Land Use Committee August 6, 2019 from NewTV Government on Vimeo.
Note: I emailed Councilors Auchincloss and Laredo a near-final draft of this post and invited them to write guest posts to expand on their comments in the meeting. They both declined, though I hope that one or both will change their mind.
Is the future of Newton car-inevitable or not? On that question, there was a stark divide on display at the most recent City Council Land Use committee meeting on the Northland Project, which was dedicated to a review of the proposed traffic-demand-management (TDM) plan.
On one side of the divide stand Councilor Jake Auchincloss (at-large, Ward 3), Andreae Downs (at-large, Ward 5), and others (the Parking Caucus*), who are demanding reduced parking at Northland. They recognize that the context of the Northland site enables car-free or -lite living. Northland will be, itself, mixed use, meaning on-site amenities. Among the many amenities within just a short walk of the development, there are two (two!) grocery stores. Needham St. is on an existing MBTA bus route. It’s no longer a walk from the site to the Eliot T station than the walk that many people in Newton already take to public transit. Needham St., in the next year or so, will have the city’s first true separated bike accommodations. It’s a mile from an elementary school. There are two urgent care centers within a mile. And, that’s just on the Newton side of the river.
On the other side of the debate is council president Marc Laredo (at-large, Ward 7). At the Land Use meeting, Councilor Laredo vigorously — and at times heatedly — argued that traffic projections for the development should be based on suburban models, not “downtown Boston.” He focused on whether or not the on-site amenities would reduce residents’ car use, ignoring the host of amenities just off the property. He dismissed (probably correctly) the likelihood that residents would work where they lived, but wholly ignored the regional employment hub that is developing just over the river in Needham. He seemed not to acknowledge the difference between housing at the Northland site versus, say, the new housing on Greendale Ave. in Needham, which has no amenities within walking distance.
The two approaches converge, if only on the surface. Both Councilors Auchincloss and Laredo said that the proposed TDM is too complex and that limiting parking is basically all the city needs to do to manage traffic. But, they come at the limit on parking in very different ways. Councilor Auchincloss supports reasonably intense development and argues that the impact of the development on traffic depends almost entirely on parking. Provide more parking and there will be more car trips. Provide less parking and there will be fewer. Importantly for Auchincloss and the rest of the Parking Caucus, the development — even with the proposed residential, office, and commercial space — can be viable with less parking, because driving is not inevitable. Limiting parking puts the burden on the developer to figure out how to create and take advantage of robust alternatives to driving, instead of allowing the developer to have the parking they want and hope that it doesn’t get fully used.
Councilor Laredo proposed a fixed amount of parking and phased development, with more development allowed if the initial phase(s) generates less traffic than the city sets as a limit. The difference is significant. Under Councilor Laredo’s proposed approach, supported by Councilor Chris Markewicz (ward councilor, ward 4), the parking-to-uses ratio starts high, which is a recipe for car travel. With available parking, people will drive. Limiting driving will be a rearguard action. The likelihood of success limiting driving without limiting parking is low, so the likelihood of the developer meeting some threshold requirement for further development is also low.
We’ll get the same impact on traffic with much less development (which may be the point for some).
Bottom line: you get the traffic you plan for. If we plan, pace the Parking Caucus, for a world where driving is not inevitable, we will have a much greater likelihood that driving is not the only mobility option. If we plan, pace Councilor Laredo, for a world where suburban-levels of driving are inevitable, we will get suburban levels of driving.
This matters because Newton needs more development. More development helps ease the regional housing crisis. More development that does not require suburban-levels of driving will help with the global climate crisis. Every person who moves to Northland instead of a suburban home or even suburban office building has the potential for significantly less driving.
I’ve had lots of discussions with lots of people — including some very thoughtful city councilors — who say that you need to a car to live or work in Newton. That doesn’t have to be the case. The sooner we imagine a Newton where some people don’t rely on cars, the likelier it is that we can build that Newton.
Cars are not inevitable.
* Not an official name. A term of endearment that I’ve coined for them.
