Public entities don't need to use eminent domain; they can acquire property on the private market just like anybody else. The market just showed that this parcel could be had for ~$125 MM.
In your view, would full T/MassDOT ownership and control of this parcel be worth $125 MM to the public? If so, then the T / MassDOT should have acquired it. (This is an honest question; I'm not trying to troll or argue.)
$125 MM is obviously a ton of money, but if this parcel is truly central to operations it could possibly be worth it. For example, how many millions could be saved at Beacon Park if the T owned Widett? With full control and ownership, the T could use the parcel as they see fit, ideally realize cost savings elsewhere, and sell future sub-divided development rights to other entities to recoup costs.
I think so, because to use the ground-level easement (spaced for air rights from Day 1 as per all study renders to date) they'll be doing up their flood mitigation & pumping plans from Day 1 before the bowl is even graded. Because anything under MassDOT's umbrella is required to do the flood mitigation non-optional. The "not being as worth it" aspect for the free market comes more with the
time that gets wasted dickering about these things instead of formulating actual plans. The risk is either going waaaaay too far into along into the real estate renders and then suddenly realizing "Wait...who pays for the decking?" and watching it implode into gravitational singularity in a week's time like B24's great gaffe.
Or, it devolves into a decade-long staring contest like:
- "Well, I can't commit to a specced land use unless you tell me what flood mitigation is going to cost and what funds I can tap?"
- "Well, I can't tell you what flood mitigation you have to do or what funds we can offer until you give me something concrete for planned land use."
- "You first."
- "No U."
- "Whoever smelt it dealt it!"
If left to their own devices the institutions with "Planning" in their name and the developer it's aiding in the transaction can't remember that planning of this exact sort is a prereq to getting anything done, what function do they serve except wasting money and devaluing land? But, again...Widett's just the proverbial canary in a coalmine for the larger problem. Such a huge slice of the highest-upside remaining properties are either 1) waterfront-ish needing flood mitigation prereqs, or 2) stacked over other (mostly transpo) infrastructure. You can take your own annotated Google Map of hot dev sites throughout the city and pretty much start affixing question mark placeholders to all the ones at risk of getting upended by similar inanity if we don't learn. So if we're not remembering to do this up-front, how do we expect to get things done? Or use our time/money
inside of the planning process wisely instead of chewing it to stale gum?
The answer doesn't always have to be MassDOT involvement. But
somebody kickstarting the process has to be the first to ask the question, because not doing so has proven time and again to do nothing but waste time, money, and sow frustration and frayed planning relationships across the city. While, more often than not, ensuring that nothing gets built at all or what does is a pale, pale echo of original ambitions. I don't, for instance, think anyone's going to be truly well-served by letting Widett stalemate for 5 years over no flood or access plan and
then deciding to make a "Mommy, help" call to MassDOT to bail them out with a better plan. It might get somethingorother built in the end, but it'll surely be more watered-down and less satisfactorily mutually-serving by a wide margin for that to have to happen years later after everyone's beyond sick of dealing with each other. We're already seeing that with the Beacon Park stalemate's de-evolution on all sides of that alleged "partnership": the storage yard that's no longer useful-enough storage, the 'union' station's forced inverted isolation from its surroundings, the incomprehensible chunky street grid, the absolute crickets from Harvard on what types of parcels such a nonsensical grid would divide, etc.
You'd think with something as easy to grasp as "need flood mitigation or All The Things a no-go" that the urgency to involve infrastructure planning up-front would start showing signs of applying learned behavior, especially after such littany of recent examples where failing to do so directly tanked the project. Apparently BDPA has instead decided after looking straight into that abyss to go: "Now hold my beer. . ."
Put it this way: I
highly recommend losing onesself in that other Widett planning thread I linked and adding 12 more pages of purely fun-stuff member contributions. It'll be an enormously more satisfying and mentally healthier exercise than watching the years go by in this current events thread where each successive news item has the principals staring at the same starting spot utterly kerfuzzled that magic isn't happening in spite of themselves.
