Multi-Family Zoning Requirements for MBTA Communities

[KCasiglio]

Dunno about refugees per se... but may as well be.

Again... building apartments in Holden isn't going to make your Davis Square rent any cheaper. Seriously. This bill flies in the face of where the demand is for MUDs, let alone the logistics of car free living. College Grads are extremely important to Boston's future, but they are not living in Holden, sorry.

Oh wild I had no idea that college grads weren't going to move to a municipality that has a share of adults with a degree 13.4 percentage points higher than the state as a whole. Oversimplifying how the market works isn't proving your point, it's putting your own ignorance on display. Sure, very few if any are directly deciding between Holden and Davis Sq. But some are deciding between Holden and Worcester. Others are deciding between Worcester and Framingham, and those people now have less competition for Worcester because some of that demand has been shifted to Holden. Now there's less competition for Framingham for those people deciding between Framingham or Newton. So on and so forth. This is also EXACTLY why the issue cannot be left to individual municipalities, because no one municipality can put a dent in regional level demand on its own.

I don't know what you're implying with the "may as well be refugees" bit. It seems we're dealing with Schrödinger's renter. Simultaneously a displacing college grad living in a luxury condo and a section 8 family with 8 special needs kids about to enroll in the school district.

 

[KCasiglio]

The rate of population increase could be gradual or it could be rapid. Just like the percentage of population increase may be low or it may extremely high. For towns and cities that embrace the spirit of the mandate, it will most likely be the latter in both cases. As I've already pointed out, municipalities are forbidden from limiting the number of occupants or bedrooms in these as of right units within these new districts. Even if you add 20% more net units to the municipality, the actual number of additional residents may be far higher.

It is extremely unlikely that new property taxes will be able to offset a substantial increase in costs for expanded municipal services and other expenditures. An addition double-digit percentage of additional students into a school system can cripple a town's treasury all by itself. Cities and towns generally don't make out like bandits with population increases, especially if that increase is sudden, and especially if a high percentage of that increase is young families, which this law claims to encourage.

A large increase in population will have a substantial impact on traffic to most of these municipalities. Supporters of this law just seems to get all hand wavy and dismissive whenever this is brought up, as if no one will have to rely on a car anymore because they can just base their existence on the commuter rail station a mile down the road. This is just absurd, of course. There will be an enormous influx of cars onto the local roads in these towns, many of which are already choking in traffic.

There is an elephant in the room here, and that is that this law is premised on a paradigm that has become obviously anachronistic. The model that has hundreds of thousands of people all pouring into Boston from the suburbs in the morning and all pouring out of Boston back into the suburbs in the evening. People don't have to do this anymore, nor do they want to. Just as people don't need to pile into the city to fill all those shoe factories, auto plants and shipyards anymore, they don't need to fill those gargantuan corporate office towers anymore. The work-from-home revolution has happened, and COVID was its proof of concept. Businesses realized that they didn't have to spend millions of dollars on office space and workers got back the enormous chunk of the lives that was being wasted getting to and from their cubicles everyday. We're not going back. Those empty office buildings downtown are going to stay that way. Subsequently, the MBTA, who's ridership numbers have absolutely plummeted since COVID, isn't going to get those riders back either.

We in Massachusetts probably should be looking at a more distributed, nodal model of self-sustaining communities for the future rather than this plainly outmoded, gigantic, centralized model revolving around the Shawmut Peninsula.

Will do my best to correspond paragraph by paragraph here:

The evidence thus far does not bear this out. Nor is your point about number of bedrooms/occupants very convincing. Developers are going to build what the market will bear. Anything bigger than 4 bedrooms is already a rarity. Almost exclusively studio-2 bed apartments are what has been getting built and given the significantly lower rates of children per family I want to see some hard evidence that that's suddenly going to change, especially outside of the inner core.

I agree! Cities and towns have certainly not made out like bandits with population increases. In fact, they could certainly do for some dense, mixed use development to prop up over half a century of only adding population via sprawl that requires such heavy subsidy. Let's talk about schools, for example. Aside from the fact that declining enrollment in k-12 districts is its own crisis across the region, from Cape Cod to the inner ring suburbs to Boston itself and an influx of young families would do these districts a lot of good, sprawl has been devastating for school district funding. We guarantee to every family that no matter how in the middle of nowhere you live we'll send a bus to come pick up your kid. You don't have to be one of ArchBoston's wonkiest transit nerds to understand how expensive that is, and how the idea of running that type of service outside of the school system would be laughed out of the room. We gave up on neighborhood schools because in the short term it was cheaper to build a centralized educational campus in the middle of nowhere. But these campuses require so much more in long term maintenance and transportation costs that it outweighs yesterday's cheap land acquisition.

So the municipal finances, much like the impact on traffic, will be primarily the result of the individual town plans. Here there have been and I'm sure there will continue to be plenty of room for critique. I'm on record in this very thread (or maybe it's the Milton specific thread?) criticizing the Milton plan for focusing on East Milton instead of the high speed line before even the representative town meeting initially approved it. These plans CAN absolutely make traffic worse, and this is where towns should be working the MBTA/RTAs to say "we'll bring you X amount more demand here but we need you to give us better frequencies" etc. I absolutely support introducing more carrots and it was a lot easier for state legislatures to do this because it didn't require them to commit money. But the towns aren't powerless here either, as your next paragraph so perfectly articulates! Your point about traffic would probably be a fait acompli in a 2019 commute dynamic, but that's not how things are anymore. This law is perfectly condusive to building that multi-nodal system you envision. We should be developing our town and village centers, and encouraging the return of local retail, dining, etc. A nice healthy infusion of density and allowing the market to do its thing will do more for that than any government program. Towns can mandate auto-oriented density and get the worst of both worlds they seem to be afraid of...or they can...not do that. The law leaves it up to them.

 

[shawn]

Yes, it is a stretch, in no small part because what possible carrots could be offered to combat miscegenation laws?

Also, we need to acknowledge one of the key reason to use the stick over the carrot is because the two sides are wildly far apart. Another is that the side being stick-ed doesn’t have much of a way to retaliate.

But on the other hand, what possible carrots could be offered to people who willingly choose raw sewage flooding their properties over modest increases in housing density?

I could be wrong here (and I very much am not trying to paint a picture of you specifically), but I can't shake this image of a family of four living in a Kingston McMansion subdivision built in the early 2000s/pre-Lehman boom deciding that now Kingston is getting too crowded. It all feels "I got mine in time to prevent you from getting yours." One of the few spots where limousine liberals and Free Stater libertarians seems to find common cause.

Insert Milton or wherever else, doesn't have to be Kingston.