Brookline Infill and Small Developments

Word on the street from this summer was some massive neighborhood-wide sewage issue (the details of which I try not to imagine...)
 
The interesting thing is that Beacon is down to a single lane throughout most of the St Paul to St Mary's stretch. True, it's slower at rush hour, but many cars will now detour down Longwood to the Riverway or up St Paul towards Comm or Storrow. It just shows once again that diminishing a road's capacity - even a major one like Beacon - does not necessarily create perpetual gridlock.
 
Youd think they would have maybe thought of doing that 3 years ago when all of beacon st was rebuilt from scratch.
 
The Capital One location in Coolidge Corner looks like it is getting close to finally opening.
 
mass88 said:
The Capital One location in Coolidge Corner looks like it is getting close to finally opening.
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I can't even begin to express how unexciting this is. This prominent corner will have lights out after 5.

Banks should have received the memo by now that their business has gone online.
 
Yeah, I can't understand all this banks opening new storefronts. It like newspapers buying new printing presses.
 
Over here in California, Chase opened 10+ locations in the last year in just one city

It boggles all aspects of the mind
 
I can see why it is frustrating to have tons of branches being opened by the same small number of banks, but it isn't mind-boggling.

Banks themselves would prefer not to open branches; branches mean all sorts of overhead, labor costs -- in a word they are theoretically much more expensive than servicing clients online.

However, banks found out the hard way that their dreams a few years back of cutting down costs significantly by moving business online weren't going to pan out. It turns out that lots of people still like having a bank branch nearby -- and that this drives their decision of where to keep their money and, more importantly, where to take out a loan.

In particular, high-value customers (those who take out commercial/personal loans and mortgages, need wealth management, etc.) like to have personalized service from a real, live human. And, given that most banks that don't intend to go belly-up want to see the person they're giving a loan to, banks also want to do a lot of their business face-to-face. Hence, banks continue to have branches even if the main points of contact many of us have with our banks today are online and through an ATM that doesn't seem like it should need to take up an entire storefront.

A surplus (though I'm not going to define what constitutes a "surplus") of bank branches can have a negative impact on streetlife ... but, then again, with no financial institutions there wouldn't be much of an economy (or streetlife) to speak of, and we do have a hundreds-year-old history of having banks at the center of town and city commercial districts. One of the big differences between then and now is that we used to have more local, regional banks (in part because of legislation that forbade banks to be national institutions).

Today (as compared with the US in most of the postwar period) there are a smaller number of banks overall but a larger number of big, national players that compete for customers, so pretty much every town will host a few of their branches. A big part of the reason why banks are consolidating is nationwide regulation pushed primarily by Obama and the Democrats because they think that having a smaller number of bigger banks (a la Canada) will make regulators' jobs easier (with fewer banks to look after) ... and because only large, complex institutions with massive back offices can comply with the huge amount of regulation in the finance sector.
 
I was told by Michael, from the deli next door, that this is their first New England location. So they do need to have a physical presence in the area. I go into the Bank of America in Coolidge Corner right across the street for work related things and that location always have a good number of customers inside.


The Trader Joes has finished its expansion and the new store is even better than before. More space and an expanded beer/wine department.
 
I knew it, it's Obama's fault!

itchy said:
A big part of the reason why banks are consolidating is nationwide regulation pushed primarily by Obama and the Democrats because they think that having a smaller number of bigger banks (a la Canada) will make regulators' jobs easier (with fewer banks to look after) ... and because only large, complex institutions with massive back offices can comply with the huge amount of regulation in the finance sector.
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Maybe banks should stick to opening 2nd floor locations?
 
The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999 by Republicans in congress, not in the 21st century by Obama. Thus allowing big, risky investment banks to buy out your safe local Joe-Schmoe Bank where Joe Schmoe keeps his money. Both McCain and Obama either support reinstating Glass-Steagall or reinstalling some mechanisms of it.
 
^^ I never implied that the repeal of Glass-Steagall has happened in the last 3 years. However, in the last few years we have had a huge heap of new regulations introduced that are causing "too big to fail" banks to be ever-deeper ingrained in the country's financial system, and even more "too big to fail" than they'd previously been.

Cases in point include the manifold regulations in Dodd-Frank, which are causing consolidation (no, the likes of the New York Times don't write about this much, but you see it in M&A trends and when speaking to banking industry sources) because smaller banks find it difficult to comply and larger banks are advantaged in having huge compliance operations, as well as more sophisticated ways of guaranteeing they have adequate capital cushions.

The entire financial sector bailout also was aimed at shoring up the largest banks. Preventing them from failing is good in itself, but after preventing a messy collapse of any one bank, the government may have pushed for a "break-up" solution rather than encouraging the likes of Bear Stearns, WaMu and Wachovia to simply be swallowed up by bigger banks -- making those bigger banks even larger and even more "too big to fail."

There are a chorus of people, whom the Dems/Obama admin seem to be listening to, saying that having a smaller number of nationwide banks is more "stable" and easier to regulate than having a huge proliferation of local banks. There have been numerous NYT op-eds urging the US have a more consolidated commercial and retail banking sector, like Canada.

