development

Framingham selectmen apparently feel that they can't revitalize downtown Framingham without moving the Salvation Army from its current building on a main street.

If this is true, Framingham selectmen apparently have no clue that there are a lot of other issues that have conspired to "unvitalize" downtown over the past 30 years. Like, oh, all those malls up on Rte. 9.

The Roslindale Wetlands Task Force is a neighborhood group trying to stop a 10-unit housing development off Walter Street near the Arnold Arboretum (it had previously helped the city Conservation Commission take over 22 foreclosed lots for open space).

Via Cavatica, who says:

... After looking over the website, I'm not sure I'm in agreement with 100% of the motivations behind stopping the development, but I'm sure as heck still against the development itself. If you check out the website, be sure to click on the "photo" pages; it's a lovely way to see online what I'm lucky enough to see in person every day - and what will be lost to everyone if it gets turned into condos. ...

Rob says what happened to the West End in the 1950s - a city eager for new tax revenue hands an entire neighborhood over to a developer who puts up a banal collection of sterile high rises - should give us all pause following the Supreme Court's Kelo ruling:

... Time will tell, but autocratic municipal rulers may be undertaking massive urban renewal plans before you know it. Municipalities (at least in the Boston area) lose money on every new family that moves into town, due to the exorbitant cost of schooling the children. Towns thought of as wealthy around here are leaving their roads potholed and unpaved, for lack of funds because the schools ate them all up. Municipalities had been doing all they could to discourage new residential development, including enacting minimum lot sizes and moratoriums on teardowns. They also give tax breaks to seniors inclined to move out of town so that new children won't move in.

Now SCOTUS has handed these municipalities a new weapon in their fight to keep their budgets in line: the bulldozer. Simply bulldoze your poorest residents and get them out of town, and put in a giant box store instead. ...

Carpundit notes favorable Kelo utterances from the Boston Redevelopment Authority and City Council President Michael Flaherty (who wants to use the ruling to seize Fan Pier):

Let's shutter the BRA and vote out Michael Flaherty.

Jay pulls out a snap quiz on Fan Pier and its Chicago owners:

... If Fan Pier was owned by some working-class dope with a God-awful postwar vinyl-sided pillbox house on the waterfront, do you think his home would have been condemned by now? Quick answer: Yes or no. ...

John writes:

I was out of town on business all week, and on return, very surprised that Fan Pier had still not been completed ...

With the Supreme Court ruling it's OK for cities to hand private property over to developers in certain cases, Empirefalls raises the spectre of Wal-Mart moving into Dover and Lexington.

David says it's a case of when good judges go bad.