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Goodbye to some NIMBY hogwash: Long-time housing cap at former Devens army base headed for the circular file
Devens was home to thousands of soldiers and officers for decades, a number that swelled to over 100,000 during World War II as various units shipped in and out to battlefields overseas.
Yet when the base decommissioned in the mid-1990s, local officials in neighboring Ayer, Harvard and Shirley pushed to successfully to cap housing at the base at just 282 units.
And that arbitrary cap has pretty much remained intact, year in, year out, impervious to all efforts to raise or remove it, even as rents and home and condo prices have gone through the roof amid a now decades-long housing shortage across the state.
That is, until now.
State Sen. Jamie Eldridge helped shepherd through a legislative amendment this week that nixes the old cap on the number of housing units at Devens, as well as a companion limit on the amount of commercial development at the old base.
Eldridge’s amendment is similar if not identical to proposals put forth by both the House and Gov. Maura Healey, meaning it has a good chance of winning final passage.
While the 4,400-acre former army base has become a home to a range of corporate manufacturing, warehousing and other operations, there is potentially room for thousands of new homes, apartments and condos at Devens.
But voters and local officials have generally been resistant, either outright rejecting plans for new housing, or, in the case of the latest proposal to turn the old Vicksburg Square into apartments and condos, insisting on conditions that would make it unmarketable.
New proposals to build housing at Devens over the years have triggered the typical litany of suburban complaints about paying to educate additional children and the potential for increased police and fire costs.
All that said, removing the cap is not likely to end efforts by local officials to keep new housing development at Devens at a minimum, though it certainly strikes a significant blow.
Under Eldridge’s amendment, the Healey administration would be required to convene a task force to produce a report examining how much new housing can be built at Devens.
And officials from the towns that surround Devens - Ayer, Harvard and Shirley - are all slated to serve on the housing panel.
So while the cap may be gone, the locals will still get another try to keep the lid on proposals to make Devens - where thousands of service members once lived - a hub for housing once again.
Hitting the nail on the head: With Trump leading in the polls, rebel Mass. congressman urges his fellow Dems to “look at ourselves in the mirror”
When it comes to President Biden’s cognitive challenges and his fast-sinking presidential campaign, it’s been radio silence from the Bay State’s congressional delegation.
That is, except for U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, who has been outspoken in his calls for Biden to step aside in the wake of his catastrophic debate performance and his series of not terribly reassuring interviews and media appearances.
“Right now we are on the path to losing,” the Salem Democrat and decorated Iraq War veteran warned in a Friday morning appearance on GBH’s Boston Public Radio.
But Moulton also had a tough love message as well for his fellow Dems.
“The Republican Party … is led by a convicted criminal, someone who is a terrible person, who everyone knows is a hypocrite,” Moulton told BPR hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan? “Yet Democrats are not winning. This should be the easiest election for us ever. We should be cleaning up from school board to president of the United States, yet we are not. What does that say about us?”
Good question - but wait, there’s more.
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