I believe that in the near future the city will develop only for the better and give joy to its inhabitants.
The odds don't favor it.
In Massachusetts, long considered a progressive state, measures that aim to ease restrictions on construction and blunt some of the nation’s highest housing costs have gone nowhere.
www.bostonglobe.com
Yes, Boston has added significant housing in the past few years. The activity is praiseworthy. But, recent experience doesn't provide abundant evidence to support your optimistic opinion. Quite the contrary.
First, outside Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, etc, Greater Boston has virtually stopped building homes. This is creating a huge distortion in our marketplace; especially for the area of affordability.
Boston continues to build far too much in an archaic, land-scraping mindset--worse, from an abusive process, where bitterly waged neighborhood fights have brought about delays, ultimately ending with failures. The process leans far too much toward the interests of anti-development. Boston housing development is clearly trending toward much lower heights and modest scale in the near future, while peer cities are stepping on the gas.
Roxbury, Charlestown, The Fenway, Mission Hill, and most of the neighborhoods aren't building or urbanizing nearly fast enough to meet the real, critical need. Thousands of affordable units have been lost by 20 (or more) failed or endlessly delayed towers in the last few years. The gloomy turn of events will clearly have a chilling effect going forward.
Lost or delayed (many years):
Tremont Crossing, (2 highrises)
Andrew Square (2 highrises + midrise)
Columbus Ctr (iconic, 420' + 4 mid-rises, 1000 housing units/hotel keys lost)
no takers for parcels 25, 26, 27 & 28, (2 highrises)
2 highrise projects in Chinatown appear to have been vaporized
South Boston power station (over 1000 units lost)
One Charlestown (3 highrises gone, well over 1000 thousand units lost)
2 Charlesgate W (several hundred units lost)
45 Worthington St (several hundred units)
1 Bromfield St (hundreds of lux units and housing linkage payments lost)
Copley Tower (hundreds of lux units and housing linkage payments lost)
1000 Boylston (~170 lux units and housing linkage payments lost)
Fenway Ctr air rights (probably never will be built)
Dudley Square (hundreds of units delayed)
Harbor Garage (hundreds of lux units and housing linkage payments delayed)
housing costs spiraling out of control,
if anything, affordability is becoming a pipe-dream,
with a housing start process slower than molasses,
A transit system not delivering w/ serious challenges increasingly met by
gross incompetence, and under-performance--
all added to endless nimby bullshit.
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