The “quasi-public” Metropolitan Area Planning Council has released its plan for how to develop the Greater Boston area. (Hey, I didn’t even know we had one of these groups in MA.) Sounds like standard smart-growth thinking: Mixed use, mass transit, high density, enviro-friendly. Sounds good, and to my mind it leverages one of the great strengths of New England: We don’t just have soulless, decentralized “pure” suburbs with no central identity; we have towns, with distinctive character and community. You don’t get that everywhere!
But Harvard’s Ed Glaeser isn’t so sure this will pan out:
“The plan is fighting against both economic and political factors that will make this difficult,” said Ed Glaeser , economics professor at Harvard University and director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.
Glaeser said that a growing number of people want to live close to transit and downtown centers, but others are interested in the new large-lot homes that populate new suburbs. Many of these people, he said, are the sort of workers Massachusetts is trying to keep and attract: young families.
Speaking as a “young family” … I think this mode of thinking is a bit reductionist. Sure, there’s definitely an appeal to the very nice suburban house with the picket fence, garage, and very nice public schools to send your very nice kids with other very nice people’s kids. But it’s a mistake to think that’s the only kind of place young families want to live.
Imagine a “smart growth” approach that really valued young families — e.g. one that integrated child care into the community; one that insisted on fabulous, creative education; one that included out-of-school resources like arts, museums, and sports; one with ready access to “green space”, i.e. “running around space”; one with fast, reliable transportation (preferably public) so that you can spend more time with the kiddos.
Actually, look at Brookline: There’s a place that’s done remarkably well being both high-density and kiddo-friendly. There’s a reason why it’s so expensive, and families shoehorn themselves into smaller places for the privilege of living there.
In other words, if you want to attract young families, offer them solutions to their needs, which go beyond the white picket fence.
This state has created the incentives for large-lot, large-size homes — everything about this state favors such housing, so everyone is behind that kind of construction.
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What’s better for a town’s bottom line: four 1,000-s.f. houses on an acre selling for $200k apiece or one 4,000-s.f. house selling for $600k? Property taxes from the 4 houses will be just 1/3 more than the one large home, but there could be 3-4 times the number of people living in the 4 houses.
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What’s better for a town’s school system — 1 house where the income is high enough so that only people earning $100k and up can afford it, or 4 houses where people earning $30-40k can afford it? Keep in mind that wealth tends to correlate with educational performance.
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What’s easier on a town’s policing services? People who live 10-12 feet from each other or people that live 1/2 acre from each other? When you live 1/2 acre away from your neighbor, you don’t have to worry about loud music, piled-up trash, or other incivilities that are evident when people live in close quarters.
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People respond to incentives, and the incentives are set up right now to favor non-smart-growth. Those incentives are aligned at all levels of this state, from the archaic reliance on property taxes to the desire of people to be away from each other due to lack of policing services that keep people civil.
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While government is supposed to reflect the will of the people, it is also supposed to make sure that the minority (not racial) are not trampled on. In this case the minority are people who would like to live in dense smart-growth communities, but such communities are less sustainable than high-dollar, high-price communities due to a singular approach to funding local services, the property tax.
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Change the municipal funding mechanism laws and allow things like local sales tax, renters tax, etc., and you’ll see policy shift.
Actually the best thing would be 10 1,000 sf houses on an acre. On a 4,000 square foot lot, a small house can be a part of a walkable neighborhood with access to transit. And, contrary to what Glaesser may say, many young families today are not looking for two acres of land, but a neighborhood and a community.
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The smart growth concepts can and will help to recruit young workers that want to live in real New England towns and villages . . . . we have that to offer here, and we should try to encourage it.
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We only have the entire tax system, local government system, state zoning act, and a ‘business as usual’ attitude in the development community to overcome. It won’t be easy.
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I don’t agree with the comment further below that we should take away zoning power from local communities, but we do need to provide real incentives and disincentives for communities to do the right thing . . . this could be easier if the state were willing to change the funding formulas to reward places that do it right.