Yet those of us on the Left expect that, like them, the whole world goes around blaming George Bush (by no means a good president) for all the world's ills ... but subject to just the slightest bit of critical thinking the Cult of Obama, and boy oh boy you'll face blowback :)
 
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Sorry, what does this have to do with Brookline development other than "I'm right," and "No, I'm right"? I come here to read about architectural projects and Boston politics, not whether having three banks is good or bad for the n'tl economy.
 
Right, because no thread ever deviates from strict project updates... :rolleyes:
 
From the Brookline Tab
http://www.wickedlocal.com/brooklin...s-dwindle-costs-could-skyrocket#axzz1nDHfVCOp

Brookline —
Getting a liquor license in Brookline could get a lot more expensive in the near future.

Under state law, Brookline can issue 63 liquor licenses to restaurants in town. If the Board of Selectmen approve two applications later this month, the town will have just two left. At the moment, restauranters looking for a license can go to the town and pony up $3,600 to $4,850 a year. But if Brookline runs out, the licenses would become commodities, worth tens of thousands of dollars on the open market.

“Clearly, it’s got some value to it,” said Joe Handley, an attorney with McDermott, Quilty & Miller, a law firm that handles liquor licenses in the Boston area. “It’s really going to depend on how strong the demand is.”
Handley, who’s also a member of Brookline’s Licensing Review Committee, said liquor licenses in Boston are going for around $275,000 to $300,000, but he expects they’d be worth anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 in Brookline if the town runs out. While it’s not as high as in Boston, it’s certainly an additional impediment to small business owners looking to start a restaurant in town.

“What we have always enjoyed, and we like, is the ability for someone to come in and join the Brookline community,” said Betsy DeWitt, chairwoman of the Brookline selectmen, and co-chair of the Licensing Review Committee. “Our concern is that when our quota runs out, we then have a substantial barrier to people entering into food business in Brookline.”

While Selectman Ken Goldstein, also a co-chair of the Licensing Review Committee, said he’s not sure how much the licenses would be worth, he suspects the higher cost could make it harder for the little guy, leading to companies with deeper pockets taking a bigger portion of the market.

“I think it could mean more chains, and not startups,” he said.
Handley said that’s a reasonable fear.

“The problem that has manifested a little bit in Boston is that it’s only allowed some of the bigger operations to open,” he said.

Charles Perkins, founder of the Boston Restaurant Group, a real estate firm specializing in restaurants, said the extra cost could be too much for some prospective owners to bear. A number of years ago, he said, he helped broker a deal for Lineage, a restaurant in Coolidge Corner. He said owner Jeremy Sewall spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to open the space, and he’s not sure he could have absorbed the additional cost of an expensive license.
“Jeremy’s investment was probably $300,000. If he had to do a couple hundred thousand more, it might have been out of reach,” he said.

Officials said the problem is there’s not all that much they can do about the issue. State regulations tie allotted licenses to a given area’s population, about one license per 1,000 residents. Increasing the number of licenses would require a change in state law.

Goldstein said that’s exactly what the town would like to see, adding they’ve petitioned the state Legislature to change the law. That’s a tack being taken by other communities as well.

“I don’t think that the limit on alcohol-serving establishments should be set by an arbitrary means,” he said. “I think it's for the community itself to determine.”

According to DeWitt, the other thing the town is doing is taking a more proactive approach to monitoring licenses they’ve already granted to make sure they’re being properly used. In the past, when licenses were plentiful, renewal was often a rubber stamp. Not anymore.

“We’re reviewing renewals more carefully,” she said

Recently, for example, the board grilled the management of Japonaise Bakery about their license, which sat unused for years. The bakery now says they’ll begin serving alcohol, but DeWitt said the selectmen would be paying closer attention. If they don’t use the license, the town won’t renew, she said.

“We would be disinclined to renew because we expect this license to be in active use,” she said.

But not everybody thinks higher license costs would be a game changer.

Nelson Cognac, owner of Cognac Bistro in JFK Crossing, said he would have come to Brookline even if he’d had to pay $50,000 to $100,000 for a liquor license. After all, he said, Brookline would still be cheaper than Boston.

“It may make it a little harder…to start up a place,” he said. “[But] it probably wouldn’t be scary enough that it would keep somebody from moving ahead with the project.”
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Shepard said:
From the Brookline Tab
http://www.wickedlocal.com/brooklin...s-dwindle-costs-could-skyrocket#axzz1nDHfVCOp
Click to expand...


Real simple -- let the banks also offer liquor licenses based on the number of branches -- I mean if you can't trust a bank to guard you virtue -- then who could you trust

Lexington Center which used to have a nice mix of retail and restaurants is now mostly banks and restaurants

At a corner which traditionally had a gas station we have a TD Bank branch in a new building nearly ready to open up

Note full disclosure my wife works for a small bank with only a handful of branches
 
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