Contrarian Boston/03.12.2024
Right-wing feud spurs call for boycott of struggling Herald | Penalties unlikely for T subway car manufacturer, despite defects and delays | No silver bullet for Mass. housing woes | Gamblers like Biden’s odds | Steward mess a cautionary tale |
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Big flop? The Bay State’s main response to the housing crisis is fizzling amid covert NIMBY opposition and overly optimistic projections
An ocean of digital ink has been spilled over Milton’s flagrant refusal to comply with the MBTA Communities Act.
But such acts of open rebellion, while headline grabbers, may not be the biggest challenge to the law, which requires towns and cities across Eastern Massachusetts to open their doors to desperately needed new apartments and condos.
Rather, an even greater threat may be found among suburbs that are technically complying with the law, but in ways that could make it difficult to actually build substantial amounts of new housing anytime soon.
A number of towns are cramming already built-out areas, including industrial parks, malls and downtown blocks, into the multifamily housing zones they are required to create near T stations under the MBTA Communities law, housing researcher Amy Dain tells Contrarian Boston.
“There is going to be in the long run a real issue of how much net new housing will be allowed,” Dain said.
In other cases, some communities are attempting to comply with the law by drawing their new multi-family zones around areas that already have substantial residential development.
A prime example can be found in Chelmsford, where the town’s planning board has designed its required multifamily zone around a stretch of Route 110 that is already built out with condo complexes, Banker & Tradesman reports.
“If the state is telling me to do something, I’m going to comply, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to make it easy to develop,” Planning Board member Annita Tanini said at the Feb. 28 public hearing, according to B&T. “It’s making as many barriers to entry as possible.”
Meanwhile, loose projections thrown about by the Baker and now Healey administrations that the new MBTA zoning law could yield more than 200,000 new apartments, homes and condos may be grossly overstated.
In other cities that have also loosened restrictions on the amount of new housing that can be built around transit hubs, just 5 to 10 percent of the properties are typically redeveloped within five years of the change, writes Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, the research center of the Boston Foundation, in an op-ed in CommonWealth Beacon.
That, in turn, would yield just 20,000 to 40,000 of new units of housing by the end of the decade.
Just a relative drop in the bucket given the state’s massive housing shortage.
Consequence-free zone? New T chief sings same old song when it comes to troubled deal for new subway cars
Years behind on delivering new Orange and Red Line cars to the T, the Chinese manufacturer behind the whole mess could face tens of millions in fines for all the delays.
And that’s before we get into the dozens of cars that were delivered by CRRC, only to be yanked out of service by the T in order to be repaired after wiring issues and other malfunctions.
Yet when Contrarian Boston caught up with him the other day, Phillip Eng, who took over the T last summer as general manager, didn’t seem particularly eager to even discuss CRRC’s well-documented failings, let alone slap penalties on the giant state-owned enterprise.
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