It’s never happening, but best solution to is to have the state take over zoning responsibilities for all Boston area towns (say, everything within 495) a la Portland, OR. It’s the only way to channel growth in an efficient, environmentally responsible way, while at the same time getting our high housing costs under control. Under our “system,” everyone attends to their own parochial interests and no one has their eye on the big picture. So it’s perfectly natural for town officials to seek out only high-value homes, avoid attracting families with small children, compete for the same commercial tax base, and push externalities onto neighbors (traffic, e.g.). Thus, we allow towns like Lincoln to keep their 5-acre zoning rules and consequently push young families further away from downtown (into Westford, New Hampshire, e.g.). It’s a horrible situation. Bad for families stuck in traffic, bad for the environment, bad for housing costs and the local economy, etc.
…the concept of local control can be a hinderance for many things. Large multi-municaplity planning is effectively impossible because of local control. I’m actually against local control in education for much the same reason.
You can’t ask inner-ring suburbs to do high-cost (in terms of services such as schools) smart growth, allow exurbs and wealthier communities to keep their multi-acre snob zoning, and keep financing municipal government the same way.
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It may work in upper-income communities like Brookline, where there will be enough money to fund local services anyway, but the model falls apart in middle-class and blue-collar towns. There needs to be a radical restructuring of the way state aid is apportioned and the way local government is funded.
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In Framingham, for example, the problem is compounded by an exceptionally high regional concentration of state-funded social service agencies. These agencies take properities off the local tax rolls while adding state-mandated high expenses. For instance, it’s my understanding that local government in Framingham has expenses in six figures to provide transportation for children of homeless families to their former school districts. I don’t have any problem with homeless families finding shelter in Framingham, but I have a major problem with a state-funded social service agency bringing such families into Framingham and then sticking the local community with the school bus bill. Especially when that means cuts elsewhere in the school system because of Prop 2 1/2.
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If you increase density of development in Framingham while allowing other, wealthier communities nearby to keep their snob zoning, this situation is just going to increase. Which is why a lot of people in town may not support smart growth. Brookline doesn’t face this problem, because it’s surrounded by other communities that also have dense development and proximity to public transportation. I’m a big fan of smart growth, but it has to be accompanied by equitable government funding. When there’s just one community in an area with more urban development patterns, there are other consequences.
I’m not so sure more state aid is the answer. I live in a city (Springfield) that gets substantial state aid. There is a tremendous stigma that comes with this aid – as if the city is some kind of welfare queen. Other communities shove it down out throats at every opportunity. We need to control our own destiny.
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This aid is only necessary because this state’s method of local revenue happens to be the property tax. If it was the sales tax, for example, Springfield would be far better off. If it was some flavor of corporate income tax, Springfield would be far better off. If lottery ticket sales stayed in the city, Springfield would be far better off (studies show that upper-income people don’t play the lottery nearly as much as lower-income people).
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I agree with you 100% about concentration of social services in urban areas. Urban areas once accepted this burden because they were the engines of a region. They could afford to do this. Back in its day, Springfield used to take in suburban students to its high schools for a very small fee. Now suburban schools won’t even accept more students for thousands of dollars per year.
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A study was done in one of Springfield’s homeless shelters that showed that half of the people there were from outside of Springfield. Half. But whenever the homeless problem is referred to, it is called “Springfield’s homeless problem”. The director of one of Springfield’s shelters lives in a more posh community of Amherst — yet he’s griping because although Springfield plans on giving housing vouchers to 140 homeless people, it will close down a 100-bed emergency homeless shelter. He has argued that we will be leaving money on the table if we do this – in essence that we should be finding more homeless to fill the shelter!
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I wouldn’t care that certain communities have large-lot housing except for the fact that they use exclusivity as a primary means to attract residents. They are economically skimming residents from the pool. This lowers their expenses and raises their income, and raises everyone else’s expenses while lowering their income. And it becomes a feedback loop — there is more demand for towns like Lincoln simply because there is so much demand for that town. Our state should not enable that.
I’ve long felt that more developed communities surrounded by wealthier, less-developed communities get the shaft under the current system.
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When stores or businesses become more successful, they generate more traffic and require more services. Both things can negatively affect the host community, but that host community doesn’t get any more money unless the business physically expands.
