| By Scott Van Voorhis
Banker & Tradesman Columnist
Upscale Harvard has emerged as a one-town wrecking crew when it comes to economic development in the Bay State.
Voters in NIMBY Harvard shot down a proposal last week aimed at luring a major biotech company to Devens, the long-time military base that, since its decommissioning in the 1990s, has been transformed in a major hub for new business and development.
As ridiculous as that vote was, the greater travesty remains Harvard voters’ narrow-minded rejection three years ago of redevelopment plans for Vicksburg Square, the historic stone barracks complex at the center of Devens that has languished empty and shuttered ever since.
There should of hundreds of veterans and their families living in moderately priced apartments living there, but ghosts of soldiers past are its only inhabitants now. After all, a redeveloped Vicksburg Square would have been a fitting tribute to the countless thousands of soldiers who passed through its halls and rooms over the decades.
Instead, the old complex of imposing barracks buildings, named after one of the pivotal Union victories in the Civil War, has become a disturbing monument to how out-of-control local control and home rule has gotten here in Massachusetts.
Scott Van Voorhis
Flaky Objections
So what’s this beef all about? Why is affluent Harvard (median home price $530,000, according to data from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman), almost singlehandedly stymieing progress and new development at the 4,400-acre Devens?
Certainly the power to say no is tempting and one that is easily abused. All three towns bordering the base – Harvard, Ayer and Shirley – have an effective veto over new zoning changes at Devens often needed by MassDevelopment, the state authority overseeing the old base, to bring in new development.
And all three towns, not just Harvard, have exercised their veto power over the years, with Ayer joining Harvard to shoot down the Vicksburg Square proposal three years ago.
But frankly the reasons offered up by Harvard voters in their inveterate opposition to new development at Devens are pretty shaky.
In a state struggling with a housing crisis, the spurning back in 2012 of Trinity Financial’s proposed $83-million redevelopment of Vicksburg Square into 246 apartments, mostly for renters with modest incomes, was a real tragedy.
Certainly suspicion and outright snobbery towards renters earning everyday salaries played a role in that rejection.
One Harvard resident, speaking at a Town Meeting, called the prospect of hundreds of new apartments at Devens “frightening,” given children living in apartments at the redeveloped Vicksburg Square complex would, heaven forbid, wind up in the town’s schools.
She painted a dire scenario of waves of children, spawned by presumably down-and-out renters at Vicksburg, coming and going every few months as their parents moved from one apartment to the next, creating turmoil in Harvard’s well-ordered classrooms.
No one bothered to point out that the developer was planning to build private sector housing aimed at working and middle-class veterans and their families, not public housing for Section 8 tenants, but maybe that’s all the same now for sheltered residents in our state’s more expensive suburbs.
No matter that during its heyday as a military base Devens provided housing for thousands upon thousands of servicemen, women and officers.
Yet no more logical was Harvard’s rejection last week of zoning changes MassDevelopment said it needed to bolster efforts to recruit a big biotech company to Devens.
MassDevelopment was seeking to rezone 17 acres along Grant Road, once packed with housing for soldiers, so it could be used for commercial purposes, in addition to residential uses.
The idea was to combine the additional land with another pair of sites that has already been zoned for potential biotech development to make for a more enticing package.
In fact, a pair of big biotech companies has been scouting the possibility of building a large research and development complex at Devens, but wanted enough land to cover future expansion, notes Marty Jones, MassDevelopment’s chief executive.
These are – or were anyway – big prospects, in the $1-billion range in terms of new development, with hundreds of well-paying jobs in the life sciences.
One company has now settled on another site, though the second is still in play, at least in theory.
And what was the big deal here? Some Harvard officials were uncomfortable with the idea that the 17 acres to be rezoned could still be used for new apartment or home construction down the line.
That in turn, could lead to “inappropriate mixing” of different types of development, noted Jones.
As if building homes near a commercial development would constitute some sort of obscene act!
Need For A Wider Perspective
All this nonsense leads to a larger problem, which is the amount of control handed to a trio of narrow-minded hick towns over what is supposed to be one of the state’s marquee state economic development parks.
Yes, the federal government carved Devens out of farmland in Harvard, Ayer and Shirley during our country’s hectic entry into World War I. And yes, the three towns may eventually take back their land in Devens in the decades to come.
But that viewpoint ignores all the history that has happened in the past century, and the hundreds if not billions of taxpayer dollars pumped into Devens over the decades by the federal government when it used Devens as a major Army base and training hub.
Ask any World War or Vietnam veteran whether they trained at Devens at some point, and you may very well get a yes. My grandfather passed through Devens on his way to service in World WWI – ditto for my father, a WWII veteran.
The money that built and supported Devens all those years didn’t fall from the sky or appear out of nowhere – it came from taxes paid by citizens across Massachusetts and the country.
Devens is a national and state resource and should be developed as such for the larger good. Instead, its future is being clouded by parochial, small-town gripes and fears, and that’s just wrong.
