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Regional planning? Isn't that, like, illegal or immoral or something?
By adamg on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 2:48pm
The Metropolitan Area Planning Commission has come up with something called MetroFuture, which is based on the idea that no locality is an island, we're all in this together and we need to finally buckle down and start making development and transportation decisions as a region, rather than a gazillion separate cities and town.
And, Commission Executive Director Marc Draisen writes, the first place to start is the MBTA, which, for all our kvetching, is far better than it was 20 years ago and needs our support and state funding to keep from collapsing because it's the engine that drives the regional economy and keeps us competitive with the transit-happy cities of Asia, Europe and the West Coast.
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Comments
Not much about regional
Not much about regional planning in there - just a call for more money.
the labors of sisyphus
I took a class in GIS at MIT last year, in which we helped the MAPC analyze some of the data going into the models that MetroFuture uses to guide regional planning efforts. More power to these guys: they have some really tough tasks on their plate. None of it is trivial, from figuring out what kinds of future development would actually help meet MAPC's goals, all the way up to getting a bunch of little NIMBYist fiefdoms engaged with regional planning.
more sticks
The state needs to consider adopting some sticks to go along with their carrots in regional planning. 40R is a good idea, but it doesn't do enough. For instance, some towns close to Boston have good transit access but also quite stringent land use regulations (Belmont, Milton, Needham). Meanwhile, further out undeveloped towns continue to incentivize sprawling greenfield development. And people looking avoid the issue (Gov. Patrick, e.g.) think we can solve the affordability problem by getting young families to live in "gateway cities", which have horrible schools.
The state needs to step in and steer towns to making (regionally) wiser decisions. Perhaps this means that towns that don't meet MAPC guidelines will start losing their local aid.
Teeth?
As in chompers ... as in the power to tell the cities and towns to offer input but to go fish if they think they can play their little "but nobody asked me" turf games?
Without it, some good things will happen - but not much.
Well I honestly think it is
Well I honestly think it is important that "somebody asks them" because these cities/towns represent the people that live in them, and the entire point of democracy is that people have a say in their lives. We just take that a little more seriously then places Oregon I guess, but that does not make it all bad.
The difference is if a city/town wants to play by its own rules I have no problem with cutting funding. If a town does not want to build affordable housing then it should not receive education funding from the state. The state has many sticks at its disposal it just does not use. Even the wealthiest states ask for money from the state, so I say if a city does not want to play ball it should not receive the money. They would continue to pay taxes but would cease to get services from the State.
It should be noted that a carrot/stick approach is used all the time at the Federal level and it works. All 50 states have the age of 21 as the legal age to drink, and that is because the feds told them it was either make the drinking age 21 or lose federal highway funding.