Imagine if Boston had gone supernova and expanded all the way out to 128
Third Decade comes across a 1912 Times article on a bill that would have let Boston annex every city and town within 10 miles of the State House. In the end, of course, Boston only annexed the town of Hyde Park, but he wonders how things would be different today if the bill had succeeded - and Boston had taken over all those communities:
... Issues related to busing, school desegregation, housing patterns, and transportation would probably have been decided in completely different ways. Or, if it happened today, would people be fighting over relatively small parcels of land in Allston or tunnels through downtown when the overall city would be much, much bigger? ...
Also interesting to note in the Times article: Even then, Boston's population was larger than it is today (Boston hit a peak of 800,000 shortly after World War II). Another thing to ponder: This being Massachusetts, the bill required towns to vote to annex themselves to Boston. What if some towns voted yes and some no? Would a map of Boston look like a piece of Swiss cheese? Brookline, after all, had the chance to join the city and refused.
Comments
Not Swiss cheese. It was an
Not Swiss cheese. It was an all-or-nothing deal. The fine-print in the article says that the initiative would have put the measure up for a referendum of all the citizens of the effected communities. If the measure received, in aggregate, 62.5% support or better, then all the communities would have been annexed. Otherwise, none of them were in.
These sorts of ideas were floating around at the time. Remember, New York City reached five million not so much through organiz growth as through annexation - from 1874-98, it gobbled up large chunks of Westchester, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Cambridge/Somerville was the Brooklyn of Boston - the industrial and working-class housing area across the river. I'll let readers draw their own analogies to the other named communities.
But the point here is that Boston followed a different path. It could have become a single city - Greater Boston, as it were. Instead, it very deliberately chose not to follow the model of several other large cities of the era, and stayed small and geographically confined. We're still reaping the benefits of that decision, and paying its price.
Unlikely, but Interesting
Indianapolis is 372 square miles with 795,458 residents where as Boston is only 89.6 square miles with 608,352 residents. Does Indianapolis gain an advantage by being larger area wise? Does Boston gain an advantage by being smaller? I don't know, but it's interesting to think about.
would have been pretty ridiculous
To have annexed Nahant but not Lynn.
-Cosmo
http://cosmocatalano.com
World's Toughest Writer
Brookline Better Off!?
The post is tacitly begging someone to make the argument that Brookline would have been somehow better off if it had been annexed by Boston. Is there anyone out there who is going to make that argument? Given the quality of life in Brookline (Schools, public safety, other town services and a good mix of urban and suburban living), I cannot think of a single way in which Brookline would have been better off had it been annexed but I would like to hear about it if you can.
I think annexation would have, for better or worse, made much of Brookline north of Rt. 9 an extension of Allston and Brighton (both in appearance and character). South Brookline would have looked like West Roxbury.
Looking like West Roxbury?
Looking like West Roxbury? Oh the horror!
Costs/Benefits
I think the central issue here is about fairly allocating costs and benefits on the local scale. In Brookline's case, it gets a ton of benefits from being close to the downtown of a major city, while absorbing only some of it's costs. Alternatively, Beacon Hill gets the same amount of benefits, but also absorbs a lot of costs. Is there any reason why costs and benefits should be distributed unevenly between two groups of people simply because of the political boundaries of their cities?
Brookline made better choices
I've been wondering about this a lot, I work and live in Boston neighborhoods on opposite sides of Brookline, so I drive through, and they really have it made. There was somebody in the history of Brookline who made better choices than Boston has inherited.
There is no reason why Brookline should poor itself down to bring Boston up. It wouldn't work anyway.
Also there is no geographic advantage that Brookline has that Boston doesn't have.
Sure they did
If you can keep out the riff raff (except for the servants, of course) you can have a wonderful place (for the rich) to live.
why Brookline costs more
It costs more because it's better.
define 'better'
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but would like you to be more specific.
Two things I think of as 'better' in Brookline than in neighboring Allston-Brighton: the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Brookline Booksmith. Allston-Brighton has lost all of its movie theatres, and I don't know if it ever had a new-book store.
cleaner, quieter and safer
I'm not saying they have better government currently, I just think they kept a higher income population and all the things that go with that, probably because at one time they were tougher on density. They have better parks which is related. In a different world, Boston would have bought the seminary in Brighton and turned it into an incredible park like Larz Anderson.
'quieter' isn't necessarily 'better'
For some folks it's the opposite. I liked the energy and bustle and sheer variety of people and businesses that I saw in Allston yesterday.
energy and lust
Energy is fine, people getting together, meeting, great. But you know what all that meeting and bustling and partying leads to -- procreation. And that's when you may need to wake up on Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning, and living next to the energy and bustle is not so desirable.
