Search results

Yes, obviously I, and many others, think the SJC made a bad decision on this issue. I referred to how this horribly crafted law was popularly understood leading up to Healey's administration. This ruling doesn't change that. Now I guess this is no longer a legal problem, but a political one.

As I mentioned earlier, the MBTA Communities Act originated as a few short paragraphs in an omnibus bill that consisted of thousands of pages. One of those paragraphs was devoted to specifying the penalties for non-compliant municipalities, and that penalty was... disqualification from receiving...

The actual law passed during the Baker administration was a vague three paragraphs slipped into a 2000-page omnibus bill. The Healey administration took that and blew it up into the EOHLC's 27 pages of guidelines. I love how the supporters of this law don't even have the courage to own it, and...

Wrong. This was not a total defeat at all. The SJC invalidated the EOHLC's guidelines, so there is currently nothing to be in compliance with. None of the current municipalities that failed to adhere to this mandate are in violation of the law, so there is no basis for the AG to sue. The...

Affordable. Housing. Crisis. There isn't a housing shortage. There's an affordable housing shortage. The idea that we're going to build our way out of this problem by zoning little districts of Roslindales next to cow pastures in places like Sudbury is misguided and unrealistic. This is a...

Oh no! Are they Housing Crisis Deniers? Let's ascribe malicious intentions to their points of view and demonize them.

Then give them a few more and ask them to make it not look so shitty.

Amazing. Old photos and films like this one make you feel like we're currently living in the post-apocalyptic remnants of a once great civilization.

I'm having a hard time finding anything "lyrikal" about these stumpy beige habitats for apparently 12-foot-tall humanoids.

The rate of population increase could be gradual or it could be rapid. Just like the percentage of population increase may be low or it may extremely high. For towns and cities that embrace the spirit of the mandate, it will most likely be the latter in both cases. As I've already pointed out...

I'm shocked at how incompetent this revamp actually is. The design approach seems to be to just plop down more inexplicable landscape features and paths in random directions through the square. Raised Grove? WTF is this? But these aspects are merely frustrating. What really bothers me is the...

This seems to be our contemporary take on old commie slab housing, but I think it's even worse. Many of those Corbusian towers in the park at least ostensibly considered the well being of their inhabitants. The idea was that constructing towers would free up the land around them for greenery and...

Of course a substantial increase in population will put an additional strain on a municipality's infrastructure and public systems. It will also have a significant effect on the quality of life in the city or town. Come on now. This is just blatantly obvious.

To most of the affected 177 municipalities, these are not modest zoning changes; they're quite dramatic. The mandated EOHLC guidelines force municipalities to designate a single-use, multi-unit residential district overlay that can accommodate at least the number of units equal to 5% - 25% of...

Your argument has no basis in reality. Both Boston and Cambridge are still below their 1950 population numbers. In the same 75-year period up to today, Boston has lost a net 150,000 people, while the net Massachusetts population has expanded by 2.5 million. During the period when the...

Something that no one seems to be acknowledging is the fact that each of these 177 municipalities already have, and have had, the power to implement this zoning at any time. They can even exceed the mandated 3a requirements if they want. In fact, they can implement any kind of zoning they wish...

Good for Marshfield. This law is awful and the one-size-fits-all urban planning it imposes is equally awful. If we're going to have to have zoning, I'd rather it be kept under local control rather than be dictated by an nonelected state commission, such as the EOHLC.

These giant lumpy boxes that have become so common in the last decade are virtually-interchangeable. They're soulless and unappealing, and their relentless proliferation is making our whole built environment soulless and unappealing. Looking at these buildings, it's as if they're trying to take...

Are we currently living in the Precariously Stacked Boxes Period of architecture?

Super interesting. I really appreciate it, sm89. Thanks. 16 units, 50 bedrooms, 42 baths. Wild.