Sean, thanks for writing about parking as it relates to negotiating with developers.
You’re right that I believe in induced demand, but that’s only one aspect of my argument.
The more important facet of my argument is that reducing parking aligns incentives and catalyses creativity: if my colleagues would hold the line with me, the developer would have to repurpose the $20M they are spending on 400 underground parking spots to craft a truly robust traffic mitgation plan. They would be compelled to design, lease, and operate the project with real skin-in-the-game regarding walkability and non-auto options. Maybe their thinking (and extra $) would have included serious conversations with the MBTA, even.
Our job in the political arena is to use the special-permit negotiations to make possible the future that we want.
Transportation advocates often say
“If they build it, they will come.” But before they build, we need to make sure we have the right “it.” More parking & traffic ain’t it.
Councilor Auchincloss hit the nail on the head with this…
“Our job in the political arena is to use the special-permit negotiations to make possible the future that we want.”
But Jake’s mistake [and the mistake of the Land Use Committee] has been an obsession with parking and shuttle buses at the expense of the two issues that matter much more, the project’s impact on public schools and increasing affordable housing in Newton. In my opinion, the Mayor should have given Land Use more guidance, by insisting Northland’s Special Permit be conditioned on these two things…
1.] 15K square feet of stand alone educational space for Newton Public Schools.
2.] 30% of the housing units should be affordable.
It’s funny to hear the outcry over the Northland site when only a half mile away, one of the region’s sleaziest companies, TripAdvisor, and its equally awful developer partner Normandy, have quietly erected a monstrous 7-story, 3,500 space parking complex with no required mitigation n a transit desert that’s responsible for a plurality of the Needham Street corridor’s 35,000-vehicle daily traffic jam.
Needham town government and its corporate facilitators salute Newtonians’ naive and completely illogical efforts to keep a couple hundred Nothland residents of relatively modest means from having parking spaces. Keep on believing you’re making a difference while we and Waze pick your pockets for a few extra car lengths during the commute. Route 9, Needham Street, or Nahanton Street? Those of us who work or live in Needham are comfortable jamming up all three.
https://www.foundersparkma.com/
A few reactions to comments above.
Needham — like most suburban communities — certainly could benefit from a more robust traffic mitigation strategies (protected bike lanes, etc.) but to its credit, the town has required employer participation in a shuttle system for decades. As a result, nearly every employee in the N-Squared Innovation District on the Needham side has access to shuttles (and Trip Advisor, which has a great record as a socially responsible business, operates its own shuttles in and out of Boston). Also, I follow Needham politics pretty closely and have seen not seen any town officials conspiring, lobbying or even taking a public position on Northland or its parking.
And @Gerry: I hope and believe you are wrong. More efficient cars may lessen our carbon footprint but won’t solve road congestion, which we all agree has reached a crisis level. We must find ways to get single occupant cars off the road. Protected bike lanes, attractive amenities, more walkable streets and shuttles buses are how we begin to accomplish this. Even if it never gets you out of your car, getting just five percent of the remaining drivers out of their cars reduces congestion by 20 percent.
That’s a powerful stat so I will repeat it: Getting just five percent of drivers out of their single occupancy vehicles reduces congestion by 20 percent.
Conceptually, I agree with the goals of the “Parking Caucus.” But what I believe Councilor Auchincloss and others fail to adequately consider is how far Northland has already gone towards reasonably and responsibly reducing parking already.
Why would you rent a $3500 apartment in Auburndale vs a real walkable area like the Seaport or Cambridge if you weren’t gonna be driving for work or to some other commitment nearby?
Cars are inevitable! They’ll be smaller,
environmentally sound, not powered by fossil fuels, and we will all own them. To think otherwise is delusional. To think developers will build housing where they know people won’t live because there’s nowhere for them to park their cars is ludicrous, too.
It’s amazing the lengths everyone is going thru trying accommodate this Developer’s plans to cram 800 apartments and households onto Needham Street.