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The flood of extra sales tax that comes during holiday shopping season doesn’t benefit Framingham specifically. The extra income tax generated when stores hire seasonal workers doesn’t benefit the town specifically. The state gets all that extra money, to do with as the governor and Legislature see fit. But the host community does get stuck with all the extra traffic, all the extra wear and tear on roads, and so on.
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A lot of people in Framingham are getting irate over just what you mentioned — that people from throughout the region are being sent to Framingham for social services, and the town ends up being forced to foot some of that bill.
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I was quite interested in your comment that the director of one of the homeless shelters in Springfield lives in a more pricey community. It seems to pay (for some, quite handsomely) to help the poor– and I’m NOT talking about the many lowly paid workers at these agencies who serve the poor. I mean some of the top executives. Would you like to hazard a guess as to how much the director of the largest, mostly government-funded social service agency in this area, the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, earns overseeing its $45M or so operation?
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First, some context here. The head of an agency in Lowell with a larger budget earned just a shade over a hundred grand ($102K) base pay in 2004. The head of Action for Boston Community Development, with a budget of more than $100 million, earned $164K in 2004.
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Then of course you’ve got the governor’s salary of $140K. Chief justice of the SJC earns $131K. The Framingham town manager earned $129K last year (the town budget is around $168 million).
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OK. Now, here’s what SMOC’s executive director, James Cuddy, pulled down in the year ending in June 2006, according to an IRS filing posted at Guidestar: $234,869 in base pay.
The director of Springfield’s Open Pantry doesn’t earn a ton — $58,250 in 2005. But I am rankled by the fact that he does not live in Springfield, and is therefore not affected by the problems caused by the concentration of homeless people attracted by the shelter he runs.
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Nor do many of the people on the board of directors of the organization live in Springfield — they mostly live in the suburbs. Keep in mind that in the Springfield area, Springfield (and Holyoke) are large poor cities, and surrounding suburbs have per-capita incomes that are 2-3 times higher.
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This is the case with many social service agencies operating in Springfield. I picked the first unfamiliar non-profit operating in Springfield on Guidestar, called “Springfield Home for Friendless Women and Children”. It has been in operation since 1865. It now seems to operate group homes in the city, among other services.
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The executive director makes $98,377 for a 35-hour workweek, along with $46,904 in deferred compensation & benefit plans. He lives in Belchertown, far away from Springfield. The CFO makes $59,533 for a 35-hour workweek. She lives in South Hadley, far away from Springfield. The top 5 highest paid employees make between $58k and $71k, and of them, two live in Longmeadow, the wealthiest community in the region, one lives in East Falmouth(!), a fourth lives in Monson, and the fifth lives in Springfield.
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While I don’t doubt that this group serves a valuable public purpose, and many of this organization’s board lives in Springfield, I find it ironic that the people working at it don’t/won’t live in Springfield – perhaps due to the preponderance of social service programs at which they earn their living!
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If the people working at the nonprofits (including the mammoth Baystate Medical Center — not many doctors living in Springfield, and the four colleges here), plus the people employed by the city of Springfield all lived in Springfield (70% or so of teachers, firefighters, and police do not live in Springfield — probably around 1,500 employees), the city would be far, far better off.
You can’t ask inner-ring suburbs to do high-cost (in terms of services such as schools) smart growth, allow exurbs and wealthier communities to keep their multi-acre snob zoning, and keep financing municipal government the same way.
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Let’s disambiguate a few things here. Snob zoning has nothing to do with municipal financing.
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In Framingham, for example, the problem is compounded by an exceptionally high regional concentration of state-funded social service agencies. These agencies take properities off the local tax rolls while adding state-mandated high expenses
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Then change the manner in which cities and towns can raise revenue. That is an issue that I have been pounding on here for months. If the agencies are state, they should at least make payments in lieu of taxes for the property that they occupy.
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When stores or businesses become more successful, they generate more traffic and require more services. Both things can negatively affect the host community, but that host community doesn’t get any more money unless the business physically expands.
