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City spending $1.6 million+ a year to maintain empty buildings on Long Island
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Seriously?
Are they paying for transportation to the island for BGood to garden?
With the cuts to the school budget, and the lack of a plan for those homeless/recovering from substance addictions, this is appalling. What a waste of money. The city has no plan to build a bridge or use the island, and millions of dollars are being wasted. Shameful.
Well, they have three options
Since the closing of the facility is water under the bridge (heh), the city can do one of three things. They can pay minimal upkeep costs, which is what they appear to be doing. They can pay to raze the building to the ground and haul away the debris (hint: between one and two orders of magnitude more than $1.3 million). Or they can let it decay until it collapses on someone or starts leaking god-knows-what into the harbor, at which point they'll be sued for the cost of the damages + the costs of razing the building.
All things considered, this is the lesser of the available evils. I'm also pissed off that they closed the shelter here, but this is what happens when the voters reject tax hikes: infrastructure suffers, bridges close, and we get further nickel-and-dimed to death.
Walsh is destroying Roxbury and South End.
They should just tear them down. Walsh has no intention on fixing the homeless/drug problems. Happier destroying Roxbury and part of the South End. Let's see, they are selling a lot (parking garage) for 100 million for a new high rise but there's no money to fix the problems.... Yes, a building lot of 1 acre for 100 million. City's response to drug and alcohol problems? Add a couple of street workers, a few cops and talk....
What a disappointment Walsh is. I was hopeful.
Sorry
Your realtor didn't tell you your $750,000 shoebox was a few blocks away from the methadone mile.
No Chinatown Neighborhood Branch Public Library yet !
No Chinatown Neighborhood Branch Public Library yet !
Compare Boston Public Library and New York Public Library!
https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/4wtdax/compare_boston_public_li...
For example, there's a new 53rd Street Branch Library between 5th Ave and Avenue of the Americas
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/06/20/introducing-genoveve-stowell
NYPL?
You mean the people who wanted to turn their main library into a giant cafe and ship all the research collections to New Jersey?
No, I'd rather look at a BPL that has given us very nice new neighborhood libraries, like Mattapan, Allston and East Boston (plus extensive redos in Hyde Park and Brighton - and the renovation of the Johnson Wing). No, BPL isn't perfect (and yes, by the time they build a Chinatown branch there won't be much of the original Chinatown residents left to use it), but if you're going to bring up NYPL, expect a fight.
The Bottom Line
The Bottom Line
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/toc/bl/29/1
Aims & Scope
The Bottom Line has broadened its scope to become a peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journal not only for library and information researchers, but also for micro-economists and education researchers, marketers and knowledge professionals in information organisations, the media, health care and government.
The Bottom Line publishes research and case studies on the financial and economic aspects of information and information practice, mainly focusing on the trading of information, information economics, and the business of information. Information is widely defined including, but not limited to: Records, Documents, Files, Learning objects, Visual and sound files, Data and metadata and User-generated content.
The journal focuses not so much on the management of information, but rather on the trading of it.
The journal is particularly interested in papers that:
. examine the environment in which information is traded relating to socio-legal, cultural and technological aspects.
. analyse the relationship between information trading and other professions concerned with communication, marketing and information technology.
. articulate and develop relevant information theories and models.
. demonstrate the value of information in the relationship between society and business, technology, knowledge categorisation and metadata, and individual, group and collective memory.
. explain how information economics applies to the practice of information professionals and related recordkeeping professional roles, such as those of knowledge manager, author, librarian, recordkeeper, publisher, information broker and others.
. investigate brokers and hackers who sell information on the grey or black market to those who would exploit it, such as foreign government intelligence agencies, unscrupulous businesses, and cybercriminals.
. advance theory building within the discipline of information science and in information practice.
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/toc/bl/29/1
Lease it
Let somebody else absorb the overhead AND let the city make some money off of it.
My idea - lease it to a hotel for a large offshore resort/conference facility and run shuttles to the airport and the city.
Would have been a great site
Would have been a great site for a Casino.
Even better would be to lease
Even better would be to lease the site to someone who would agree to build a bridge to the island.
Never work
The cost of the bridge would probably exceed the value of the lease.
More to the story?
The article noted that there is some sort of day camp on "the other side of the island." What is that? If there are people actually using the island I can understand there being some kind of presence and upkeep out there. If not, mothball the buildings, turn off the utilities, provide basic security to preserve the assets, and cancel the contracts. Alternatively, lease it all out or sell it.
Camp Harbor View
Camp Harbor View has been there for a long time, and still runs, with the kids brought in by ferry.
We're talking about the buildings that used to be used for the drug-treatment and homelessness programs. Given that the city has not yet ruled out replacing the bridge, it actually makes sense to pay for upkeep of the buildings - imagine the outcry if the city did manage to build a new bridge (because Quincy, through which the road passes, will fight it tooth and nail) only to announce they have to raze and replace all the buildings because they didn't maintain the old ones.
There are no easy answers
No plan for Long Island is cut and dried. Everything has legitimate negatives. The only plan that is totally unacceptable is ignoring this and hope that it goes away. The cost of ignoring it is too high to not come up with some plan.
Why not keep using the buildings
for either their original purpose or a new one, and run a ferry to get people to and from them? Ferries seem to work just fine for Georges and Spectacle islands, as well as for some of the smaller islands.
It is really pathetic that
It is really pathetic that the bridge situation was not dealt with in advance to avoid having this situation where there is an island full of previously-well-used buildings sitting empty with no real plans developed for alternative locations for the services once provided inside them.
That said, properly "mothballing" a building to retain it for some undetermined possibly far off future use is really quite expensive. You can't just turn off the utilities and walk away and expect to be able to come back later unless "later" is not far away. Proper mothballing, particularly if a heated building becomes an unheated building, requires removal of all finishes, making repairs to or otherwise protecting all water-shedding elements, installation of passive or active ventilation systems to prevent mold, etc. Even the most thorough mothballing job will still require some level of annual care. Roofs leak, animals get inside and cause damage, masonry and wood continues to weather and deteriorate (especially if you've changed conditions by not heating anymore) and if not fixed in a timely fashion can allow water into the interior, interior conditions need to be monitored to make sure the ventilation is appropriate... If you defer/neglect maintenance the process of deterioration increases exponentially and you will be pouring money into either a huge overhaul or replacing the buildings at a later date. Looking at the number and type of buildings in those photographs,1.6+ million dollars for annual maintenance and continuing to keep some kind of regulated interior temperature in the winter is likely cheaper than almost all of the future alternatives.
Abandoned buildings soon fail
Abandoned buildings soon fail in expensive ways even without vandalism. This is particularly true for buildings that were never built to be shut down.
Drains freeze and crack pipes. Interior spaces get damp and moldy from the sea air and lack of ventilation. Plaster surfaces break down. Brick walls still need to be repointed every few years.
Unless the buildings are scheduled for demolition they should be kept up. A million bucks would barely build a new shed on Long Island; spending it or some more to keep what is already there is money IMHO well invested.
Build the bridge
Long Island is irreplaceable as a completely NIMBY-proof site for necessary services that most people don't want to see go in next door.
Well................
If I build a new bridge can I have the island?
GREAT LOCATION FOR A REHAB & RETRAINING COMPLEX, BY BOAT
The buildings are still standing and a nice dock to the buildings after a rehab of most of the buildings we could have a state of the art long term radical alcohol & drug free rehab complex where the unfortunates among us can be brought back into society as clean, sober and educated. Having these folks wandering aimlessly around Boston is cruel and unusual and no caring society would allow them to suffer like they do. After they are clean we give them real world jobs and welcome them back.