does that have to do with anything? Last time I checked, people have been living in cities for thousands of years. Tens of thousands of years at least. Occupy happened last year. Big whoop. Nobody cares.
So in conclusion, scoot back to the Herald comment page where you came from.
I reverse commute like many
I moved from an apartment in Charlestown to an apartment in Arlington when my software company employer moved from Cambridge to Waltham to save money, get more space, save on supplied parking, and be closer to where most employees had moved. Parking was needed to attract and retain employees despite free T passes. Nearly every other job and contract since was further from Boston/Cambridge than my apartment.
Transportation has been vital to cities for thousands of years. Roads allowed Roman and Inca empires to grow and thrive. High taxes, political instability, and disease were their downfalls, not a lack of "Smart Growth".
Romans and Incans
They did not have to devote huge tracts of lands for the storage of automobiles. Transportation is vital. So is land usage.
Your obsession with the buzzword "Smart Growth" reveals your ideological backwardness. Whatever the latest buzzword is, the fact of the matter is that cities have never traditionally been built with parking lots. The new or rebuilt cities packed with parking -- like New Haven or Fresno -- are broken and rotting from the core.
If you want to live in such a broken and rotten "city", you have many choices in the US. Boston is one of the few with any remaining traditional aspects, and I'm glad for it.
Cliche's and parking
I just enjoy repeating the cliche's and oxymorons used by progressives - smart growth, sustainable community, traffic calming etc.
I don't know these parking Meccas you identify. The only areas I see are ones at office parks and shopping malls, where people go to make money or spend it - horrible! Roads and parking allow both to occur. Framingham has highways, rail, office parks, shopping malls, and oh, its so awful. A job or store that people can't get to quickly disappears. Many cities and towns go through booms and busts that have nothing to do with parking.
Lets consider how wonderful the Big Dig is. By investing billions of dollars, evil roads were hidden under ground. The former land and airspace of the elevated road is now... a park and sink for more tax money. Its not housing (other than tents). Its not jobs. Someday there might be a building for retail and farmers market, though numbers must still not work out. A repaired or replaced, elevated road would have been cheaper, not leak and rain debris, and produce income from parking underneath!
If we consider underdeveloped parts of Boston, they all have something in common - residents have to suffer slow surface public transit on buses, no subway. East Boston is the exception because driving is harder to elsewhere. Dot, Southie, Chelsea, JP, and Winthrop are other areas harder to reach. So, should the taxpayers in 351 communities across the state invest in more subway to enhance property values for owners in Somerville and elsewhere? Not fair at all like 1% of statewide sales tax going to the MBTA serving just the eastern 1/3rd of MA. Property owners who see increased values need to help pay for new transit - a small bump in property taxes going to just their city isn't enough.
We're talking city -- not suburbs
It's about housing in the city. And land is scarce. Any land that gets devoted to parking is land taken away from housing.
You can only pick two of the following:
1. Housing density at city levels (e.g. 100+ d.u. per net acre)
2. 1:1 or higher parking ratio (spaces:unit)
3. Reasonable cost
You cannot have all 3 -- it is geometrically impossible.
Let's consider the possibilities:
(1 and 2): High density + lots of parking = high cost luxury condos
(1 and 3): High density + reasonable cost = pre-automobile or traditional city
(2 and 3): Lots of parking + reasonable cost = suburbia.
Naturally, I gravitate towards (1 and 3). But most of this country has developed only the (2 and 3) style which means that traditional style city neighborhoods are rare, and mostly leftover from the pre-automobile era.
pre-automobile city no longer exists
Those times are gone. Americans are marketed at like never before to buy more crap and consume, consume, consume. Bigger and bigger places are needed to hold it all, trucked home in huge SUVs. Its far worse in the burbs, but city dwellers want bigger places too. Autos freed people from just having urban or rural living and working, and economic growth which made the US the largest economy in the world.
What a bleak life
I'd like to think we can aspire to better than that.
And automobiles did not free anyone from anything. They just became another burden to be handled. And the need for accommodation of automobiles destroyed urban life in many parts of the US, removing that possibility from consideration, leaving little to no choice for many Americans.
EPA regulations and costs hurt too
Compared to building on former farmland or desert, redeveloping a property that might contain toxic waste from a decade ago, have nearby water, is surrounded by old sewer/water/electric/gas utilities all got a lot more expensive since the 1970s. There is lots of contaminated soil in East Cambridge and the Leather District from former tanneries for example. It all requires expensive removal and replacement. Former gas station? Likely contaminated soil. Underground home oil tank for heat? More testing costs. Tear down an old building with asbestos or lead paint? Expensive. I'm not saying don't clean it all up, just that virgin areas in Colorado, Texas, and Nevada are much cheaper to build those generic box houses.
not shedding any tears
Life's not fair. Many want to live in Boston, but not everyone can afford to. Developers will ALWAYS make the most money they can when building. It's just a fact. I'd love to live in Malibu, but I can't afford to. It's the reality of life.
People tell me all of the time, oh I'd love to live in Boston too. Then they hear how much I pay each month, see the size of my apartment, learn that I don't have a dedicated parking space and they shudder and feel pleased about living in the 'burbs. You want to live here, then you make sacrifices like the rest of us.
