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No NIMBYs found - Forum member InTheHood was all wrong to write on 20 July: “Flaherty is a garden variety NIMBY who lives at 75 Clarendon and would just as soon the Pike be left untouched” and “the most rabid opposition to CC has always been from residents of 75 Clarendon and the Pope building whose views would be compromised - they LIKE the trench.”
-----None of that is true.
-----I am an urban planning activist who eleven years ago co-founded the non-profit Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods, which educates citizens about urban planning issues. For 15 years, I have endorsed fully developing all air rights over I-90 (turnpike) and I-93 (Big Dig), and all public comments from residents in both abutting buildings have agreed.
-----There is no record of any “NIMBY” opposition to air rights development; that is merely a label used to dismiss valid criticisms of the failed aspects of this 12-year old proposal.
-----
Project was sold, then became insolvent - After the former owners sold both the Columbus Center company and the project on 15 March 2006, the new owners wrote to state officials that their project would be insolvent without a looser lease, lower rent, and larger subsidies. [See "Is Columbus Center up in the air?"
Boston Globe, 25 August 2006, at
www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/08/25/is_columbus_center_up_in_the_air/.] They never paid the rent, investor funds weren’t released, bank loans weren’t disbursed, insurance policies weren’t issued, and the 7-year construction schedule never started.
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What citizens still oppose - Here’s help for forum members like Atlantaden, who admits being confused about why so many people oppose Columbus Center. People across the city oppose: (1) deletion of the 2-acre public park required by the Turnpike Master Plan; (2) conversion of three promised public parks into privately owned gardens; (3) air pollution from 14 railway and roadway tunnels being captured, concentrated, and vented into the community; (4) no competitive bids; (5) no financial disclosure; and (6) hundreds of millions of dollars in 14 public subsidies to a project that was proposed at 300% of the allowable density because it was going to be subsidy-free.
-----In addition to multiple grants and low-interest government loans, the subsidies include federal income taxes waived for many years, state income taxes waived for 7 years, and city property taxes waived for 19 years, so that the new owners’ taxes are waived, while the public pays for the project.
-----Most recently, the new owners bribed a public agency $500,000 to re-draw Boston's poverty boundary so it illegally wraps around their luxury skyscraper complex, to get low-interest loans and income tax breaks from federal "anti-poverty" programs. Even the bribe itself was to be paid using public funds. [See "HUD to investigate expansion of Boston Empowerment Zone",
South End News, 16 August 2007, in on-line news archives at
www.SouthEndNews.com.]
-----Everyone wants air rights developed. But no responsible citizen wants non-competitive awards, to unaudited developers, who increase air pollution instead of filtering it, who privatize or delete required public parks, for a project where the former owners promised zero subsidies to get their approvals, and new owners now demand that the public fund their costs, their profits, and even their bribes.[/code]
