Part of the property includes a rocky ledge and a wooded area dubbed Crane Ledge Woods by the project’s opponents, who have latched on to its role as an “unprotected urban wild” to halt the project in its tracks. Known to the BPDA as 990 American Legion Highway, it also adjoins a strip mall with a Stop & Shop and Walgreens.
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What was to have been a “new apartment community” with nine detached three-story buildings, plus parking and “substantial landscaping,” and public areas, including a playground, remains fallow. It’s now trapped in a so-called Article 80 planning process — the same one used for downtown skyscrapers.
As Land Court Judge Howard Speicher told attorneys in a recent video conference, “Everybody is talking about how we need to produce more housing in Boston. You’ve got 200 some odd units [that are] I’m told as of right, a very nice area. It looks like they would fit in very nicely. It would be wonderful if you would all agree about how they should get built.”
Wonderful indeed. But this is, after all, Boston, where the squeaky wheel theory applies — even over, perhaps especially over, housing.
The judge has scheduled another hearing in the case for Sept. 24.
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Meanwhile, the church and the Wu administration have acknowledged discussing the possible sale of the land to the city, which could then protect it as green space. But so far those talks have been without success.
And why would the city want to deny future housing on the site, anyway?
“Boston’s housing crisis is deepening,” Kendin Carr, vice president of Colliers multifamily division, wrote in the wake of a devastating new report on the city’s inability to actually get housing projects through the development approval process.
“Despite a pipeline of 15,000+ units, only a fraction have broken ground,” he wrote. “NIMBYism, high costs, and slow approvals are hindering progress. We need urgent action to unlock this shadow inventory and build more affordable housing.”
The “shadow inventory” Carr alludes to is based on the BPDA’s own figures of 83 Letters of Intent for large-scale development projects — representing a potential 15,290 units — that have been filed since 2020 of which 45 have been approved. Of that total only five projects have broken ground to date, representing 1,008 units. Those other 40 projects — the “shadow inventory” — total 8,205 units.
And, of course, that doesn’t even include the Jubilee church project, which remains in the untended heap of those 38 not approved.
Contributing to the lag between approval and execution, Carr notes, are high interest rates and high construction costs, “economic headwinds” and political uncertainties.
Interest rates and high construction costs were cited in the recent decision to slow construction on the 10,000-unit Suffolk Downs housing development on the Boston-Revere line. Only one of nearly four dozen buildings planned for the site will see completion this summer. It represents 475 units, but those are in the Revere section of the development near Beachmont Station.
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Interest rates are, however, about to come down, according to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell.
But it will take a lot more than that to allow the city to take advantage of the economic window of opportunity lower interest rates may open.
Carr suggests “accelerated zoning processes,” which Mayor Michelle Wu and soon-to-depart BPDA head James Arthur Jemison have long promised but thus far failed to deliver.
Wu has succeeded in moving the BPDA’s planning operations into City Hall, but right now that looks rather like rearranging the deck chairs.
“Ultimately, the region requires a substantial increase in multifamily housing production at varying levels of affordability to alleviate the affordability crisis,” Carr writes. “Without significant changes to current policies and practices, achieving this goal remains a formidable challenge.”
The numbers alone tell a sobering story of a housing crisis without an end in sight.
The tortured tale of the wait for 200 new apartments in Hyde Park offers further proof that Boston is not immune to the kind of NIMBYism that stands in the way of solving its housing crisis.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.