For once we agree! The
For once we agree!
The problem is that while Brookline is nice, it is nice because it is close to Boston AND the poor people live in other cities. For every Brookline we have 4 cities that are poor, and that is the problem with having so many little hamlets all around Boston. The rich escape to particular cities and towns while the poor get funneled into other cities and towns.
Is Newton really better run then Lynn, is the ledger in Brookline really better then Chelsea? Does Cambridge do a better job of managing their money then Somerville? In all three cases I would say the main difference is in pure cash on hand. Somerville is one of the best run cities in the Commonwealth but have less money then Cambridge so their services are still a little lacking. Both Newton and Lynn have had problems with the construction of new schools and crazy political management but Newton has more cash. Brookline and Chelsea are both about the same distance from downtown Boston and yet Brookline has a direct trolley line and the residents, on average, are much wealthier. If you look at the richer communities, and then at the poorer communities you will see similar numbers population wise, but a massive difference in actual annual spending at the city level.
Give any of those poor cities the rich population and overflowing coffers and I gurantee they would become wonderful places to live too. The problem is poor people exist and always will, and they are a part of everyday life. The nicer places just do a better job of keeping the poor out...
That's unfair
It would be much better for Brookline if Boston were rich and not poor. It's not in their interest for Boston to be poor! It was stupid shortsighted decisions on Boston's part which have caused it to be poor.
For instance out here in Brighton we exchanged a section with Newton when the Pike was built. That area is closer to the Pike so less desirable, and yet the houses are more expensive=the people are wealthier. Because it wasn't built up and infilled by a construction-dominated zoning department and a "more population is better" political machine.
Here's a link, look at the satellite, Newton is to the left, Brighton to the right. At one time it was all Boston. You can still walk through the Brighton side and see the houses that were the beautiful ones and the later plainer ones.
map
Brighton-Newton boundary change?
I did not know anything about this. Can you tell us more (and maybe point to a reference or two, either online or in print)?
The Mass. Pike didn't come through Newton until the mid-1960s, so this would be a very recent change.
Brighton-Newton
I heard about it from a woman named Wilma who used to walk her old dogs around. If you go back into that neighborhood there's a street called Hunnewell that at one time went all the way through. It's Hunnewell on both sides, they closed it off to keep the Brightonians. I'm making the other side's point am I not? Oh well. I think that the section on the north side of the pike was also part of the deal.
how old is Wilma?
http://www.bahistory.org/bahdates.html says:
1875 The Brighton/Newton boundary was redrawn for the purposes of placing the Chestnut Hill Reservoir solely in Boston. Newton was compensated with the transfer of approximately 100 acres of prime real estate on Washington Hill.
Not Sure...
what density has to do with the quality of a neighborhood. Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, the South End, and the North End are all much denser than Mattapan and Roxbury.
Poor people have to live
Poor people have to live somewhere! It doesnt matter to me who traded what to whom, what where and why. Fact of the matter is that if one town enacts policies that discourage poor people some other community will receive the influx of poor people. So what happens is we shift the poor people around and they end up landing in the areas that don't kick them out.
While certain state wide policies may dictate the number of poor people living in the state community level policies only encourage or discourage poor people from moving it. At the end of the day someone has to work at Burger King, someone has to clean the buildings we work in, someone has to work in the local day care centers... By allowing the communities to segregate themselves like they have we are guranteeing some areas get more money then others.
the poor
Somebody has to do those things, yes, but they don't have to be poor! Wages are set in a competitive environment. Or what if everybody wanted to eat and had the money to eat at The Upper Crust?
What I'm hearing from you is penalize Brookline or wherever for being a nice place to live. It's better to make the people in Boston rich enough so there isn't a disparity.
Well lets put this into some
Well lets put this into some historical perspective... Once upon a time people only lived to their 30's if they were lucky and not everyone had running water. Poor and rich are relative terms that will change. Poor here and poor in Alabama are two different things. If everyone could afford to eat at the upper crust then the people who eat at the upper crust now would strive to eat at an even better pizza place.
I do not want to penalize Brookline, but its hard to deny that places like Brookline prosper because someone else takes the poor people that they , through many different policy moves, keep out of their borders. That allows them the ability to do what they wish with their money while poorer communities become more compact and have to fend for themselves. If Bostons borders were broader that would be less prominent, although would most likely still exist.
