Reality Bites by James Norton for October 5

If you live life in a bubble, does that mean you always have safe sex?

Some who know me are about to moan and groan, but I really don’t give a damn.  State Senator-Elect Pat Jehlen will do, I am sure, a decent job for our district and will undoubtedly be hounded by pundits the whole way through.  I personally would have liked to have seen Bill White win, but it is what it is – good luck Pat – work hard for us all.  You know something, the weirdest part about what I just wrote isn’t that I’ll be given a ration of crap by people I know just for saying what should be said regardless – it’s that she probably won’t even think I was giving her a compliment – oh well.

Now that I got that out of my system, let me get back to long-term community development and the local real estate market.  I know, yawn.
The incorporation of long term development in this city for the next twenty to fifty years is reliant on a combination of municipal services, private ownership and the business community.  There needs to be more open dialogue with less politics and dirty back room deals/payoffs on even the smallest of the three family condo conversions for this to take place.  The time is now to make some inroads.
Assembly Square and the Green Line are the good first step.  But they are only the start.
There are plenty of studies which have shown that since Boston Proper, Brookline and Cambridge have almost completely maximized their mixed-use potential already, the availability to make sweeping, long term real estate developmental changes right here in Somerville is a golden opportunity for us all.
I have talked about the problems with Arlington – having such a large middle of the road residential tax base – for years.  Here is a town, which instead of encouraging commercial and mixed-use development, still to this very day, insists on razing commercial buildings in favor of high dollar residential construction.
I hope Somerville doesn’t end up like that, because that is foolish from a municipal standpoint, because the business of local government is to keep residents happy with adequate local services while not taxing the living crap out of the average homeowner.  That’s it in its most basic form.
The absolute need for hotel space in the immediate vicinity of Downtown Boston, along with the anticipated increasing demand for condominiums and other less permanent or transient living quarters, combined with the need for larger more accessible retail and light industrial space is a void we can start filling today, but only if we start to look to the future.
By maximizing the highest and best use of large congruous parcels of land and developing large, towering structures with multiple uses including residential units on them, we can start to fill all these voids and ensure our community’s non-dependence on state and federal aid in its current iteration.
Doesn’t this make sense to you?
Look, I’m not talking about reducing residential uses or creating an over population of commuting zombies.  I am talking about smart development with all sorts of benefits to the community.
Along with smart real estate development, how about some other beneficial long term projects for the city?
I’d like to see some ideas thrown around about how to utilize alternative energy sources to power city equipment – make the incinerator more efficient – hey how about the big dark secret nobody wants to talk about – the ancient water and sewer pipes that could possibly all let go on a cataclysmic level.
Needless to say, we need to make sweeping changes and start planning now for the long-term fiscal viability of our community.  Over dependence on state and federal aid will always keep us at odds with ourselves and our community as a whole and will do nothing but maintain the current “running scared” attitude when it comes to the municipal budget and its process, year after year.