Re: [Cleveland-Circle] 🔷 City-sponsored public event tonight 1/30 -- Allston Brighton Mobility Study "Working Session" , 6pm- 8pm Jackson Mann Auditorium, 40 Armington St., Allston (Union Sq., Allston)

[Eva Webster]

On 1/30/19, 1:52 PM, "Brian McLaughlin" <cleveland-cir...@googlegroups.com on behalf of bmcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Joanne,

Allston-Brighton doesn't need a transportation study.

We need control of development.

When over-development was rampant in the 1980's, our neighborhood put a moratorium on building profusion.   A volunteer committee, headed by Ray Mellone - the greenspace adjacent to the Honan Allston Library is named for him -  developed a plan that instituted a 35 foot height limit and one parking space per unit requirement.  Three and one-half story structures provide a human scale for a neighborhood, not the five to six story properties we are asked to comment upon again and again.

A transportation study is City Hall offering us dregs.

I’m glad someone has finally said it. Thanks, Brian.

The Mobility Study is a fig leaf.  Even if it succeeds in improving transit matters around here — and it’s a big IF — those results would be used to justify continuing overdevelopment, and in a few years we would be back to square one.

In the meantime, overdevelopment predictably leads to the loss of family-oriented housing, eradication of greenery that should be buffering buildings from one another and the street, and the overall obliteration of neighborhood character (a neighborhood is a place that has stability and long-term residents (incl. generations of families) who are vested in the area.

So when we’re witnessing overdevelopment, this is about losing the very things that long-term residents value about living in A-B, the things that keep us here.  The process that is in motion right now seeks to replace all that.

A couple of weeks ago, a long-time Brighton resident whom I have known for many years wrote to me in a private email (I want to share this fragment because I think those observations are very important):

Your continued persistence, energy and burning desire to conserve family neighborhoods is admirable. This was a desire you and I shared for decades as we have seen the voice of individual homeowners dwindle in Brighton.The fire in me diminished many years ago and has been fully extinguished by the political regime of Boston that is hell bent on replacing neighborhoods with anonymous apartment blocks and carefully controlled business establishments. It is not a tide with an ebb and flow that we are facing. It is a long slow steady current that will persistently erode the rock on which many neighborhoods once stood.

Amen.

Why should anyone participate in a process that is a part of a deliberate effort to change the neighborhood in ways that we do not welcome.  I want moderate, tastefully done development that is respectful to the area, preserves/improves the quality of life, and attracts people who are able and willing to purchase and live in traditional homes that are still standing – not a development tsunami, perpetrated by mega-developers, that seeks to transform A-B into a Boston version of the Bronx (only the apartments are smaller than in most buildings in the Bronx).

The BPDA is not paying traffic planning consultants who are assisting with the “Mobility Study” to tell the City that it would be good to put some breaks on dense development in A–B.  Consultants are called in when you want to devise ways to densify an area while reducing (because it’s impossible to eliminate) the possibility of gridlock.

But traffic issues are not the only reason why people are unhappy with overdevelopment. The Bronx is being served by a high-capacity public transit system — but it’s still the Bronx.  Is this what we want for A-B?

There are some leading neighborhood people right now who apparently think that if public transit is improved, it will help us.  It won’t.  It will be just a prelude to development tsunami Act 2.  Some of those folks also seem to believe that A-B has a responsibility to keep accepting endless amounts of housing for anybody and everybody who wants to live here. So how long before improved transit/mobility is severely inadequate again?

If anyone thinks that NYC, the poster child for overbuilding, has solved, or will ever solve that problem, you’re wrong:

MTA chief compares current subway crisis to NYC's worst disasters

https://nypost.com/2018/05/23/mta-chief-likens-subway-crisis-to-worst-disasters-in-city-history/

It’s not difficult to predict what will happen with the A-B Mobility Study. The consultants will say tell the City that our streets need to be narrowed to put exclusive bike lanes everywhere, and they will suggest that too many A-B residents have cars and should get rid of them, and start using public transit (that will be the day!) — and they will produce a pretty little report that we will be asked to sit through in a public meeting — and that will be it.