Data Points and Ideas
John, the data above does include public housing. The Census housing data estimates all units, and they can be further disaggregated in several ways, but funding program would not remove a unit from the count. Nearly all of the City of Boston's public housing was originally built in one of two waves - one in the 1930s and one in the 1950s.
PJ, while I agree that we do not build enough affordable housing, you might be interested to know that the developer with far and away the most units under construction in Boston right now is not a market rate developer but The Community Builders, Inc.
Solution? All of the above. Reduce overly burdensome constraints on development to encourage more private, market-rate development. Continue to prioritize and provide funding for a variety of affordable developments (some provide housing for moderate income folks, some for low income folks, special populations, etc). Encourage transit oriented and downtown development. Improve the transit system to make more neighborhoods convenient and to enable greater density.
Here's the biggie that won't happen though - get the other 100+ municipalities in this housing market to appropriately increase density and provide affordable housing instead of utilizing large lot zoning to keep out all but the wealthiest.
Of course Boston's housing
Of course Boston's housing stock is older than other cities. Boston is older than other cities, it's tiny in area, and it was built out sooner than other cities. There are no old cow pastures to build on.
There are spots in the city where you could build, but would people who can pay for a new home live there? There's a price point at which developers will build on spec for any given site. Those developers don't need to be told - they'll do it when they can make money doing it. That's how the Back Bay was built out, and that's how Dorchester was filled with three deckers. If you down-regulated dramatically, no doubt you could get a flush of building. That's not happening.
Then again, there's the unspoken problem. Build more housing (at the lower end) and you'll attract more people. Which means more demand. Which leaves you with a more crowded city, and the same problem you started with.
And by the way - is the T ready to handle significantly more riders? That was a rhetorical question.
I want a house in JP
I think you've found the fatal flaw in this thread: there is plenty of opportunity to build in neighborhoods in Boston but few people with a choice think about living in those places.
things change
look at rent and housing appreciation in Southie and Charlestown the last 10-15 years. As the stigma wore off, people realized the hidden gem they were overlooking irrationally.
Some call it yuppification, others revitalization; but eventually a hard group of folk move in and work hard to reassert the area as a community, and fix the problems associated with it.
Hell, Hipsters are doing the same thing in Detroit as we speak. Creating island neighborhoods and communities that band together and make it a not so bad place to live. And the best thing about out there is you can live on a part time job and get the rest off for life and civic duties.
wait
There was no community in Charlestown or Southie before the "revitalization"?
Then Egleston Sq is a good neighborhood
By that logic, if that's where the young white people can afford to buy a house, then they should be flocking over the tracks.
Elitist!
Low income housing projects aren't communities? Only yuppies count? They seem to be soft folk displacing hard folk!
NIMBYism is not a problem in dowtown Boston
I went through this with someone recently on another thread - if you look at all the major projects over the last 12 years - the only one that local activists were able to stop or change in any major way was the Millennium project near Mass Ave over the pike. Every other project (that the mayor was in favor of) got built - I think one - a dormitory for Suffolk, was moved from Beacon Hill to DTX. That's it.
Columbus Center?
If so, yeah, residents opposed it, but you could make a good argument it collapsed because Winn was unable to convince the state to give him more subsidies for putting a deck across the turnpike when the economy was collapsing (despite the best efforts of his BFF Dianne Wilkerson).
Columbus Center Collapsed under its own weight
This predates my involvement a bit - but someone involved told me the following:
First they said we need to build X to make it viable (of course way more than the zoning would allow). Winn said he didn't need any public subsidies.
Then after a round of negotiations and the addition of some open space Winn said he needed more height on his towers to make it viable, again without subsidies.
Then a couple of years later he said his new BFF Dianne would help him get subsidies because that was the only way it was viable - trying to pull a Filene's on the city.
In hindsight it's very fortunate it didn't get built or it would be sitting mostly empty if not just in shell form right now. It was too big and too expensive and eventually even Calpers pulled out when they realized this was a boondoggle and Winn was a hustler. The city went into the recession with only 3 projects needing to get sold out and they are wrapping up and we actually have an inventory shortage until some of the newer projects come on line.
it's zoning, too
Direct activism may not defeat that many projects but overly-restrictive zoning and a regulatory thicket that both work to prevent the expansion of supply are also products of NIMBY-ism.
Maybe in the burbs, not in Boston
There have been several attempts to ask the BRA to come up with a structured plan and develop a zoning strategy that fits that master plan. They won't do it. Why? Nothing to do with NIMBYism and everything to do with control of the real estate market by the mayor. If you zone properly, the mayor has no sway over yes or no of most big projects. But if all the zoning is half the height of what makes projects economically viable, the BRA (i.e. the mayor) can do all kinds of things to control development in the city. Any questions, ask Don Chiofarro how he feels about Millennium getting approval to build more than triple the zoning in DTX when he can't get an inch over what he wants.
Yes, about wanting power and control instead of prosperity
Just as new bike lane projects serve just a small minority, targeted development exceptions show how the mayor wants his say. We can see how the restriction of motor vehicle traffic and lack of affordable parking in DTX created the many bankruptcies and vacancies. Retail where there are roads and parking are doing much better than the Lafayette mall, Filenes etc.. Yuppie residents are needed first to support the cafes and restaurants which do best in pedestrian malls. I don't know any pedestrian malls in Manhattan or NYC that have worked either - and that is a city which walks and uses public transit instead of cars, more than Boston.
BTW h/t to john keith
Great post very interesting stuff