Multi-Family Zoning Requirements for MBTA Communities

DZH22 said:
It's probably a 10-20 minute drive to the last stop on either line. From there either line is well over an hour to Boston.
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As I said before, the housing shortage isn't just a Greater Boston issue, it's a Massachusetts issue. We can't ignore the housing needs of Central Mass just because there's a lot of unmet demand for housing in Greater Boston.

DZH22 said:
So we should somehow treat them the same way we'd treat, say, Woburn, which is about a 25 minute ride?
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We aren't treating Holden the way we treat Woburn. Woburn has to zone for 2,631 units because it has a Commuter Rail station. Holden only has to zone for 750 units.
 
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themissinglink said:
Holden isn't a "small town", it's a midsize bedroom community. It has a population of ~20,000, and it's part of the Worcester Metropolitan area. Why shouldn't they be subject to this law? The housing shortage isn't just a Greater Boston issue; it's a Massachusetts issue.
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We should look at ways to stimulate more housing in places like Holden without a doubt, so long as it is near the town center and coupled with a bus to Worcester's Union Station. But I agree with DZH22 that this seems to be shoehorning a rule designed for a different purpose into a more general and widespread reform. My take on the MBTA communities act is that is is meant to stimulate TOD, not just general development in any community where people might drive to a station. We don't want people driving to stations, we want them living near stations. Holden isn't the right target for a law with a TOD purpose.

DZH22 said:
To me, keeping the forests intact serves the health of the state. I don't want to clear cut forests to put up some barely-dense housing when we should instead be telling Boston to turn their 3-6 story housing proposals into 20-50 stories. It also meets the "green" mandates better to have more housing in the already dense cities of Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, etc than to put them in far-flung suburbs. The carbon footprints per unit are much smaller in the cities. But I guess you can't have a Massachusetts law unless it's paired with wild hypocrisy.
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The largest goal for housing construction in eastern Massachusetts should be high density 15 minute neighborhoods built around transit nodes, and especially not focused on the few areas not already touched by sprawling development.
 
My goodness what a terrible article that is. They did a whole zoning process to identify places where density would work, and developers are proposing in those places - vacant lots, empty parking lots, low-rise office parks, Hartwell Avenue, but heaven forbid. 89 Bedford Street is located 0.1 miles from a medical office building and multistory retail complex at a neighborhood commercial center - on one side of it are a pair of probably 5 million dollar semi-detached mcmansions and a completely unremarkable street of ranch houses curls around the back. Yet from the way the author describes it you'd think it was replacing one whole side of the Battle Green. They also mix in a lot of photos of Hartwell to make it look like the enormous buildings there are being built all over the city.

You approved a plan to build housing, then bailed when it turned out that people wanted to build housing near you. There's a word for that... what is it...
 
Equilibria said:
They did a whole zoning process to identify places where density would work, and developers are proposing in those places - vacant lots, empty parking lots, low-rise office parks, Hartwell Avenue, but heaven forbid.
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Right - I can think of nothing more "out of character with the historic character of Lexington" than Hartwell Avenue of the last 30+ years.

Dense and walkable apartment blocks there would surely be more in line with what the founding fathers pictured than this nonsense.
 
Hey, that medical office building was the site of an old trolley barn. We can’t be destroying the memory of that…
 
Someone needs to just call these people liars. Complaints about densifying Hartwell are patently absurd. It's formally part of Lexington, but culturally it's an industrial zone across the freeway next to a freakin air force base/airport. It's basically part of Bedford, let's be honest. And for people living there and commuting into the Boston area they would need to cross several onramps before causing dreaded traffic in downtown Lexington.

There's a cruise missile firm currently on Hartwell Ave and I don't recall press or the town condemning that opening up. But apartments, now we're going to get into fights at the city council. Reminder that what these people care about is potential devaluation of their prime assets (their homes) that they have juiced by restricting any competition. Press shouldn't let them get away with it.
 
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