With four subsidized innovation centers, subsidized conference rooms, subsidized accelerator space, publicly-financed hotels, $1 leases for office space on public property, a few hundred $mil in tax breaks, and an $8 billion trough of public investment in roads, ramps, MBTA, harbor improvements and BCEC, trust me...
The private enterprise system is running on all (Pugeot) cylinders.
With four subsidized innovation centers, subsidized conference rooms, subsidized accelerator space, publicly-financed hotels, $1 leases for office space on public property, a few hundred $mil in tax breaks, and an $8 billion trough of public investment in roads, ramps, MBTA, harbor improvements and BCEC, trust me...
The private enterprise system is running on all (Pugeot) cylinders.
EDIT: Changed three to four subsidized innovation centers. In July, the BRA approved Innovation Center #4 at 399 Congress Street.
Thats the problem everything is subsidized we won't get private money to help the system run it a more cost efficient manner. It's called mismangement This was Detroit problems. BUILD BUILD BUILD (its called job creation) Boston is very different than Detroit and I don't see us following the same dire financial situation as them (Thanks to MIT)
For Example BIG DIG MONEY PIT. It looks great but the monthly maintaince is out of control for the tunnels.
When you build something make sure its cost efficient along with Safety for the taxpayers and the people of Mass.
No, I'm saying it's elitist when some members criticize it by saying it makes it look like Houston as the primary reason. I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure other major cities like NYC, Chicago, Toronto, Philly, SF have 4-6 lane boulevards and they work out fine. They exist in major cities just like shadows do, so deal with it. Does Boston have some kind of small city inferiority complex where the only way it can make itself feel better is by shitting on other cities?
And this is not exclusive to just wider roads.
This is just me, but it's not that it will look like Huston. It's that it will look like not Boston.
But really, permeability is my main issue with the width: it constrains the neighborhood and creates superblocks. As I said, instead of having three (and only three) major E-W arteries, six one ways would have been preferable. There would be very little net loss in developable square footage (the width of three sidewalks), however it would double the amount of street walls. In addition, it would narrow the average lot size, reducing the glut of fat, stocky buildings such as what's on fan pier.
The other issue regarding the width of the E-W boulevards is that due to the FRA restrictions, the buildings will never be tall enough to create a proper streetwall. The reason wide avenues work so well in NY, Chicago, Huston (I guess...) is they are bordered by a canyon of very tall buildings. And again repeating myself, I'm not convinced that at full build having only three roads is going to be adequate for the traffic. I could see them becoming a bottleneck very quickly.
For whoever said that traffic in (insert neighborhood here) is bad downtown, yes. But that has nothing to do with the street width. It has everything to do with the fact that Boston streets double back, spiral in, change direction, and end randomly in a complete nonsensical fashion. Then on top of that you have insane one ways laid out not to improve traffic flow but to block cars from driving through certain (prosperous) areas, and the absurd detours resulting from Washington Street being made a pedestrian only zone when its like fucking Rome, all paths lead to it.
Which cities should we be looking at for inspiration?
Copenhagen.
I rotated that view 360 degrees and didn't see a single active ground floor.One sample Copenhagen Streetview shot.
There is a lot of contemporary development of this caliber at the edge of the city. On the Google Maps page that I've linked to, you'll see there is a river where the development in question is. You can get a good view of the scale and quality of the development by dropping the Streetview finder on pretty much any location going up and down the river right down to the airport.
Hope this helps.
The difference in scale -- available land - between the South Boston waterfront and what's planned in Copenhagen makes for unrealistic comparisons.
You'll have to explain that one. Why does having more vacant land around parts of Copenhagen mean that there is therefore no ability to compare the Seaport's level of architecture to Copenhagen's new construction?
Itchy, because the market dynamics of multi-unit housing in Denmark seem to differ from those in Boston, or elsewhere in the United States. Here, developers build and sell/rent housing to make money. Their objective is to secure a good return on the money they spend, if not to maximize their profit. In Denmark, the developers are non-profits, or cooperatives, who presumably have no interest in making a profit, but great interest in building homes that place a premium on quality of materials and workmanship, and on durability.Still not clear why this means "they can have nice things and we can't."
If we have less available land vs. Copenhagen, if anything it should be more prime and therefore deserving of better architecture/planning. We don't think Framingham gets better architecture because of its greater amounts of available space.
^ very interesting. It sounds somewhat like the Charlesview model here, which turned out profoundly better than most of us probably expected.
Any sources/articles on copenhagen development?