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Not necessarily true. The value of the business property is oftentimes related to the revenue that the property (the store) generates. That is one of the major ways that a town can determine the value of the business property. A problem may arise if the town gave the business prop tax breaks to try to attract the business (another theme I’ve been beating on here for months) but that’s a completely separate issue.
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Main theme: Profitable nonprofits
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There is no such thing as a non-profit. There is such a thing as not-for-profit. There is a rather substantial difference. Not-for-profits do not have shareholders who might garner dividends for their investments, but they do have employees who rake in oodles amount of income, particularly those at the high end of the totem pole.
I’m not sure you were following my argument.
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Let’s say you have one community with “smart growth” — dense development near public transit. And let’s say that community is surrounded by other communities with sparse development and thus no hope of any practical, useful public transit. Where do you think state-funded agencies are likely to site regional social services? Is the state likely to send a lot of out-of-community homeless to a place like Lincoln, or a place with dense development near public transit? If you are looking to site a regional social service, are you more likely to site it in a community with minimum 2-acre lots and no way to get from a train station to the rest of town without a private automobile, or a place where there are apartments within easy walking distance of town?
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I repeat that I’m in favor of smart growth. But the way the state is running social services now, there are already negative consequences for communities with dense development that are surrounded by communities with much less dense development. This is not the case for immediate inner-ring suburbs like Brookline, because they’re not surrounded on all sides with much pricier, less densely developed communities. There needs to be some way of dealing with this.
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Personally, I am in favor of looking at the concentration of regional social services, and taking away some state aid from communities that are not doing their fair share in order to fairly compensate the communities that are shouldering a disproportionate burden. (By the way, Framingham only came out #12 in terms of number of state-licensed residential facilities per capita. Other communities have a higher burden on this scale, such as Waltham, Westboro and Pittsfield. However, Framingham came out higher than Springfield, Worcester and Boston.)
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You don’t seem to understand how the concentration of social service agencies takes properties off the tax rolls, thus negatively affecting the ability of a town to raise money from property taxes. The number of properties owned by social service agencies in Framingham grew almost ten-fold between 1990 and 2000. SMOC alone now owns properties, many of them tax exempt, with a total of 451 units, according to a recent report, and they’re certainly not the only agency in town. That means either everyone else’s property taxes goes up in order to levy to the Prop 2 1/2 limit, or the amount of money raised is less. When a large number of people served by SMOC actually come from other communities, that’s simply not fair.
…I have been beating on the muncipal financing issue here for months. The stranglehold that the state has on muncipal financing. If I were the ruler of the universe, I would unleash the stranglehold, and require all the properties currently exempted by the state (universities, churches, state facilities and so forth) to pay their share of the property taxes. It may seem anomolous to some, but it isn’t to me, that the state should pay to the town in which it puts a prop-tax-exempt facility a facility that (a) takes property off the tax rolls, but (b) benefits residents not only of that town, but also of other towns.
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I have also been decrying the sorry state of “public transportation” in the Boston area for months. (Is the state likely to send a lot of out-of-community homeless to a place like Lincoln, or a place with dense development near public transit? ) But it isn’t gooing to change any time soon. So, what are you going to do? Put the homeless in Lincoln, where they have no access to any public transportation (sorry, the cummuter rail is a farce)? Maybe Boston should be bombed to smithereens, like Munich was during WWII, which got them to build a real public transit system (four of them, actually, binding cities and towns up to 20 miles outside of the central city, to the central city). Boston isn’t going to do that any time soon.
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I understand your frustration, but, let’s get practical…
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I am in favor of looking at the concentration of regional social services, and taking away some state aid from communities that are not doing their fair share in order to fairly compensate the communities that are shouldering a disproportionate burden.
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It seems to me that social services will be provided where they are most demanded–where the clients are. Do you really believe that the clients should be removed from Framingham to Lincoln in order to receive the services? That’s nonsense.
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If you want to take “state aid” away, that’s fine with me. But, as far as I’m concerned “state aid” is a substitute for “local option taxes” and taxes on currently tax-exempt properties. Allow the last two, and I’ll agree with you on the first. Is it going to happen in either your or my lifetime? Decidedly not.