By creating a line between rich communities and poor communities it allows a rich community to say they feel bad for the poor community and even offer trivial support while keeping all their money and not sharing. The poor communities then get the dumps, the oil, the power plants, the sewage treatment plants and all the other grimey things that come with civilization. Sure Brookline is nice, but they are being nice while standing on the backs of their less wealthy neighbors all over metro Boston.
I have a serious and kind of stupid question I guess.
what would happen if the government (boston or MA) simply did not provide housing to anyone except the eldery and handicapped, and everyone that is getting free or semi-free housing had to move out in 1 year.
Would they go homeless? Would they move far away where it is cheap enough to buy a house and land to live just to survive (Maine?) Would they have to farm their own food?
I ask this in thinking about how some towns simply chose not to provide too much public housing....
I am not talking about
I am not talking about public assistance when it comes to housing. If you look at places like Cambridge that is the only reason why they still have poor people, as it gentrifies more and more you get the well off, the students, and those on the public dole. That is not a healthy situation either.
Im talking about places (in this case Brookline may not be to blame) that make it so if you build you have to build on certain sized lots, or enact other sorts of policies that prohibit those with less money from moving into town. Where they have set themselves up in such a way that people buy in that town because they know most of their tax money will be used to pay for extra perks in life. Someone making 100,000 a year will get more benefits in a place like Brookline then if they were living in Revere so of course they would choose Brookline. If Brookline and Revere were both part of Boston you would have tax money flowing from Brookline to Revere. Of course there would still be Brooklines in the Greater Boston city but they would not stand out as much. Having that formal line of seperation allows the residents of places like Brookline to still feel good about themselves for having Democratic principles without having to put their money where their mouths are. At least the residents of Beacon Hill, and the nicer parts of Hyde Park/JP/West Roxbury contribute to the coffers of the city of Boston so the city of Boston can keep the financial district running and ensure Roxbury and East Boston (where the lower tier workers live) have some sort of police presence and economic development.
Let's not overgeneralize
Because property taxes don't just come from residential property. So East Boston's relatively low rate of residential property-tax revenue (let's pretend absolutely no yuppies live there for a moment) might be more than compensated for by taxes on all the businesses clustered around the airport. In contrast, JP might be a money loser for the city because it has relatively little big-money commercial/industrial property left, but lots of families with kids.
But even aside from that, where do you think Boston would be without all those skyscrapers downtown? They pay a boatload of taxes to the city. And yes, while a good chunk of that goes to the extra police and fire and roadwork they require, in general, commercial property pays more than it gets back (this is one reason why some suburban towns would rather see a shopping mall go in than a subdivision). One of the reasons residential property taxes in Boston started going up a few years ago was because the commercial market began to collapse before the residential market and the city had to make the money up somewhere.
Yes but as you get more
Yes but as you get more expensive homes and people with more wealth the tide starts to turn and those higher end residential units begin producing a higher rate of return. Thats why many communities will accept the shopping mall AND the luxury condos.
not a dumb question
I'm not a housing law expert, but I believe the bottom line is that you'd still have rental subsidies under the federal Section 8 housing program.
That said, there would be a huge rise in homelessness and a lot of relocating....
Ummmm, it depends....
For me personally, I'll take scruffy, diverse, semi-gentrified J.P. over Brookline any day, thank you.
But if I had kids it would be different. In fact, it's the only reason that would change my opinion, and it would be a closer call than one might think. The local high school in J.P. is not a place I'd want to send my (hypothetical) kids, but I wouldn't be all that thrilled to have them going to school in homogeneous Brookline either.
Ever seen the brookline schools david?
Far from homogeneous I would say. Systems like Wellesley or Concord would fit that mold more....
pete, no, I haven't
Pete, I've never visited the Brookline schools, but I'm basing my assumptions on the socio-economic makeup of Brookline. It's not very diverse -- and I'm going beyond race & ethnicity in making that characterization. Though I'm sure you're right about Wellesley and Concord being even less diverse.
Yea I drive by the high school everyonce in a while....
and my family lives there. Very diverse. Not as much as Cambridge but a lot more than most people probably think. And the socio-economic makeup of Brookline might be a little different than a lot of people think too. A lot of renters have kids in the schools too. And I think the largest (or one of the largest) metco programs in the state.
some factual data
Pete, I dug the following out of Wikipedia. You're right about the schools being more diverse than one might think. I'm just surmising, but it appears that the public schools are more diverse than the town's population at large because of both METCO and the fact that wealthier parents are sending their kids to private schools.
