Yeah, that's me
@Wonk and I'm happy to own that sentiment. Nobody is asking you to knock down your suburban town's historic buildings or cut down your forests. I'd be against that.
They're saying you need to zone so that some, I don't know, parking lots or gas stations or goddamn self-storage buildings in your town center could *legally* *potentially* be developed into housing.
That housing doesn't have to be 5/1s. It could be nice brick rowhouses, or whatever type of MFH town is willing to allow and incentivize.
Adding on to extra emphasize that "Denser housing" doesn't mean 5over1s, apartment buildings, etc. It could be some duplexes/triplexes in a neighborhood that's currently single-family dwellings. If you're worried about the "character" of quiet single-family house streets this is probably the densification for you. It could be one or two storeys of apartments built on top of existing downtown shops, which can bring new life to a downtown that's been gutted by suburban shopping malls, or it can be a new block of row-houses, like you see in the South End, built where some parking lots, self-storage facilities, car dealerships, etc used to be.
The rate of population increase could be gradual or it could be rapid. Just like the percentage of population increase may be low or it may extremely high. For towns and cities that embrace the spirit of the mandate, it will most likely be the latter in both cases.
If "the spirit of the mandate" means bulldozing a bunch of existing buildings or erecting massive new developments on underused land, then sure. But you and I both know that's not what's going to happen. Urban development is an extremely slow process. Rezoning opens the door to redevelopment, which gets some developers interested, who then start looking at land costs, who then have to jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops, who then need to design their building or buildings, jump through some more hoops, and then finally start building. None of this is rapid.
As I've already pointed out, municipalities are forbidden from limiting the number of occupants or bedrooms in these as of right units within these new districts. Even if you add 20% more net units to the municipality, the actual number of additional residents may be far higher.
If you had a town where everyone lived in their own house and a bunch of families with 5 kids moved in, then sure. But again, you and I both know that these suburbs are filled with families with 1-2 kids, and the people moving in will be young professionals with 0-2 kids.
There is an elephant in the room here, and that is that this law is premised on a paradigm that has become obviously anachronistic. The model that has hundreds of thousands of people all pouring into Boston from the suburbs in the morning and all pouring out of Boston back into the suburbs in the evening. People don't have to do this anymore, nor do they want to. Just as people don't need to pile into the city to fill all those shoe factories, auto plants and shipyards anymore, they don't need to fill those gargantuan corporate office towers anymore. The work-from-home revolution has happened, and COVID was its proof of concept. Businesses realized that they didn't have to spend millions of dollars on office space and workers got back the enormous chunk of the lives that was being wasted getting to and from their cubicles everyday. We're not going back. Those empty office buildings downtown are going to stay that way. Subsequently, the MBTA, who's ridership numbers have absolutely plummeted since COVID, isn't going to get those riders back either.
This is all true, people are not commuting like they used to, but it's also not relevant. It doesn't change the fundamental truth that MA needs more homes, and urban sprawl is fundamentally unsustainable. Given those two facts, denser housing is the
only solution. And to use your own words, why should a denser housing plan be focused exclusively on the gigantic, centralized model revolving around the Shawmut peninsula?
A large increase in population will have a substantial impact on traffic to most of these municipalities. Supporters of this law just seems to get all hand wavy and dismissive whenever this is brought up, as if no one will have to rely on a car anymore because they can just base their existence on the commuter rail station a mile down the road. This is just absurd, of course. There will be an enormous influx of cars onto the local roads in these towns, many of which are already choking in traffic.
If you make literally everything except the population static and unchanging, then sure. But if you say, add a cycle path between some new developments, and the local grocery store, then suddenly this is no longer true.