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I bristle at this because you’re ignoring that, for years, the poor were serviced in rural areas. If this country had decided that subsidized housing belonged on former farms rather than in older apartment blocks, you’d be crying a different tune. The presumption that the poor cannot be serviced in wealthy areas makes also it de facto that they will be serviced only in poor urban areas.
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Economic segregation is the problem here. There are no “poor” in Lincoln because they can’t move there to begin with, and if something tragic happens to someone living in Lincoln they move out of that town into a cheaper area. That does not mean that the people of Lincoln have no responsibility to those who are poor. They’re probably benefiting pretty heavily from people below them on the economic ladder — imagine what they’d pay for goods and services if they had to support all those people living in housing that was as expensive as theirs.
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Subsequently, Lincoln becomes more attractive because people who live there don’t have to worry about “the poor” and the problems that come with them. They don’t see them, they might just as well be living as far away as Asia.
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Without the exposure to the problems that the poor bring, the services they require, the attitude becomes “why are you taking my money to subsidize these other towns — lower the income tax and cut that funding — it doesn’t affect me”.
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It’s a completely rational decision brought about by an irrational belief, that by segregating the rich from the poor, there is no longer a connection between the two groups.
…I’ll have some more comments in the morning (it’s evening here in Germany) but I’ll merely point out…
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I bristle at this because you’re ignoring that, for years, the poor were serviced in rural areas.
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…that the reason that the rural poor were serviced in rural areas was largely because that’s where they lived. The rural poor weren’t shipped to Chicago, Cleveland or Manhattan to be serviced. That would be the analogy that you are proposing regarding the poor from Framingham be shipped to Lincoln for service.
I was thinking of the concept of a “poor house”.
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The poor in Springfield were not serviced in the downtown urban area. The alms house was in the formerly rural part of town.
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Boston’s poorhouses were on Deer Island, Rainsford Island, and Long Island. That’s about as rural as it gets in Boston.
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There is an excerpt of the law on that site stating that the poor must be provided for by the town where the person has a settlement. In other words, if someone from Dover became poor, they have to be serviced in Dover.
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Now the response is to send them to a shelter somewhere else, anywhere but Dover, they’re not our responsibility.
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Springfield’s homeless shelter recently stopped taking referrals from other communities. It seems as though the Boston area was constantly sending their homeless out here.
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Does it even make sense to inject the poor and homeless into the middle of an urban commercial area, one that is competing with suburban commercial malls that have the ability to keep the homeless off their private property?
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Do you care to elaborate? I have been following development in Massachusetts in the newspapers for several years. Every time a lower-cost-per-unit project is proposed, the discussion always centers on “cost of services that will need to be provided”. Statements like “housing that is valued at less than $400,000 is a money-loser for our town” come up.
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Perhaps you’re right in that there is a deeper sentiment at play here — economic segregation, keeping poor people out of a town. But it goes hand-in-hand with decisions based on the costs associated with any development.
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Try proposing housing that costs, and will be valued at, $25k per unit in any town and watch people absolutely howl over it. They will bring anything possible they can up to defeat such a proposal — environmental, traffic flow studies, etc.
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Shouldn’t housing that costs $25k per unit be a good thing? Not in this state — everything is designed to bump up the price of the housing so that municipalities can realize more new tax revenue from them.
In other words, if you want to attract young families, offer them solutions to their needs…
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That is the real purpose of “extended school hours,” isn’t it? Taxpayer-financed day care.
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I really do wish that politicians in the USofA would be honest, but they won’t be, anytime soon.
at which school starts being “day care”? Two o’clock in the afternoon? Three o’clock?
So when is the exact point at which school starts being “day care”?
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…when I was in school in the middle ages (actually, the 1960s) they did not permit us to take more than 5 academic courses (45 minute periods each day) and they were correct in doing so*. Fill the rest with “study hall” (warehousing), PhysEd and lunch, and you get a grand total of–let’s put it this way. School began at 7:45AM and let out at 2:30PM. No day care–the “let out” time was too early.
