
Nimbys vs. needed new housing
Maybe not that much union these days
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Newton, Mass., has provided a strong example of why housing costs are so high: It’s tough for developers who propose projects that would increase local density in a nation where many still see the ideal as the one-family house.
While 60 percent of voters in Newton (an affluent and very liberal town) supported, in a referendum, the Northland Newton project, which will provide 800 units of housing, 140 of which will be classified as “affordable,’’ the road to the development has had a lot of potholes. Although the City Council also supported it, the developers had to go through an 18-month permitting process, and make many concessions, among other torments. Such delays drive away many developers and thus prevent the construction of new housing that could moderate housing costs by increasing supply, especially in places like Greater Boston and the San Francisco region, where these costs are astronomical.
In a Boston Globe essay, Katherine Levine Einstein and Maxwell B. Palmer, assistant professors of political science at Boston University, wrote:
“Across Massachusetts towns, from 2015 to 2017, only 14 percent of those speaking at permitting meetings about multifamily housing were in favor of the development. As the Northland referendum shows, true public support is much higher.’’ Opponents tend to be older and richer.
“Indeed, recent election results underscore an unfortunate liberal inconsistency on housing policy. On Super Tuesday, Democratic primary voters flocked to the polls to endorse candidates with robust plans to improve and increase the nation’s housing stock. The platforms of former vice president Joe Biden and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all advocate for housing policies that would make it easier to build more housing. In Newton, more than 90 percent of voters cast a vote in the Democratic primary. A sizable portion of those voters opposed those same principles when it came to their own backyards: At least 35 percent of Newton Democratic voters opposed the Northland project.’’
“Sanders’s positions illustrate this disjoint between national and local housing preferences. Sanders’s housing plan outlines regulatory and funding measures that would increase the supply of national housing for residents at a variety of income levels. Yet, he opposes local housing developments and endorses politicians in local races who fight critical zoning reform.’’
It’s a variant of the old “don’t tax me, don’t thee, tax the man behind the tree.’’
Forget rent control, which worsens housing costs by discouraging construction and expansion of multifamily owner-occupied or rental property. The way to control housing costs is to build more housing.
Poisoning the Merrimack
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The Trump administration doesn’t particularly like environmental rules because they can inconvenience some businesses, whose bosses/owners might be big campaign contributors. It’s been trying to weaken or delete some regulations, meant to protect people and the broader environment.
Here’s a troubling example of its attitude:
Federal and state environmental officials have renewed a permit letting Turnkey Landfill, in Rochester, N.H., send as much as 100,000 gallons a day of polluted runoff to a Lowell, Mass., treatment plant that empties into the Merrimack River, which provides drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people a day.
The polluted water has large amounts of highly toxic chemicals known as PFAS, which have been linked to kidney cancer, low infant birth weights and other diseases, reports The Boston Globe, which said:
“The company’s tests showed that the amount of PFAS, known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they never fully degrade, was more than 100 times higher than federal and state guidelines and more than 400 times higher than stricter standards being considered in Massachusetts.’’
“While the Lowell Regional Wastewater Utility treats the landfill runoff before discharging it into the river, the plant lacks the expensive equipment to filter out PFAS. Worse, environmental advocates say, the treatment process can make the chemicals more toxic, enabling them to bind in ways that make them harder to break down.”
Don’t expect the EPA and the Granite State to change their minds (EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is a former coal-industry lobbyist.) You might want to stick to bottled water when you’re in the Lowell area…
To read more, please hit this link.
The Merrimack at sunset in Lowell
Always leaving the Northeast
An unofficial flag of New England.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Every once and while a story comes out about people leaving the Northeast, especially to move south, for jobs, lower taxes, cheaper housing, less winter and so on. These stories have been a staple of journalism since the invention of air-conditioning, which made manufacturing and its jobs more attractive in the South. And yet the Northeast remains the richest part of the country. That’s because it has the academic institutions, dense centers of skilled workers and several “world cities’ that are so closely associated with wealth creation and preservation. And it’s on the coast.
The large number of affluent people in the Northeast helps explain why property prices and taxes are so high here: They can bid up prices.
As for Northeast’s weather: Yes winter in the region can be tedious, but most of the year is fairly mild and the region rarely suffers the floods and droughts so frequent in much of the rest of the country. And we have plenty of fresh water. It’s interesting, by the way, that the happiest place in the world appears to be cold, dark Scandinavia, at least in part because of its public services. (Still, I think I’ll nip down to Florida for a week soon to break up the winter.…)
And there’s what should be an obvious reason why population growth in the Northeast is so slow – the region has long been densely populated and urbanized; it’s much further along in development than most of the Sunbelt. Consider that the seven most densely populated states are, in order of density: New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware and New York (even with the vast Adirondack wilderness). They aren’t going to empty out as people move to Florida and Texas subdivisions.
