In the 20th century, meeting the state’s biggest long-term challenges meant destroying four towns. What if meeting the 21st century’s challenges means building four?
During the Depression, the state wiped Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott off the map to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir, which became — and still is — the source of drinking water for Greater Boston.
Those towns didn’t go without a fight, and an unnamed Globe writer who covered the drafting of the 1927 legislation that doomed the towns was clearly uncomfortable with what the state was about to do to those centuries-old communities.”
Like the general staff of an army of occupation,” the account read, a group of state officials condemned “a 200-year-old civilization that will be nearly uprooted to meet the water needs of the distant city of Boston.”
The rural towns would be disincorporated, their cemeteries dug up and moved elsewhere, and what remained of their land area added to neighboring towns. The secretary of state’s office, which maintains a list of incorporated places in Massachusetts, still lists those four but characterizes them as “drowned.” The reservoir was completed in 1940.
The drowning of those towns — followed by the construction of public infrastructure that continues to yield enormous public benefits almost a century later — is emblematic of the good and bad of a much more ambitious era in public works, a time that feels incredibly remote from the present.
Thankfully, though, today’s challenges require the state to build, not destroy. Specifically, Massachusetts needs housing to make up for a huge shortage, which Governor Maura Healey referred to last week as “the biggest challenge we face.” To make the challenge even harder, the state also needs that growth to happen in ways that don’t exacerbate its traffic and transportation woes.
The state’s basic solution is to cajole towns into allowing more housing, preferably near transit, while providing subsidies for developers to build it. Both are incremental approaches that will be slow to bear fruit even under the best circumstances.
What if, in addition to working with towns, the state also just created some new ones — with adequate transit and smart zoning woven in from the start?
In October, I asked Healey’s housing czar, Ed Augustus, whether the state would ever consider creating planned cities as part of its effort to increase the housing supply. Though somewhat befuddled by the question, he notably didn’t reject the idea outright.”
You’d need a tract of land to do that. I guess I’d have to know more about the scale. And how does that work? Is it a municipality? Or is it within an existing municipality?” he said. “There are probably areas of land that could be looked at,” he said.
The idea is not totally nuts.
In California, another state with a housing shortage, a group of investors has proposed to build an entirely new city of around 400,000 people. The idea is easy to mock — and plenty of Californians are — but it has a disruptive allure. Not only would the new city massively increase the state’s housing stock, but the developers say they want the whole thing to be a walkable metropolis that would embody modern transportation concepts.
Massachusetts doesn’t have as much land as California. And every square mile is already legally spoken for — there’s no unincorporated land in the state (with the possible exception of one lighthouse). Existing towns might object to the state taking some of their land to create new cities.
But the state could force their hand, as it did in 1927 to abolish the four towns it removed to create the reservoir.
Of course, there are huge practical, financial, and legal barriers that make planned cities unlikely — in Massachusetts or anywhere else in America. The proposal in California doesn’t…
This article was originally published by a www.bostonglobe.com . Read the Original article here. .