Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos
I agree that Alexandria is the model, but how do we make it happen? Put another way, why didn't this happen with our own Orange Line in Roxbury, JP, and Malden?
Massachusetts towns, being small and compact compared to Counties are bad at thinking about people who are new and different from whomever lives there now. They usually have just the 1 high school and 1 low-rise "center" and 40 years ago, 1 hospital. And a homogenous housing stock no more variant than single, 2-flat and 3-flat. New high rises would, by definition, be filled with "outsiders" and people who choose to live differently--aliens--and people who are definitely *not* represented at Town Meeting. They are also bad at planning and zoning because they lack the will to make winners and losers and the best they can do is push the town dump to the border with a neighboring town (usually Woburn ;-)
Meanwhile, in suburban Virginia, everyone is from someplace else in America, drawn to the capital in waves since the 1930s, and they don't(didn't) have a rigid sense of what their town should be and the County was too big to ever try to impose one. If some newcomers want single-family, that's ok. If some want high-rises, home owners have been known to band with their neighbors and sell out to developers together and move on. The jurisdictions are also county-level, and so the county administers 5 to 10 high schools or more. Somewhere was a natural place for a real downtown with tall buildings. A 5-person county council also doubled as the zoning commission and made a master plan for 30 square miles.
Arlington MA and Arlington VA offer powerful contrasts (they are both the source of my nickname, having lived in both).
Arlington (Town) MA is just 5 square miles. It can't even figure out that Alewife could accommodate high rises in East Arlington. In classic New England style, though, Cambridge chose to mass its "undesireable" uses (public housing towers, WR Grace chemicals, and now tall buildings) butting up against the Arlington line. Today Arlington can't figure out who those people were who didn't bring the Red Line to Town and yet they aren't self aware enough to see that it is pretty much the same people (them) who today won't take the Town to the Red Line by upzoning Alewife. From 1970 to 2010 population declined 20% (from 53k to 42k)
Meanwhile Arlington (County) VA is 26 square miles and insisted that its Orange Line come right down the spine of town (not the median of I-66). They Bulldozed Clarendon Blvd "Haussmann-style" parallel to the existing Wilson Blvd to solidify their grid (which got griddy alphabetical names in the 1930s during the first wave of new deal /WWII growth) and buried the Orange Line under Clarendon Blvd and upzoned everything around it, and yes, essentially added 30% to the housing stock of the county from 1970 to 2010 (population grew much less because household size collapsed, but population rose 16% from 178k to 208k)