The most serious demographic challenge facing the Northeast is its aging population. This is an especially serious problem for Rhode Island, exacerbated by its deeply entrenched cynicism and parochialism; someone once called it an “urban backwater.’’ It needs a higher percentage of younger adults to start and grow businesses and to help pay the soaring social costs of the elderly. More on that to come in future columns.
I’m sure that cheaper land and lower taxes (except for regressive sales taxes, which tend to be highest in the Sunbelt) will continue to draw many from the Northeast for some years to come. But I’m just as sure that the Northeast will remain the richest part of the country. And many of those who stay will appreciate its slow population growth, which means less sprawling development, and a healthier natural environment, than in much of the country. And eventually, growing populations and other demographic change will lead to political pressures for more and better public services, more controls on land development and higher taxes in the Sunbelt – even as the effects of global warming make them more problematic.
Too rich for Providence?
Providence Place
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal 24.com
‘Nordstrom’s announcement that it will close its store in Providence Place, in the Rhode Island capital’s downtown, didn’t surprise me. I was always skeptical that a large high-end department store could succeed in Providence; I’m surprised that it has lasted this long. There aren’t all that many very affluent people around here, and some of them do their expensive shopping in relatively near – and very big – Boston and New York. Boscov’s, which will take Nordstrom’s place, is mid-to-down-market.
Further, the rise of the Internet has posed a huge threat to large department stores in general, except for very down-market chains such as Dollar General.
As I’ve written before, what will survive and, in some places prosper, are some smaller specialty stores with close connections with affluent neighborhoods – e.g., Wayland Square, in Providence, and Main and Water streets in East Greenwich – or in destination/resort towns such as Newport.
Nordstrom’s exit is a blow to Providence Place, and more are likely to come. But the huge building does have something big going for it: It is a very attractive and solid complex made of good materials and all or part of it could be retrofitted for other purposes, such as education, health clubs (with swimming pools!), state and/or city offices and even a hotel or two. It’s not your typical big-box-based suburban mall.
Maybe a company called Scape, which runs student housing in the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland, should look at Providence Place. The Boston Globe reports that the company says, in The Globe’s words, “that it will spend $1 billion over the next few years to develop privately run student housing in Boston, and it will also locate its North American headquarters in the city.’’
The Globe continues: “It’s a move that could help meet the huge demand for college housing in Boston, where an estimated 36,000 undergraduate and graduate students live in off-campus apartments, and establish a new model for student housing here — independent of any particular school and less taxing on universities’ already-tight budgets.’’ Lots of college kids in Providence, too.
To read The Globe’s story, please hit this link.
North Country beauty
Adapted From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:
Artists love New England’s white birches. (One of my favorite pictures is an encaustic painting (which uses a wax process) of a stand of birches by Nickerson Miles, of Barrington — above). Castle Freeman Jr. pays a Yankee Magazine tribute to these trees, often associated, along with maples and elms, with our region. The further north you go in New England the more you see them. The birch, Freeman writes, is “by no means a flamboyant, show-offy tree {unlike, say, the flaming sugar maples of fall} but by its unique coloration {including pale-yellow leaves in autumn} and habit of growth, it makes its pale, slender presence very welcome. It’s not for nothing that the white birch is New Hampshire’s officially designated state tree.’’
Birches are also fun to carve words on and, as Frost famously wrote (below), to swing on. And, Freeman notes, its medicinal qualities make it “the apothecary shop of the north woods.’’ I hope that global warming doesn’t kill them off.
‘‘When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.’’
— “Birches,’’ by Robert Frost
Pre-AC cooling
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
We had various strategies for beating the heat at night when I lived as a boy in a Boston suburb on the ocean. There were fans, but their effect was unsatisfying. One option was to move into the cellar, which in our house was deep and with granite walls. Another was to sleep on a porch. You see a lot of sleeping porches, mostly facing the summer prevailing wind from the southwest, in houses built from about 1890 to 1930. Or we’d sleep on the lawn. For kids these options provided minor adventures (seeing fireflies over the lawns, etc.) but they weren’t particularly attractive to adults, most of whom had to get up early and get to work after sleepless nights
We’d sometimes hear dance music coming up through the rustling oak trees from a club on the harbor. This was Big Band stuff; rock n’ roll had not yet become entrenched.
Then came those air conditioners awkwardly installed in windows, which in old houses like the one we live in now seem the only cooling option because you’d have to rip up the house to put in central air.
Of course, the central irony of air conditioning is that while it may make you cooler, it makes the world hotter as we burn fossil fuel to generate the electricity to make it work and the damn things release lots of heat –into the great outdoors. And living in air-conditioned spaces makes you less able to tolerate the outside air when you're in it. But it has certainly been good for productivity.
We lived on Massachusetts Bay and so we could go swimming but the water was usually frigid, what with the hot-weather wind – from the southwest – pushing the warm surface water away from the shore and the Labrador Current lurking nearby. We loved visiting our paternal grandparents in West Falmouth, on Buzzards Bay, where the water was almost tropically warm from mid-July to Labor Day. It seemed that the Gulf Stream would send up little eddies to run against the south and west sides of the Cape. It smelled like Florida.