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So, what is the purpose of the proposed longer school day? Longer “study halls”? More PhysEd? Play-time? You aren’t going to get any more instruction in. Taxpayer-financed day care. And, please, be honest about it.
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Here in Germany, the class day starts at 8AM and ends at 1PM. I know this, because there is a school down at the end of the street, and I’ve watched the kiddies walk by going to and from the school.
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*They were correct in limiting it. In my first quarter in college, in my hubris (having placed out of most of my first year via AP), I opted to take an unheard of number of semester-hours. It was almost disastrously exhausting.
What do kids in Germany do after 1pm? Where do they all go? Privately funded daycare?
What do kids in Germany do after 1pm? Where do they all go?
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That’s where I went after I got out of school at 2:30 in the 1960s. And I did my homework, ignoring my (stay-at-home) mother in the process.
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You seriously aren’t going to deny that “extended school hours” are nothing more than taxpayer-funded day-care, are you? Admit it, and let’s then discuss whether taxpayers should be funding day-care.
I’m not going to deny that this is a small component to extended school hours, although it seems like school days are being pretty filled up with things like test preparation, and things like physical education, art, and music are being cast aside. I’d love to see longer days that incorporate more creative activities. I’d also like to see fewer kids wandering the streets after school, getting into trouble.
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It is unrealistic to believe that we should return to single-earner families. I have two daughters; I don’t want to raise them just to marry the right person some day. I want them to be able to participate in life the same as anyone else.
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It’s also completely inefficient, given today’s credentialed society, to have single-earner families. People spend over $100k for an education — does it makes sense to throw that all away after a couple of years to be a stay-at-home parent, especially when from 8 to 2:30, you’re not with the kids because they’re at school?
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I’m a working parent, my wife also works. Jobs in this country are simply not flexible enough — our choices are either both parents work full-time or one parent works full-time. I asked my company to go to an 80% schedule, they told me no-way, I was basically laughed at. My wife got the same reaction – go part time and kiss your career goodbye.
it seems like school days are being pretty filled up with things like test preparation, and things like physical education, art, and music are being cast aside
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…my 7:45AM to 2:30PM school day included PhysEd, art and music, in addition to math, history, the various sciences, and a foreign language. Even “shop” (I made a nice set of bookends, but that’s about it). Not all at the same grade level. We even went through the Pledge ritual.
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We also took (yes!) standardized tests. They weren’t pre-requisites for graduation, though, and therein lies the rub with MCAS. They were used to help the teacher determine how well he or she was helping the student.
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BTW, thanks for inferentially admitting that warehousing kids in the public schools is taxpayer-paid day care. I’m mediating among three pairs of glasses, but I can read between the lines quite well. But, let me ask you this. Why should I be paying for your lifestyle choices? It was your choice to have children, and it is my non-choice to pay for their care?
I don’t believe that we can run a civilized society with the attitude of “why should I pay for your choices”. Nor do I believe that we can cost-account things so that everyone is paying exactly what he or she “costs”, no more, no less.
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The children you’re “paying for” will be there to provide the social security dollars that you collect, they will be there to do the yard work that you will someday need to farm out, they will be there to bag your groceries, to develop new drugs that will prolong your life, to bury you when you die.
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Children are the way a civilization survives. It is obscenely foolish to stack the deck against having children, especially in a day and age where two-parent families are both the norm and the goal that we are trying to achieve (via educating more than just the male half of the population).
A couple of months ago, Deutsche Welle did a story about “School in the Afternoon” catching on in Germany. Germany’s school day is the shortest among all OECD nations, according to the report, which you can read here
…(thank you for the DW link, btw) but I have seen school-day plans in Germany courtesy Goethe-Institut Boston. I would not put it that the school day is short. I would put it that the instruction day is compact. It really is.
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The “school day” (learning day) does not end with the end of the instruction portion of the day. It continues into the homework. And schools do not need to warehouse kids for the homework portion of the learning day. What is being proposed in MA is that schools warehouse kids for the homework portion of the learning day. That is what I am referring to as the “taxpayer-financed day care” and what I object to is the fact that proponents are not willing to admit it. Let’s admit it and then discuss whether schools should be in the business of day-care after the instruction period is over.