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In my town they are building a lot of apartments downtown, and that's fine with me, but the unfortunate reality of my area is that if you don't have a car then you are pretty well stuck in town and can only get around to surrounding towns using buses that only run a few times a day. You can get to Boston faster than you can get to the shopping center 2 towns over (unless you take an Uber). And that's still pretty good by American standards. Let's assume that they are buliding 500 new units downtown but only 350 new parking spaces. So what's going to happen is that these $4500/month apartments and $900k condos will fill up with high-income singles and couples from Boston/Cambridge/Somerville with no kids who don't really care about not having a car, because they'll just commute to Boston for work, walk downtown for errands, and take an Uber for their occasional trips elsewhere. That's fine on its own, but meanwhile the sub-wealthy families will continue fighting tooth and nail for the diminishing handful of old unrenovated houses that go on the market each year, and the wealthy families will keep happily buying and selling the nice pretty mansions on the quiet suburban streets at the edges of town. That is, it's not actually relieving supply pressure on the people who are hurting from it the most. Instead it's relieving supply pressure on the city that the suburb serves, which is still a good thing for the region overall but not optimal for the town. The real NIMBY mansion-dwellers are quiet winners here. They get to comply with state-mandated development minimums without actually changing anything in their neighborhoods. What actually should be happening IMO is that zoning restrictions need to be eased uniformly across town, for the same number of added units but at a lower overall density. We need more mansions converted to 2/3/4-unit condos (and yes I mean condos specifically, not just rentals) in addition to the luxury apartment development happening downtown. We need safer bike infrastructure so people who do want to really go car-free in a downtown apartment can do that without worrying about death by pickup truck, maybe even get their kids around on an e-bike or whatever. We need local circulating buses to take people around town, without relying on the sprawling MBTA bus network. We also honestly need a program where the city commissions development of smaller and cheaper homes, and sells them at cost in a lottery system or something like that, because all the new development in the fancier neighborhoods is $1m+ 2000sqft stuff that's way too expensive, bigger than most 1/2-kid families need, and also looks like shit (and is probably built like shit too). Or none of that is right and I'm wrong about all of this. But the point is that no serious long-term holistic planning is being done, at least not in any venue that the public can see and comment on, and anyone who calls that out is shouted down as a NIMBY. I literally want more apartments in my neighborhood and fewer single family home (yes I live in an apartment but I wish it was a condo not a rental), more bike lanes, and narrower streets with bioswales and raised crosswalks and stuff. And yet I'm a NIMBY by some people's standards because I'm a little skeptical of just letting developers do whatever they want, in an area that isn't even that close to my backyard. |