In older days those reports would just gather dust sitting on shelves – now, they just disappear into the hard drives or to the cloud.  2-3 years later, the study and the report will be obsolete anyway.

The Guest Street Area Planning Study was done some years ago, and everyone thought it would instill enforceable guidelines on development in the area.  Is that Study being taken seriously?  No.  So what makes anyone believe that the Mobility Study will have much of an effect on anything. 

However, when additional overly dense development projects are filed, we will be told that it’s OK because A-B had its Mobility Study done, and people participated.

If someone wants to provide that cover to the City — good luck.  I tend to learn from past experiences and don’t believe in miracles — so I will most likely stay at home.  (The most precious thing we have in our lives is time — and I feel like I have been robbed of too much of it during my activist years in A-B.) 

People are asking - what should we do? what should be do?  What works, or can work, is having neighborhood people who are not necessarily living from paycheck to paycheck, and are willing to spend money on lawyers to enforce zoning.  It may be too late for most of A–B.  If you decimate owner-occupancy, and the area is primarily working class, and the remaining homeowners feel uncertain about their future in the area, the neighborhood becomes a sitting duck.

BACC is well-intentioned, of course, but sooner or later I think it will encounter the reality that trying to unite people who have different visions and goals for the neighborhood, different levels of understanding of what is going on, and different levels of personal investment in the area (some a lot, some none) — just for the sake of having a high number of members — cannot produce a well-focused and effective force.

Philosophical differences may be swept under the rug for some time, for the sake of superficial unity, but they will resurface sooner or later, as members realize that their leaders only advance whatever they happen to care about (it’s always the case, it’s unavoidable — that is the main problem in many volunteer organizations).

Additionally, the politicians know that the more diverse and inclusive a group is, the less likely it is to agree on key issues, or to vote as a block — since people’s perspectives, needs, desires and beliefs are different.  It may be easier to make a difference if you work within a smaller group of like-minded, philosophically-aligned people than trying to persuade all kinds of people that they all have the same goal, when deep down they know it’s not the case.

Generally, looking around at activism on all levels, it has occurred to me that large groups of people who don’t realize they are pushing for things that are going to backfire (and no one can hold them accountable for that) may not be much better than nobody pushing for anything, and everything simply sorting itself out.

Eva

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 11:43 AM Joanne D'Alcomo <dal...@comcast.net> wrote:

            The Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA)  is holding a “working session” as part of the Allston-Brighton “Mobility Study” that is being worked on by a consulting firm hired by the BPDA.  Details are below. This is an opportunity to give the consultant and the city some feedback on transportation concerns in Allston-Brighton, and to find out what the consultant and the BPDA are doing, and plan to do, about transportation in our area.  This is an important issue, not only because public transportation and private transportation is overburdened in our area already, but because developments that are being proposed or being built will add to the strain on the inadequate systems. 

    

            Developers with major proposed projects in Allston-Brighton – such as the developer for the Whole Foods site (15-35 Washington St. ) and the AvalonBay site (139-149 Washington St) – like to say that their projects are “transit-oriented” as if merely saying it makes public transportation available.  But it’s  one thing for a project to be located near public transportation – it’s an entirely different matter for that transportation to serve as a meaningful and realistic way to move people where they need to go.  Right now, these so-called “transit-oriented” projects aren’t near public transportation that can realistically be used to get all the thousands of people who would move into the projects where they need to go.  So what is the Allston-Brighton Mobility Study addressing that?

     

        Below are two items:

 

First, the BPDA’s announcement about the event, which contains the schedule.

 

           Second, below the announcement, to give you some background, is the BPDA’s  progress report about the study from December 2018  that you have to scroll far down to read in full.  

 

.

   Joanne D’Alcomo, Member of the Steering Committee of the Brighton Allston Community Coalition

Notes from the BPDA from December 2018

 

 

 

 

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[JOHN SPRITZLER]

Eva raised some important points in her criticism of the Brighton Allston Community Coalition. I reply to those points online here.

I hope we have a robust conversation about this.

John Spritzler

On January 30, 2019 at 9:00 PM Eva Webster <evawe...@comcast.net> wrote:

...