Gerry’s right, cars will get better (and have) for the environment, but they will not be fully abandoned by an affluent community that wants their convenience. Who would pay $4,000/mo for an apartment then happily take the bus to dinner? In February? Who would pay $4,000/mo to send their kids to a classroom of 30?
Let’s stop trying to 19 eggs into a carton for a dozen. Cut the number of apartments to 400. The Developer can save costs on the building the underground parking.
Or as Councilor Laredo recently proposed, limit the Developer to build in stages. Prove this will work before building more.
Pinning our hopes on fancier tech for cars is a cop-out for making bold policy choices today (and my day job is studying the future of mobility.)
We need the political backbone to build projects around people, not cars.
I don’t disagree, Councilor…people should come before cars. But many people in this city is also pleading for the political backbone to not give away the “Garden City” and the lifestyle that many in this community have worked hard to afford, to the profit driven motives of a few wealthy developer/corporations.
Your constituents are asking for reasonable scale. There’s a group now called Rightsize Newton, not LessCars Newton. If less parking is the means to that end, so be it, but less cars so builders can add more $4k/mo apartments is exchanging one problem for another.
I do disagree, Jake. That “fancier tech for cars” is surely coming, and it’s not a cop out but a responsibility of our civic leaders to build projects around reality, not around some pie in the sky notion that sounds good but will never happen, not only because the people to whom you refer aren’t going to live that way but also because developers aren’t going to build it if they’re not going to come. So please, Jake, continue to advocate for that theoretical car-free future as much as you want in your day job, but in your night job do the right thing for the people of Newton and get off this kick to limit parking before the developer has had enough of the lunacy of trying to build in Newton and decides to just walk away.
Of course Northland will make concessions on parking. It costs them nothing out-of-pocket to reduce the number of parking spaces. They’re happy to spend a little on shuttle buses too, because their development is the principal beneficiary of that service.
How Northland will mitigate the project’s impact on schools is a much more significant issue, and one they would prefer to avoid. The thing that is absolutely mind boggling, is that the Land Use Committee is oblivious to the issue. These folks learned absolutely nothing from the Avalon experience. And how do any of them explain the low percentage of affordable housing associated with Northland?
Mike: You’ve been repeating over and over again, post after post, this line about school impact, in spite of the fact that demographic trends show a measurable decline in school age children living in Newton’s existing housing stock based on very credible reasoning. I wonder if you’ve actually read the report on this or watched the full presentation and if you could tell us which specific parts of the study you disagree with?
And the more specific you are, the more credible your answer will be.
Greg– We both know that repeat messaging works. You repeat your messages. I repeat mine. May the best message win. Here’s my message regarding Northland…
The people of Newton are getting screwed because the city is not properly prioritizing schools and affordable housing in the Special Permit process…
Yes, I’ve read the report on school enrollment. Like most reports it comes with no guarantee of accuracy. Based on prior reports, I’d give it a 50/50 shot of being correct…
My call for educational space at Northland is not based on city-wide enrollment trends anyway. It’s not based on enrollment at all. It’s based on mitigating the actual long term impact of the Northland development by requiring that developer to contribute fair value to our school system…
15K square feet of educational space at that location is a fair trade-off. That footprint near Needham Street would give Newton Public Schools tremendous flexibility moving forward. The space could at different times in its history be used as an elementary school, or an alternative high school, or a STEM school that expands Newton’s curriculum, or even administrative space that could free-up the current Ed Center.
I believe Northland should retain ownership of the educational building and lease it to the City of Newton for $0 over 20 years, with the city holding options for additional years at fair market value.
Greg,
The region needs at least 185K new homes by 2030. Our pro rata share would be 11K. There are now 32K households in Newton.
How are we not building schools?
@Sean: You betcha, if we ever get anywhere close to that. But our city doesn’t seem able/poised to produce 2K new homes, let alone 11K
Without new homes our school population dips for two primary reasons:
1. Empty nest single family homes are the fastest growing segment of Newton’s real estate market. And these baby boom empty nesters aren’t going give up their 3-plus bedroom homes unless the market offers them housing that meets their needs and interests.
