The way that part of Brookline contains density is actually very impressive, perhaps ideal. The number of huge apartment buildings that somehow just feel nicely tucked in all over the place around there is under-appreciated. I've always wondered about what was going on in the planning board in the 60s; no question some people made a shitload of money, and no question it pissed off a lot of residents which is why the zoning got clamped down. Yet, it actually works really well.
Problem is nobody wants to truly change their neighborhood. We have not come close to reckoning with how much change is actually needed. In the 19th century, people waltzed into low density towns, razed every building to the ground and build entire streets with walk ups and triple deckers. Nobody is prepared to just take ten streets in Brookline or Roslindale and level every fuckin building and replace them with 6-stories and up. Yet that is the level of change that happened 100 years ago and that's really what we need now. And to do that would inexorably change the living shit out of our neighborhoods, to the point they'd be unrecognizable. I'd be surprised if anyone on here truly is ready for that. We morn the loss of elegant urbanism here constantly. Anytime the mom and pop closes or the cute taxpayer on the corner gets leveled, we know we lost something irreplaceable. But if the entire region isnt to become just some museum, literally we need boldness to the point of razing every building under 3 stories on every major corridor, destroying whole swaths of Cambridgeport, etc etc. Tinkering around with one street at a time, one site at a time, we are not making any headway at all.
I have always wanted someone to calculate a real number of new housing that would be needed to staunch the housing price increase in the region. As in, people say we need x-hundred-thousand new housing units just to provide space for the people who need to live here, but what's the number needed across the region to slow the housing value increase by $x per year? Such a number would be staggering and throw into high relief how truly dire a situation we're in. If housing costs have increased at x percent over ten years and we want to slow that by y percent over the next ten years, whatever the number of new units required for each incremental reduction in cost, I guarantee you it would be far, far higher than anyone imagines. And if we actually need, say, one million new housing units simply to keep costs from increasing as fast as they have been, where in the hell do you even think about putting them? Even a hundred thousand units inside 128—that's a huge number. Neighbors fight the BPDC tooth and nail over projects that add a couple dozen per project at best. The Shawmut story in the Globe today, for example. I feel like even this Brookline policy shift is a pitifully small drop in the bucket. Anything Wu does—same. What is the way forward? But we need those numbers and to get a lot more serious about them.
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