Drive in peace
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
As least anecdotally, Rhode Island’s new law banning drivers from talking into cell phones they’re holding while driving seems to be starting to work. I think that a lot of drivers will grow to like the law because it will encourage quiet time and reflection and let them enjoy the ride much more. There’s a false urgency about most cell phone calls. The vast majority of calls can wait!
The addicts will, of course, continue to take the risk of a $100 fine. Their brain chemistry, as with some of those who spend their days looking at social media, has been permanently rejiggered. For some reason, people in SUV’s seem particularly prone to cell-phone addiction. They seem to especially like to talk on cell phones while turning. And some just can’t stop texting while driving either!
Then there’s our over-reliance on GPS for directions. Google Maps, et al., are sometimes wrong! Old-fashioned printed maps are often more reliable but too many people seem to have forgotten how to use them. But then so many people in the
Be fair to brick-and-mortar stores
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' at GoLocal24.com
I hope that the U.S. Supreme Court reverses itself and decides that retailers on the Internet can be made to collect state and local sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence. If somebody in a state buys something at a physical store in that state and has to pay its sales tax, it’s only fair that someone residing in the same state pay sales tax in buying the same product online.
The problem goes back to a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that spurred Internet shopping. That ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, said that the U.S. Constitution bars states from collecting sales taxes from enterprises that don’t have a physical presence in a state. But in these surreal times, more and more of us don’t seem to have a physical presence anywhere.
Internet retailers complain that collecting the taxes will be too complicated. But in a world where, for instance, social-media companies can micro-target customers with great precision, I’m sure ways can be found to efficiently manage the tax collection.
It has long struck me as bad public policy that physical stores (whose owners pay local property taxes and otherwise contribute to the local economy and civic life) must collect sales taxes from local consumers patronizing these establishments while businesses living on computers far away don’t have to. Unfair advantage.
This inequity has deprived states of billions of dollars in tax revenue to pay for essential services and transportation and other physical infrastructure.
Saving a stoner signpost
Boston Citgo sign viewed from Lansdowne Street.
From Robert Whitcomb's "Boston Diary'' column in last week's The Boston Guardian:
Even ads for companies owned by South American dictatorships can be beloved. Consider the Citgo sign at Kenmore Square. Since 1965 the spectacle with the red trimark atop 660 Beacon St. has told many millions of Bostonians and visitors where they are. Few care that Venezuela’s state oil company now owns Citgo (a descendent of the old Cities Service oil company).
The pulsing (throbbing?) logo presides in its surreal way over Fenway Park, which helps expand its hypnotic allure well beyond Boston. After all, people around the world can view it in televised Red Sox games. And exhausted Boston Marathon runners love it because they know when they see the sign that they’re near the finish.
As most Guardian readers probably know, Kenmore Square development pressures in the past few years had put the sign’s future in doubt. But happy news comes from real-estate firm Related Beal, which now owns the Citgo sign building. The company says it will preserve the damn thing and protect views of it from various points around the city and Cambridge. Mayor Marty Walsh, relentless preservationists and many in the general public deserve much credit for saving this hallucinogenic treasure.
Some proper Back Bay folks in the mid-‘60s complained that the sign was too tacky. That reminds me of the delayed love of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, in Lower Manhattan. I worked across the street from those skyscrapers for a few years in the ‘70s as they were being built and then slowly rented out. For quite a long time many people hated them as a sterile Modernist travesty. But as their “twinness’’ became that overused word “iconic’’ and as New York recovered from its woes of the ‘70s and again became prosperous in the ‘80s and ’90s, a deep affection developed for the towers, which, of course, with their extreme height also served as markers for those confused amidst Manhattan’s density.
I most remember the Citgo sign from summer jobs in Boston in the late ’60s, and then as a reporter for The Boston Herald Traveler in 1970-71. The sign provided geographical guidance and psychological soothing for the college kids, Hippies and even many respectable people. Further, staring at the sign was a way to, er, enrich the pot-smoking experience of that rowdy time. And it evokes the Pop Art of the ‘60s; it looks like an Andy Warhol poster.
Growing reverence for the sign was manifest when it was turned off during stretches of two energy crises. Some then called it “Boston’s very own ‘North Star,’ and The Boston Globe’s celebrated architecture critic, Robert Campbell, in 1980 called it a “symbol’’ of the city.
I remember when the gold-topped, Art-Deco United Shoe Machinery Building dominated Boston’s Financial District and the company itself, nicknamed “The Shoe,’’ was a very powerful player in the New England economy. Now you’ll have a hard time finding the quaint skyscraper amidst the many new, higher office buildings around it and the company itself is long gone.
Will the Citgo sign be there in 50 years? I doubt it. But I hope it remains to help guide me through Boston’s labyrinth for the rest of my days.
Robert Whitcomb is president of The Boston Guardian, editor of newenglanddiary.com and a GoLocal24.com columnist.