So I will amend my comment: If I did have kids, I'd like to find a way to keep living in J.P. while sending them to Brookline public schools! :)
-David
Demographics
As of the 2000 census,[7] there were 57,107 people, 25,594 households, and 12,233 families residing in the town. The population density was 8,409.7 people per square mile (3,247.3/km²). There were 26,413 housing units at an average density of 3,889.6/sq mi (1,501.9/km²). The racial makeup of the town was 81.08% White, 2.74% Black or African American, 0.12% Native American, 12.83% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 1.01% from other races, and 2.18% from two or more races. 3.53% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 25,594 households out of which 21.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 38.4% were married couples living together, 7.1% have a female householder, and 52.2% were non-families as defined by the Census bureau. 36.7% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.18 and the average family size was 2.86.
In the town the population was spread out with 16.6% under the age of 18, 11.7% from 18 to 24, 37.3% from 25 to 44, 21.9% from 45 to 64, and 12.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females there were 82.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 79.1 males.
According to a 2007 estimate[8], the median income for a household was $82,496. The median income for a family was $120,933. Males had a median income of $56,861 versus $43,436 for females. The per capita income for the town was $44,327. About 4.5% of families and 9.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 5.3% of those under age 18 and 7.5% of those age 65 or over.
Public schools
The town is served by the Public Schools of Brookline. The student body at Brookline High School includes students from more than 50 different countries. Many students attend Brookline High from surrounding, neighborhoods in Boston, such as Mission Hill and Mattapan, via the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) system.
There are eight elementary schools in the Brookline Public School system: Edith C. Baker School, Devotion, Driscoll, Heath School, Lawrence, Lincoln, Pierce, and Runkle. As of December 2006, there were 6,089 K-12 students enrolled in the Brookline public schools. The system includes one early learning center, eight grades K-8 schools, and one comprehensive high school.
The student body is 66.1% White, 17.7% Asian, 9.9% Black, 5.9% Hispanic, and 0.4% other. Approximately 30% of students come from homes where English is not the first language.
Private schools
Several private primary and secondary schools, including the Beaver Country Day School, Brimmer and May School, British School of Boston, Dexter School, Maimonides School, and The Park School are located in the town.
Don't forget Latin
Don't forget that Boston Latin is a public school, David. And you can't send your kids there if you live in Brookline. So go ahead and continue to live in JP.
Sock-Puppet...
...because I waited 'till 2003 to buy a place and I don't have kids, I have a feeling I'll be ensconced (happily, though) in J.P. for some time. :)
Looking like Alston? Oh,
Looking like Allston? Oh, the horror!
is that so bad?
I took a walk yesterday evening from JFK Crossing through Allston Village and Packard's Corner. It felt very lively and bustling to me, exactly what a city should be.
plus fewer turkeys
Those guys get aggressive, don't you know.
-Cosmo
http://cosmocatalano.com
World's Toughest Writer
Not bad at all
We need an irony smilie!
It was an Honest Question
My comments, while necessarily provocative, were not intended to be pejorative. When I said that southern Brookline would have looked like West Roxbury and the northern part like Allston and Brighton, that was neutral speculation based on the reasonable notion that those areas were geographically close to those to which I was comparing them.
What I was looking for was someone who would make a case that Brookline was worse off for having avoided annexation. I am still looking (and hoping) for that.
Reading perjorative intent into my comments would be like reading into Swirly's comment that there was a concerted effort by Brookliners to keep the riff raff out of Brookline. I certainly didn't do that, and since no one has, I'm going to assume that the "oh the horror" comments were made in jest rather than to allege elitism.
My motiviation was purely intellectual, not confrontational. So, I'll ask again: does anyone think Brookline is worse off for having avoided annexation, and if so, why? If it helps you, make the same argument for Newton and contrast both with West Roxbury (which, of course, did go for annexation).
Of course Brookline is not
Of course Brookline is not worse off, but they are using all the advantages of being close to Boston without any of the disadvantages. They are gaming the system, and its actually a little disturbing to be honest with you.
"Gaming the system?" What
"Gaming the system?" What system? The Existence of Municipal Goverments System?
what
I have to agree with NotWhitey (an unusual event). In what way is Brookline doing anything bad to Boston?
Well if...
more people from boston were committing crimes in Brookline than vise versa....that might be a disadvantage...
What I was looking for was
What I was looking for was someone who would make a case that Brookline was worse off for having avoided annexation. I am still looking (and hoping) for that.
Maybe no one makes that argument because no one else cares.
It's also kind of creepy that you're "hoping" for that.