2. The number of women of child baring age in Newton is declining (see reason #1). If young women/families can’t find/afford a place here, school population dips…unless we add a lot more housing.
Watch the video starting at about the 16:00 mark.
I also disagree Jake. Using development as a pawn to force change isn’t fair. You have to build the housing that people want and need now. Like it or not, the majority of people want their cars. The infrastructure doesn’t exist to provide the mobility that people are accustomed to. My mom lives in Gloucester. T o visit her using public transportation on weekend I would need to walk to the commuter rail, take a train to South station, take the subway to North station, take the commuter rail to Gloucester and then take an Uber to her house. This turns a 45 minute car ride into 3-4+ hour ordeal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for change so we can take better care of our planet, but you’re working the problem from the wrong end. and what you’ll end up with is an incredible increase in congestion as people try to force their vehicles into the space that you didn’t provide for them. Vehicles will continue to improve and hopefully we will start building the infrastructure so that people can start use their vehicles less. I can’t see a scenario where are forcing change to development doesn’t create a disaster for Newton.
There may be no “LessCars Newton”, but almost every development debate is implicitly centered on fear of traffic congestion (high up among a small number of other issues).
We aren’t talking about forcing most people to live a “carless lifestyle”, but rather enabling a “less car lifestyle”. The plans don’t call eliminating all parking. The goal has to be less dependence on driving (“more options”) and the need for fewer trips (indirectly tied to parking and car ownership).
Our estimates for how much parking is required just isn’t accurate today. Look at the recent MAPC report showing that wasted extra parking required by zoning in the Boston suburbs. It certainly doesn’t make sense to build parking no one uses.
I think it is important to set expectations that parking is a constrained resource early in development. The first people (residential/commercial) who move in will set the tone, and establish a baseline demand. There also needs to be pressure from tenants to maintain shuttle services and other traffic mitigations, otherwise the developer will say “we’re running empty buses because of low demand, we have to stop”.
Has Northland combined the commercial and residential parking pools? I had understood that they previously were keeping them separate, which would mean they don’t get to take advantage of the fact that the flow of business and residential parking is often complementary.
Sean,
I’ve had some thoughts and questions this morning on the philosophical side of this issue.
I realize that our world view is constructed around growth. Businesses need to grow, our economy needs to grow. Our tax base needs to grow.
So what happens when there’s no more room to grow? I wonder, Can a community or a region that has reached its growth potential continue to thrive without further growth?
It seems to me that we have a housing crisis and traffic congestion crisis because we want to, and continue to grow.
I love where I live, I’ve got a good life, and I’m able to make a decent living here. Personally, I don’t need Newton to grow.
I don’t have day today complaints that are streets are too congested, or that our village centers are inaccessible or unwalkable.
It makes me wonder … and maybe someone has an answer to this … Why must we grow?
At times, it seems that this conversation about planning for more density with fewer vehicles is a bit of smoke and mirrors to justify growth when growth isn’t really required.
Growth is fun, growth is exciting, but at what point does adding more people to a region’s population cause diminishing returns?
Will this tinkering with the infrastructure in order to get more people per square foot end up negatively affecting our overall quality of life?
I don’t know the answer but it’s a question that I have this morning.
The reality in the near term is that expensive parking at home/work drives people to Uber/Lyft, which generate 1.5 miles of driving congestion for each mile of private car travel replaced even with all the AI involved. It might result in less cars being manufactured, but not less emissions. Public transit needs to be priced much more competitively if its going to play a role. I had a need to go downtown awhile back on a Saturday evening , and there was actually a commuter rail route to do it, but it was $8 vs $13 for a door-to-door uber, and involved an extra hour of wait time.
Mike does have a point about growth. If the Boston area congestion and housing situation could suddenly be made 10% better than it is today, then does that tip the scale for Amazon to put its HQ2 here? While that could be great from an economic point of view and for certain types of jobs for existing residents, it would set back the housing and congestion situation with the influx of a higher population seeking the incremental jobs.