Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s bold vision of tens of thousands of new homes, apartments and condos puts to shame the mean-spirited NIMBYs who increasingly dominate towns and suburbs across the state.

At a time when “new housing” is a dirty word to many town fathers (and now town mothers as well), Menino wants 30,000 new units built in Boston by 2020. It is a big number for a housing-allergic state struggling right now to get a third of that built each year.

Boston’s blunt-spoken mayor clearly gets it when so many well-heeled suburban pols don’t or just won’t. Opening the door to new homes amid a dire shortage of places to live is not just the right thing to do, but it is the only viable long-term strategy for one of the most rapidly aging states in the union.

While upscale burbs and small towns across the state erect an iron curtain of zoning restrictions in a bid to keep newcomers out, Menino is rolling out the red carpet.
“Boston 2013 is thriving … but one thing has not changed: in order to fulfill its promise, we must stay focused on creating housing, because this is an issue that affects every Boston resident,” Menino announced when he rolled his ambitious housing goals.

It’s a last hurrah of sorts for Boston’s urban mechanic.

With just a few months left in office, the city’s longest serving mayor is pledging to do everything he can to push as many new housing developments through the City Hall permitting process.

Menino has given a green light to the Boston Redevelopment Authority to approve new housing projects with more than 3,600 units and is moving ahead with plans to sell off surplus, city-owned land to developers.

A Call To Development

In return, Boston’s mayor is calling upon developers to invest more than $16 billion in new projects, from downtown condo towers to new neighborhood housing.
And with condo and home prices spiraling upwards again, Menino is doing more than just issue another call for more “affordable housing” for low income residents, badly needed as it is.

Rather, he is calling for 5,000 of the new homes, condos and apartments to be offered at prices and rents affordable to middle class families, who are increasingly getting the squeeze.

Yet as important as what Menino is doing is why he is doing it.

Boston is poised to add another 100,000 jobs over the next few years, but Menino knows full well that won’t happen if those new hires can’t find a place to live, or afford what’s on the market.

Just to keep up with that growth, Boston will need to add nearly 29,000 new housing units.

As it stands now, prices in the Hub are rising at twice the rate of the median income for middle class families, according to city officials.

Now contrast Menino’s campaign to recruit the next generation of Bostonians with the increasingly anti-housing sentiment that dominates suburban boards and town councils across the state.

Communities across the state are going to extraordinary lengths to make the development of new housing as difficult as possible, obsessed with preserving “character” and keeping dreaded school costs down.

Even small subdivisions of a few homes get the major project treatment in many towns, with endless reviews and red tape.

You would never know the Bay State was a pioneer in public education, with the first schools founded way back in the 17th century, from all the bellyaching local officials do about paying for necessities like teachers and new classrooms.

Not An Invasive Species

Young families and children are talked of as if they were a plague of locusts, ready to swarm in and strip bare local school budgets if a town should make the mistake of opening the door to new apartments or modestly priced single-family homes.

It’s no accident that new home construction is just a fraction of what it was back in the 1980s, despite a relatively robust local economy and rising demand and prices.

It’s not a sustainable course. Massachusetts is already the seventh-oldest state in the country, with a median age of 39, notes Peter Francese, a well-known, New Hampshire-based demographer.

Massachusetts is now shedding roughly 8,000 school children a year as families flee to states with less expensive housing.

As they rant and rave against supposedly greedy developers and diabolical plans to build those evil things called apartments and homes, small-town pols are effectively killing the communities they say they love so much.

“It’s economic suicide,” Francese told me in a recent interview.

The NIMBY nitwits certainly don’t get this, but Menino does.

Menino knows that to keep growing, Boston needs to embrace change, including the change that new housing, and the new residents and families that come with it, will bring.

It is a lesson, however, that pertains not just to big cities like Boston, but really to communities of any size.

Whether you are a big city or small town, it’s grow or go. When you stop growing, you start dying. 

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.