To continue…
The Herald’s Brett Arends weighs in on the population issue and remarks,
The Rappaport Institute at Harvard estimates that, if we had given as many new building permits in the last 15 years as we did in the sixties and early seventies, the average house in Greater Boston today would cost up to a third less.
Here’s the study.The thing is if we had continued to tear down and rebuild as Boston did in the 1960s, the city would not have quite the charm it does today. The other night, my friends and I were talking about why the city didn’t allow any new architectural idiom, why everything had to be red brick and a friend made the comment that the "New Boston" of the 60s had killed off any popular support for modernism. It’s been one extended reaction against the travesty of Government Center; the razing of Scollay Square, West End and much of Bay Village; the award-winning architecture like the Public Library that is inhospitable to anyone but the homeless; the highrises like Jamaica Tower that are a rebuke to their surroundings, without so much as an abutting sidewalk to the neighborhood.
This plays out on the policy front, as well as the aesthetic. The political climate that gave permits freely was the same one that thought nothing of bulldozing a Southwest Corridor for a highway. Now, things have changed since the 1960s, and we don’t have to keep living the same battles. If anything, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, where neighborhood groups block any building, however reasonable, as a way of fighting back against a change they’re otherwise powerless to stop. We do need more housing, more construction, and more density. But restrictions on construction (i.e. on tearing down existing structures) did serve a useful purpose. I’m willing to accept a significant premium on housing costs if that guarantees a city with historical architecture, good housing stock and a nice liveable scale. I’ve lived in and visited places without planning restrictions and frankly they were ugly (Knoxville), unappealing in their bizarreness (Houston) or at best obsessed with the new (Atlanta). Medium density and historic architecture is what makes Boston special among American cities.
I can think of areas that really could use some tight-knit, mixed-use, high rise development: Kenmore area, Somerville’s Assembly Square, the Seaport district, and Washington St. near Forest Hills. (Other nominations? Can’t be on landfill…) But this means tinkering and fitting in density where we can. Ultimately, we still face a tradeoff between medium-density character and housing prices. Even if we reduce the unwritten architectural heritage tax a little, I don’t see the popular demand to get rid of it.
No comments have been added to this post yet.