That is making a gigantic--and, IMHO, erroneous--leap of judgement: that because the towers are unattractive to look at from afar, they are "antiquated" and somehow dysfunctional. That couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah, they're lasting odes to brutalism. But they've been thoroughly upgraded and renovated inside over the last few decades to break down the "every man alone in his pod" isolation that towers of that ilk can/have inflicted on residents as a design backfire. They're flush with community rooms, have the rooftop pools, and have enhanced ground-level concierge space promoting mingling. As well as a refreshing paucity of parking capacity, so when residents are out they're out-and-about not transferring from pod (apt.) to pod (car) in hermetically sealed isolation. Russell Field is right there across the street as the de facto rec room. The result is
highly functional community living, and the proof in the pudding is that those towers have crime rate and drug usage rate
far below average for public housing of any similar density. If you don't mind the elevator rides, they're actually very nice places to live these days. And they probably weren't nearly as nice in 1975, so ugly brutalism was capable of giving way to highly effective troubleshooting and correction. You can't compare the health of the resulting community with Columbia Point at all...no way. If the most basal aesthetics are leading one to that comparison as first reach...stop immediately and re-educate thyself on what's going on inside first. Columbia Point may as well be as hospitable as the far side of the moon vs. Alewife towers on actual community living standards.
This extends to the outflow public housing down the street infilling halfway to Mass Ave. Jefferson Park...not much to look it, kind of a cheesy 70's condo complex vibe...but it's low to the ground and densely packed around its meandering driveway so it encourages a lot of outdoor time. There are always people out on front porches and patios talking to each other. They've got the community center and Head Start program right at the end of the driveway on Rindge as clearinghouse for resources and community involvement. In the 9 years I lived on the other side of Danehy I think there was 'a' fatal shooting there and a couple annual drug busts. i.e. Goes with the public housing territory, but
way below-average. It demonstrates all the vital signs of a healthy community, few of the warning signs of an unhealthy one. Now you've got Clifton Circle apts. infilling the space between the towers and Jefferson Park. Same density motif, but much more attractive architecture. All three feed off each other.
Third example: Lincoln Way apts. on Walden St. These used to be utilitarian brick barracks-style apts. from the 1930's...quick-and-dirty, ugly as sin, haphazardly laid out, and semi-enclosed like it was a prison yard. It looked more blighted than anything in the neighborhood, and acted more blighted as the incidence of drug arrests was higher here than any of the places on Rindge. This was the one closest to my triple-decker, and I knew if I saw police lights speeding by exactly where it was headed. Cambridge Housing Authority hatched a plan to blow-up/rebuild-it with modern buildings that corrected most of the unintentional brutality of the brick prison yard motif. But because a lot of residents were going to be temporarily displaced by the total site demo/rebuild and re-knitting it back as suitably dense and functional public housing was a big existential dilemma amidst all the other upscaling going on in the neighborhood...they agonized over the decision. I attended a couple of the public meetings on it where they were intentionally walking themselves over hot coals in pains to make sure they got it right. They ended up getting it very right. The
new buildings are beautiful, inviting, open to the street in marked contrast to their predecessors, and densely massed to promote interaction. Shock of all shocks, the crime rate started running consistently lower accordingly after the resettlement.
^THESE^ are not developments you fuck with. Not even when they're ugly to look at or you think you can do a 1970's architect one better on massing. They 'work' by any demographic metric--high degree of interaction, low degree of crime and isolation--that you can assign to measure a public housing unit's health. When I say on the previous page that it's bewildering how Cambridge can get some dev things so very right and yet keep doing this insane "stop punching yourself!" game over the Acorn Park-cum-Cambridge Park-cum-Concord Ave./West Cambridge triad...it's these examples in the very same bloody neighborhood that immediately come to mind from personal observation and experience. Improvable or no, you do not disrupt high-functioning communities for some individual conception of the pursuit of perfection. Definitely not if the same planning dunderheads who keep fucking Acorn/CPark/WC into the ground are allowed within an inch of giving their ever-helpful "input" to building a better Alewife tower. Um...hell no. Those geniuses can go fuck right off rather than start showing us nü-tower renders with 400-car in-ground garages.
You want to see what less-functional living is? Count up all the new market-rate condos that are perched up on stilts because the entire ground floor and sometimes half the basement are given over to parking canopies in rote 1:1 occupant-to-space ratio. Oh, sure, the cladding on the buildings looks superb. But hello...what is talking to your neighbor on the front porch from the ease of a screen door interface? Those folks will never experience that. The interface with the outside world got removed so they could instead have an interaction-free trip down straight to their car. Which when you think about it, isn't that exactly what we were initially
assuming was wrong with the towers but which on further review they instead got so very right??? The builders of these new places aren't marketing the outside-world interaction. They're marketing a pod to sleep in after a long day at HQ in Waltham, to transplants from the Arlington, TX office who had to make a quick decision on the take-it-or-leave-it relocation offer + raise. Until they finally work up the courage to ask their budies at the company gym "What's this 'square' thing you live in? It sounds fun" and it starts to dawn on them that as soon as they know the area well enough they'll be able to hunt for a similar rent in a place much less insulating. In which case they'll move in 2 years tops and be replaced by the next transient from the Floral Park, IL satellite office. Quite a "community" y'all end up cultivating there, Vox.
I'd much rather troubleshoot the places that are getting the interaction painfully wrong than the places who've long had their shit sorted on that front.
