The Melrose, MA Planning Board is currently looking at whether or not the local zoning ordinances should be changed to encourage more housing around transit-oriented locations. This is great! I applaud it! Concerningly, though, at the last session, the following thoughts were uncorked by one of the Board members, Paul King:
“We could be going down a rabbithole. We talk about a space per unit because they’re near train stations. You’ve gotta remember, a trip to your work is one trip, for one part of your life. I’ve never driven to work in like 40 years, okay? But I could not live a day without my car. It’s my activities that are not work that make me use my car. I play hockey three times a week — I’ve gotta go to the rink, you know? I go do this, you go away on a weekend, you constantly — you need cars. If you have a life, you have a car.”
He continued, on the subject of renters in such buildings:
“These people are going to be squirreling themselves into the City any way they can. And I think this is going directly to a time when we’re just going to allow overnight parking in the City, which I think would be horrible. There are things in this City where we’ve been talking about — we’re the most desirable City in the country, blah blah blah. There’s a reason for it, okay? To start now going towards Maldenizing Melrose, I don’t think is a good direction that it should go. Not every city and town needs to be the same as every other next city and town. They can be different. They can offer different things. Melrose can offer a living experience that you don’t get in the next town.”
There are a few things going on here which one could find concerning.
The first is that, by invoking Melrose’s tendency to be listed among realtors’ “hottest zipcodes in America,” the Board is sounding the white suburban homeowner alarm bell: if you let too many Malden types “squirrel themselves” into Melrose, property values will go down. This attitude is of course not unique to anybody in Melrose. For decades, white suburban cities and towns have been using a variety of tools to limit the supply of housing in order to preserve single family homes as stores of investment value for their taxpayers. This has the knock-on effect — often, an explicit desire — of controlling who gets to live where. One such tool cities employ is restrictive zoning rules, which then get propped up and defended in part by unelected Boards such as the one in question. The “living experience” being referred to here is, in many ways, one centered on keeping people out unless they can afford mortgage down payments on scare single-family homes.
Melrose has a long, thinly-veiled history of conservatism and hostility toward outsiders, a history which is only just now hinting that it may begin to unwind. Many of our City Councilors run openly on platforms based on who has lived in Melrose the longest. Other people will have much in-depth knowledgeable on the legacy of discriminatory housing practices, and I hope they make their voices known to the city, especially as it embarks on a Housing Production Plan with MAPC.
The second thing that’s happening here is the warped logic defending the automobile as, essentially, the price of admission to the suburbs. This is not unique to Melrose either, and it is hardly a natural state of affairs. Rather, it is an artificial and hostile system built and perpetuated by same people who “could not live” without it but think it would be “horrible” for others to access it.
One of the great legacies left behind by the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers is hideous and widespread sprawl and suburbanization, fueled by auto-centric practices. In Melrose, it really didn’t have to be this way. Here’s how the Master Plan describes the city:
Melrosians value the community’s historical character as a “streetcar suburb” largely developed during the early 20th century, with Victorian architecture, a tightknit development pattern that makes walking, biking, and taking public transportation feasible, green spaces at the periphery of the city as well as neighborhood parks throughout.
The Melrose Planning Board is charged with adoption of this vision. As a conception of the City, it is fundamentally accurate. Melrose is a small place, two miles by two miles. A substantial portion of the western border is DCR parklands. A quaint, low-lying pond sits at the city center. There are three train stations here, multiple bus routes, and since 1978, a subway station just a stone’s throw from its southern border. Aside from a tiny sliver of MA-99 on the mountainous and virtually uninhabited southeastern corner, there are no highways here. If ever there was a place where it should have been strikingly obvious that the automobile was not a necessity of daily life, it was here.
But by cementing the vehicular lifestyle into place, the preceding generation has imperiled the very vision they purport to defend. In reality, they are to blame for this flawed system’s existence, though it seems obvious that they do not realize this. It is therefore particularly galling when NIMBY homeowners and decisionmakers alike, who have done nothing to make it easier to live in their cities and towns without a car, stand up and say: sorry, Melrose is full, there is nowhere for you to keep your automobile, which you really must have in order to live here.
The automobile has badly damaged American life. Drivers wend treacherous paths through neighborhoods, killing tens of thousands of Americans — often themselves — each year in the process. Worse, drivers heavily pollute the air that people breathe, leading to hundreds of thousands of additional premature deaths each year and causing untold levels of harm in the lungs and brains of developing children. Worse, worse still: the auto-fueled global carbon economy of course carries substantial tail risk of rendering Earth inhospitable to human life. All this, in the name of hockey practice.
Nobody likes it. Everyone complains about the traffic, the speeding. The answer is not to try limiting access. As Mr. King (and others) correctly intuit, this is a losing battle: the more cars in the city, the more likely it becomes you wind up condoning long-term storage of them on the streets in the form of overnight parking. After all, it’s simply unfair to restrict access to this auto-centric lifestyle to private property owners with paved driveways. Everyone has a right to access public life, and because people with this car-first attitude have rendered access to an automobile to be prerequisite to “having a life” in Melrose, others will demand access to an automobile, which will inevitably lead to pressure to store private autos on public space.
I don’t want to see this either. The answer is to reject auto-centric culture entirely, and start to build a local culture based chiefly on safe street access for walking and biking. Nobody’s taking your car away. If you want it, fine. But your whims and desires to drive 35mph around the city, without traffic, will no longer be particularly meaningful to us.
If you’re tired of the prior generation of Melrosians propping up a system of frighteningly high property valuations, embarrassingly low diversity, and unacceptably dangerous streets, now is the time to reach out and tell them. The City is embarking on a Housing Production Plan, Mayor Brodeur’s office has indicated an interest in actually promoting walking and biking, and there is a historical sensitivity to equity and diversity in the public sphere. Tell city staff what you want Melrose to be. There are already people sitting at the table, trying to keep it the same as it’s been.
