Developer concludes there's just not enough demand for office space in a former Readville train yard; files plans to build self-storage space instead

The T hasn't expanded all the way out on the Readville yard they already use, known as Yard 2. They've got a study out for adding another 8 tracks to it within their existing property lines, and if they revoked the easement used by the recycling center next door they could more than double the size of the facility and fan it back out to the banks of the Neponset like it used to be under the New York, New Haven & Hartford RR. It would be an excellent place to erect full-service repair shops for Regional Rail to relieve the maintenance load on maxed-out Boston Engine Terminal on the northside. The T gives Readville a middling rating for pure midday storage because at approx. 9 miles out it's not *central enough* to the terminal for midday equipment shuffles to work without some induced ops awkwardness. The same problem would manifest itself even with full midday Regional Rail schedules instead of peak/off-peak splits, as periodic cleaning & shift-change downtime would still happen plus the total number of trains on the system will be dizzyingly higher at those service levels. But if every more-central site ends up being out-of-reach and they absolutely have to make it Readville-or-bust, they can fit their expanded storage needs entirely in the footprint of an expanded Yard 2. The recycling center is not a hard business to relocate.

While it no doubt sucks that Yard 5 has been coughed up to less-than-stellar land usage via lackadaisical strategy, with that much fungible space left to tap in their existing Yard 2 confines it's not like the T was going to be thinking about Yard 5 for another generation or more.

What a waste to have it as storage space for people’s belongings. Terrible idea.

No -- The Mayor has no idea how much of what kind of housing or any other kind of buildings that the City of Boston needs to permit. Only the integrated independent decisions made by all of the property owners and potential owners can provide that answer.

So let's assume that the new Mayor is "transformative" and stops allowing the current mix of Labs, Offices, Retail, Residential and Light-Industrial facilities to be build and only permits housing development.

Soon all of the developers currently pouring billions into Boston would go elsewhere -- where they had a freer hand. Soon after that the companies whose growth was fueling the other types of development would start to go elsewhere. In the short term -- less housing would be created as development slowed.

The next consequence is that most companies which were still here would stop expanding here and start transferring operations to other locations where they could expand and transform as needed. With fewer opportunities for professional and career development -- Boston would attract fewer professionals from other areas and there would be less demand for higher end housing.

Eventually -- the people who come here for the educational opportunities and stay for the jobs would realize that they might do almost as well somewhere else where there were more job opportunities after graduation.

End result of the plan -- lots of available low cost housing [including formerly fancy housing] as the City started to shrink in population and stagnate again.

We've been down this road before several times. In due course -- assuming that our Great Research Universities were still at the forefront of knowledge creation -- perhaps someone would become the Mayor and begin to enable development again. This time the leading industry would be....????

The so-called 5-Yard is partly in Boston and partly in Dedham. So there are two municipalities at play there for many items.

I'd best-guess that this yard has been under the development umbrella for at least 10 years now and maybe more. The plans have changed many times.